Tag: 2016

Hywel Williams – 2016 Speech on the Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Hywel Williams, the Plaid Cymru MP for Arfon, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2016.

I join other Members in congratulating the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on their speeches today, which were an adornment to this occasion. I also think that the Leader of the Opposition did rather well, at least for the first few minutes of his speech—it rather fell away after that. A very long time ago I was on the staff of the University of Bangor and, as such, sometimes had to recycle some very old lectures, but at least I took the care to preface them with the phrase, “Same old lectures; all new jokes.” That might be a strategy for the Leader of the Opposition next time.

I am afraid that the Queen’s Speech provided pretty thin fare. One might even suppose that the Prime Minister and his friends are occupied with something else. So as not to disappoint the Welsh media, and particularly the BBC, I should repeat the traditional Plaid Cymru response to a Queen’s Speech: “A bit of a slap in the face for Wales; and not a lot in it for Wales.” Having done that, I can now explain myself.

On the claim that it is a bit of a slap in the face for Wales, if one looks at the prisons Bill, one sees that there will be profound changes to the prisons system, but as far as I can see we will still have no provision at all for women prisoners in Wales. They are very small in number, but they all have to travel to prisons in England, which causes great difficulties for their families. I am sure that many Members will agree that many of those women are wrongly imprisoned anyway. I was very glad to hear other right hon. and hon. Members make similar points with regard to prison reform. By the way, we still have scant provision for young people in Wales. We are just about to have a new super-prison open in Wrexham, HMP Berwyn, but that huge institution—it will hold 2,000 prisoners—will apparently be unable to guarantee that a Welsh-speaking pastor will be available, even though it is serving largely Welsh-speaking north Wales. There is therefore a great deal that could be done.

With regard to the claim that “there is not a lot in it for Wales”, it has been widely trailed that the spaceport will be in Newquay. I want to pay tribute to the excellent case for Llanbedr made by my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts). I am sure that the Members representing the other five potential sites will say the same thing, but Llanbedr stands out, to me at least, as the obvious choice.

Of the Bills set out in the Queen’s Speech, by my count there were three that apply to England and Wales and a further five that apply to England only. That is devolution for England, I suppose. It is little noted, but it is devolution by default. That is not a bad thing, but I think that we really should be planning all of this, rather than falling into it by accident. England-only Bills also have implications for Wales, of course, because Welsh people access services in England, particularly health services, so changes to provision on Merseyside, in Manchester and in London do have direct and indirect effects on health in Wales. The funding of England-only policies sometimes has profound implications for funding for Wales through the Barnett formula. No mention was made of that particular elephant in the room today, of course. Barnett staggers on even though clearly it needs to be reformed.

As has already been mentioned, of the 30-odd announcements made today, significantly, 28 have already been trailed in some form or other. That is the case with the only Wales-only Bill, which I will come to in a moment. Looking at the 37 paragraphs of the Gracious Speech, I see that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland rate just one specific mention, although that mention could have great significance for Wales, for we are to have yet another stab at a Wales Bill. This will apparently be simpler than the previous draft Bill, which was panned by nearly everyone involved. As I noted in an earlier intervention, a prominent Welsh academic called it

“much the worst devolution bill that I have seen”,

and that was one of the milder responses.

We could have great expectations of the Wales Bill. There are many examples of things that I would like to see in it, but just two will suffice this evening. It needs to be recognised that we now have a body of Welsh law that is growing and will continue to grow, because the Welsh Assembly is passing laws—that is another elephant in the room. We need recognition of that fact, and that could be achieved, at least in my opinion, by recognising a distinct Welsh jurisdiction. Now, what that would actually look like is a matter of considerable discussion, and some of it is extremely obscure legal discussion that I am entirely unqualified to participate in. However, the plain fact is that we now have Welsh law but an England and Wales jurisdiction, and that must be addressed in some way. Another point relating to the Wales Bill is the devolution of policing to the Welsh Government. There is now great support for that across Wales, not least from the four police commissioners, two of whom have been Plaid Cymru nominees.

We in Plaid Cymru worked constructively with the previous Secretary of State, putting forward quite positive proposals, none of which was realised because the draft Bill was withdrawn. By now we have a new Secretary of State, and indeed a new Labour shadow. I hope that they will be able to work together, and with us, to realise that next step in the process of Welsh devolution. A former colleague of ours, Ron Davies, famously said in 1997 that devolution is a process, not an event. We have had several attempts at that process. I think that now is the time for a substantial leap forward in Welsh devolution through this Bill.

One thing that I think we really do need to have in the Bill is a change to the electoral system. We have in Wales and in Scotland—I am not sure about Northern Ireland—something called the d’Hondt system, which is an additional member system. I do not intend to go into the theology of the matter this evening—I might leave myself—but I will say that we really do need a different system. That system delivered a less proportionate result in Wales than the first-past-the-post system did in May last year in the elections for this place, with Labour getting 28 of the seats on something like 35% of the vote, even under a system of proportional representation. I might as well say now that I and my party are in favour of STV—the single transferable vote. I will say no more about that now, but I will certainly be trying to impress that point on the Secretary of State and the House when the opportunity arises.

Like the SNP, Plaid Cymru has an alternative Queen’s Speech in which we put forward our own measures—the House will forgive me if I indulge in a bit of sloganeering here—to make Wales stronger, safer and more prosperous. I have been saying that for the past six weeks in preparation for the Welsh elections, so it is rather difficult to get it out of my head, like an irritating pop song. It includes plans for an EU funding contingency Bill to safeguard vital EU funds in the event of Brexit, a specifically Welsh issue that we need to address; a UK finance commission Bill to put an end to the historic underfunding for Wales; a north Wales growth fund to deliver genuine infrastructure and investment for the north; a policing Bill to make good on recent independent and cross-party recommendations to devolve policing, a Severn bridges Bill to enable the Welsh Government to put an end to the bridges tax on economic growth; and a broadcasting Bill to devolve powers over broadcasting to Wales. Those are just six of the points in our alternative Queen’s Speech. I will expand briefly on some of them later.

That is Plaid Cymru’s positive alternative: not preoccupied with our economic decline, though that is real enough, I am afraid; not obsessed with the City of London at the expense of the rest of the UK; not, like some in other parties, hanging on the nail over Europe or at each other’s throats on the fundamental course their party should take; and not rejected by the voters and shunted into a siding. Clearly, those people are not in their places this evening. Rather, we are looking to the future of our country—to supporting Wales’s interests and delivering policies needed to make Wales a stronger, safer and more prosperous country.

Unfortunately, Wales is still at or near the bottom of league tables across Europe on economic performance. The Government here should be doing everything they can to promote growth in Wales, making Wales an attractive place to do business, investing in roads and railways, and upgrading the digital infrastructure. The headings of the digital economy Bill read well enough, and I am glad to see them: a legal right to fast broadband, a universal service obligation, and automatic compensation when things go wrong. We would be very happy to support such measures. However, I am afraid that my constituents, and indeed people throughout rural Britain, may be excused a hollow laugh at this Bill, because I am afraid we have heard it all before. I hope that the Government succeed, but one must be slightly sceptical.

I hope you will allow me, Madam Deputy Speaker, to recount a short story to do with the digital economy. It is about mobile phones, not broadband. I have abandoned the use of a smartphone in my constituency, because there is no point in most parts of it. I now carry one of those flip-top, oyster-type phones that were all the rage, I think, in 1997—but it works well enough. The other day my office had a phone call from one of the leading digital phone companies announcing to us that the city of Bangor in my constituency would have 4G. There was general rejoicing around the office, and we were just about to put out a press release welcoming this wonderful development when my colleague, Alun Roberts, said, “We’d better phone them up, just to check.” That is what he did, and the company then confessed that it was Bangor, Northern Ireland, not Bangor, north Wales.

Mr Dodds

Great news!

Hywel Williams

Yes, indeed—wonderful news, but wrong Bangor, unfortunately. I am afraid that sort of thing happens rather often.

Let me turn to some of the detail that I wanted to put on the record. I referred to our EU funding contingency Bill, which would introduce statutory contingency alternative funding arrangements should we leave the European Union. A couple of weeks ago, the Prime Minister confirmed to me at Question Time that the Government could not say now that regional funding under the convergence funding would continue if we left. That funding is extremely important to west Wales and the valleys, because we have intense economic problems. There are also questions around the common agricultural policy. It is imperative that plans are put in place to safeguard businesses, farmers, communities and projects in west Wales and the valleys. We have already sunk to the economic level of parts of former communist eastern Europe, and it is really important that these funds are not held up in any way in the event of Brexit.

I mentioned the problems around Barnett. There are ways out of this, although I concede that it is a complicated area. We would want to see the establishment of a commission to resolve funding disputes between the UK Government and the devolved national Governments. Barnett has been roundly condemned over many years, not least by the independent Holtham commission set up by the Government over five years ago. Establishing an independent commission is essential in the context of the emerging debate over the fiscal framework. If the Welsh Government started levying taxes and varying income tax, how would we figure that out? How much should we lose in our grant from London, and how do we ensure that this sort of settlement is fair? We want to look at a fiscal framework within the tax-sharing arrangements between the UK and the Welsh Governments. The commission would also adjudicate on the appropriate deduction method that is employed so that Wales does not miss out on potentially extremely large amounts of money as a result of inappropriate or unjust methods being used, or of so-called cannibalisation of the Welsh tax base. I will not go into that now.

There is a highly respected academic institution at Cardiff University called the Wales Governance Centre. In one of its recent reports, it concluded:

“An independent adjudication commission should therefore be an essential component in the UK’s emerging fiscal framework”

as a way of solving the problem all round. It continues:

“A 2015 report by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law recommended the establishment of an independent body to advise HM Treasury about devolution finance and particularly about grant matters. This body could be modelled on the Australian Commonwealth Grants Commission and named the UK Finance Commission. The Bingham Centre report also proposed that this body or another independent body be responsible for adjudication in the event of disputes between governments that cannot be resolved through joint ministerial processes.”

That is the way out that I commend to the Government and that we will be proposing.

Much has been said today about the northern powerhouse. We would want to see a north Wales growth deal looking at matters such as electrification of the north Wales main line. We still, unfortunately, have not an inch of electrified rail in north Wales. It would also lead to the inclusion of Welsh rural areas on the UK’s list for the EU fuel duty rebate, which is another important matter in rural areas. There are several other matters that we would like to see dealt with, such as a major upgrade for the A55.

As I said, we would want a broadcasting Bill establishing a BBC trust for Wales and dealing with other matters regarding the responsibility for S4C, the world’s only Welsh language television channel: in fact, the universe’s only Welsh language channel; there is no other. We believe that that responsibility should be transferred to the National Assembly, as should the funding for the channel, which is currently with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and that the Welsh Government should appoint a board of members for S4C.

I have already mentioned police devolution, so I will conclude with the Severn bridges Bill. We will introduce a Bill in this place to transfer responsibility for the Severn bridges to the Welsh Government when the bridges revert to public ownership in 2017. This will enable the National Assembly for Wales to decide on the appropriate level at which to set a charge, if it sets a charge at all. At its current high rate, it is a tax on the Welsh economy.

Those are some of the very ambitious measures that Plaid Cymru will promote. No doubt some people, both here and in Cardiff, are willing to trundle along on a “business as usual” basis, but as the Labour party discovered in Cardiff last week when we were choosing a First Minister, “business as usual” is not Plaid’s business.

May 19, 2016
Peter Bottomley – 2016 Speech on the Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Sir Peter Bottomley, the Conservative MP for Worthing West, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2016.

The first reference I want to make to a referendum is to the words of Dr Johann Malawana, the junior doctors’ leader, who has said he is going to put forward the agreed proposals from ACAS in the referendum for junior doctors, hoping that they will agree them.

I pay tribute to Sir Brendan Barber of ACAS, to the British Medical Association leaders and to the national health service employers, together with the Secretary of State for Health and his Ministers, for finding a way forward that will be good and better for doctors in training and for patients, and that will help to make the national health service work in a way that people want it to. It will not abolish all the problems, but it is a great way forward.

As I understand it, some of the adaptations that have come forward during the last 10 days’ negotiation will be even better for doctors who have caring responsibilities. It seems to me that we lost sight of that in the years since my wife was Secretary of State for Health. It is a good idea if people can become fully qualified no matter what their caring responsibilities are at any one time. If they have had to hold back because of taking time out, they could then come forward and catch up with the rest. I pay tribute to that.

I will not say much more about the referendum coming up on 23 June because, as I have tried to explain to some of my people before we start having meetings about it, it is not a clash between two things in total. If we come out, we will still almost certainly be part of the Common Market, and we will almost certainly be contributing our money and having free movement of labour. If we stay in, we will not be proposing to join the euro or the Schengen area, so it is a question of how we move forward.

On balance, my personal view—I agree with the majority of the population about this—is that it is better to stay in and to help Europe to do things that are good for Europe and good for us, rather than saying that we are concerned about only ourselves, not our near neighbours.

I shall speak about general issues facing Members of Parliament. I look on being a Back Bencher—that was the reason I came into Parliament; I did not come in to try to become a Minister or a Cabinet Minister—as rather like being a general practitioner in politics. A large aspect of that is trying to reduce avoidable disadvantage, distress and handicap, and to improve wellbeing—it is a mixture of wealth and welfare. What really matter are such issues as getting better education and training, and a better start in family life, and getting better support for those whose families go through deformation and reformation.

The role also involves looking at issues of the day with two eyes. I represent junior doctors and their patients. I also represent rail workers and rail travellers. To those involved in the disputes in the Southern and Govia Thameslink rail services at the moment, I see no reason to justify the interruption to services, whether that be through organised sickness absence or strikes.

Many people who have caring responsibilities, and the many people travelling on the railways whose jobs bring in less than rail workers, need a reliable service. This is a public service. Obviously, some issues can be so great that they justify a strike, but the fact is that about 40% of Southern services are driver controlled all the way through—drivers operate the doors and everything else, although there may be other staff on the train. Moving further on that approach is not a convincing reason to justify an all-out strike.

Sometimes I suspect operators do not use the right language. If they propose that ticket office staff should be operating in a ticket office without walls, that would be a better way of putting it than saying that they are going to close ticket offices during certain hours of the day. They need to find the language, as Sir Brendan Barber and his team have with ACAS, that will allow people to come together and find out what they can do together that will be good for those they serve, as well as for themselves.

Let me turn to other issues that come up for Back Benchers. I pick up causes, one of which came about as a result of an incident in my constituency regarding leasehold, when some elderly, frail and poor people found themselves paying for something they should not have paid for. They tried to go to the lower-level property tribunal, but found that those representing the freeholders managed to spin the issue between different courts, keeping the case away from low-cost dispute resolution. With the help of the Bar pro bono unit, it took one barrister one day to cut through all that, and my elderly people were paid a rebate of £70,000 without further court action.

That case led me to meet people in Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, now a charity, which was created, and is mainly supported and led, by Martin Boyd and Sebastian O’Kelly, who I think give more advice to more leaseholders in trouble than most people who do the same thing professionally—and they do it without pay. What they have achieved is remarkable.

We need to respond by making sure that Parliament recognises the 6 million residential leaseholders in this country, who can often find themselves exploited. Why is it that people who buy a retirement flat find that when they try to sell it, or their executors do so after they have died, it is worth so much less? There is something wrong with the system. As it happens, the Chancellor loses out because lower property values mean that less is obtained through stamp duty when new buyers come in.

Another problem is caused by court-created law. I cannot explain this issue off the cuff because it goes beyond me, but I can refer to a recent upper tribunal lands chamber decision, whose neutral citation number for 2016 is UKUT 0223 (LC), case Nos. LRA 20, 21 and 35/2015. The case was between the trustees of the Sloane Stanley estate and Adrian Howard Mundy; between the trustees of the Sloane Stanley estate and Arnaud Lagesse; and between Sophie Nathalie Jeanne Aaron and the Wellcome Trust Ltd. A decision of 160-odd clauses was reached about the value that applies when people are trying to get a leasehold extension.

We all know that George Thomas—Lord Tonypandy—a former Speaker, came to public notice when he fought for leasehold rights for south Wales residents. We now need to do the same thing again. As I understand it, the judgment has transformed the valuations of expiring leases. No consideration was undertaken in Parliament, yet this upturns what was believed to be the way to approach these valuations for the last 10 years, so it is time that we got Departments—whether that is the Ministry of Justice or the Department for Communities and Local Government—to come together and, perhaps after putting it before a Select Committee first, assess whether Parliament needs to take formal action on this issue. Otherwise, we are letting a judgment go forward regarding three cases that have been argued by lawyers at great length in a way that few of us would understand. Indeed, I challenge most people to look through the document and find the actual judgment—I tried to do so in 10 minutes but could not; it took me 20 minutes. This is wrong.

When it comes to leasehold, we need to say what is right, what is wrong and what we can do about it. Martin Paine has interests in leasehold at a different scale—not the high-value area. That relates to the Wellcome Trust buying the Henry Smith properties and turning them into an investment trust. The Wellcome trustees should start looking to see whether what they have done is fully justifiable. I am not making an accusation, but asking for their interest.
Returning to the Martin Paine issue, it applies where a young person or couple buy a low-valued flat and have the lease checked by their lawyers, but later on discover that Martin Paine has informally rewritten the terms of the lease—extending it but, for example, doubling the ground rent every 10 years. That situation might be difficult in itself, but the greatest difficulty comes from the way the lease is written, as lawyers do not normally spot that the ground rent has been doubled back to the time when the lease was originally granted.

Let us say the lease was originally granted in 1959. The first ground rent demand could be not the expected £15 but, say, £2,000. That would mean that the rent would increase to £4,000 in 10 years’ time, and then later to £8,000, £16,000 and so on, so the flat becomes worthless. I understand that if enough fuss is made or enough publicity issued, Martin Paine will offer to buy the property back. He sometimes appears to remarket it without drawing the attention of the potential auctioneers or the potential purchasers of what those buying it will be letting themselves in for.

It is not for me to judge whether that is criminal, but doing this on an organised basis certainly demands attention. I ask the Competition and Markets Authority, the Office of Fair Trading or the police to check this and stop it. I warn the solicitors that their indemnity societies mean that they should be looking to see why this is going on.

I could provide a number of other examples that I would not suggest are necessarily criminal, but they are certainly odd. I mention embedded management companies, and I would ask some of the major developers to check whether there are clauses in their leasehold agreements that make clear the right of leaseholders to come together to buy their properties or to take over the management company. They need to make sure they are effective, and if they are defective, they should be made to put it right at their own cost. We should not ask the victims to pay all the costs and take all the risks—especially of going to court—to get things put right.

Let me turn briefly to medical cases. I shall shortly meet two of the people I most admire in the medical world. One is Dr Kim Holt, who suffered persecution by her trust when she warned about the baby P case, before it acknowledged that it did not have the right staffing. The other is Dr Peter Wilmshurst, who had to face a crooked company that threatened him with defamation when he pointed out that its research was wrong. There are other examples.

I am waiting for the result of an Manchester employment tribunal case involving Mr Aditya Agrawal. I shall make no further comment, because we have not yet seen the result, but when it comes out, I hope to ask Mr Speaker whether we can have a debate on why the hospital trust had had over 100 confidentiality agreements over the last five years—and a compromise agreement that is a secret as well. This is the sort of pattern that we should not have in our national health service.

Then there is the police and the case of Gurpal Virdi. He is still waiting for the police to accept his case when they prosecuted him for a week and a half unsuccessfully—it was obviously going to be unsuccessful—in Southwark Crown court, when he was said to have assaulted somebody 28 years ago.

The police did not interview the officer recorded as arresting the complainant. When Mr Virdi arrested the complainant six months later, the police did not interview the officer with him, who could have given evidence about the relationship, if any, between the complainant and the police officer.

Our job in Parliament is to stand up, without making wild accusations, and to be persistent about issues until either the law or practice changes. Anyone in our constituencies who feels they have suffered an injustice should be told, “Do come to a Member of Parliament or a caseworker, and if it is serious and if it matters, we will work at it.” We may not always be successful, but it is our duty to try to help.

May 19, 2016
Edward Garnier – 2016 Speech on the Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Sir Edward Garnier, the Conservative MP for Harborough, on 18 May 2016.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). I might not agree with her commentary on the Queen’s Speech or the conclusions she reached, but I think that the thoughtful way in which she approached the several subjects she discussed was commendable. It was a commendable way to debate the Queen’s Speech, particularly from the Opposition Benches, because people tend to listen to Opposition Members when they speak carefully, calmly and without hectoring. She certainly was listened to by me, and I am grateful and very happy to follow her.
I am also happy to take this opportunity to thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) for starting our deliberations this afternoon with two first-class speeches. The speeches were different in style, but both were hugely amusing and insightful. They are to be congratulated on what they had to say and the manner in which they said it.

All Queen’s Speeches can be something of a curate’s egg; they tend to include a bit of detail, a bit of general aspiration and a bit of

“Other measures will be laid before you.”

I do not suppose that this Queen’s Speech is an exception to that rule. However, I am keen to highlight three areas that appeal to me and that I think will be of interest to the country as a whole. It does not matter to me that the Bills on which I want to concentrate have a bearing only on England and Wales, because I think that the theory and public policy behind them should be of interest right across the United Kingdom.

The first issue that I want to deal with is the anti-corruption summit in London and the follow-on legislation that will tackle corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. There is absolutely no question but that for far too long the police and public policy commentators have not given enough attention to white-collar crime, as it is sometimes called. Nobody dies, there is no blood and guts, and there are no obvious victims in so many cases of corruption, money laundering and tax evasion, but none the less these are serious crimes. If somebody went into a bank with a sawn-off shotgun and stole £10 million, we would all get rather exercised about it, and in the event of a prosecution and a conviction, we would expect the offender to be given a pretty handy sentence. Yet there seems to be a rather perverse sort of admiration for people who, through computer crime or through other clever tactics, launder money, evade tax or commit acts of corruption, in this country or abroad.

All these financial and economic crimes need to be borne down on with a sense of purpose, because they not only produce victims in this country—we see pension funds ripped open and lives ruined as a consequence—but damage the developing economies in countries where corruption is, to some extent, endemic. It was interesting for me to attend the Marlborough House talks last week. I did not go to the main summit addressed by the Prime Minister but to the event the day before addressed by the noble and learned Baroness Scotland, now Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, at which a whole host of people, including the President of Nigeria, spoke with one voice about the need to tackle corruption, not only because it is wrong in itself, but because corruption in their countries damages their development, damages their economy, and makes the lives of their people, particularly poorer people, altogether more difficult. I welcome the onset of this new legislation, not least because it ties into something that I did when I was briefly in government, which was to introduce deferred prosecution agreements that allowed corporate malefactors to be dealt with pragmatically and effectively.

I am not so happy about the second thing that I want to draw attention to, which is the sentence in the Queen’s Speech that reads:

“Proposals will be brought forward for a British Bill of Rights.”
This idea of a British Bill of Rights has been knocking around the lampshade like a demented moth for some little while, and it may well be that if it has an armour-plated head, it can carry on knocking itself around the lampshade for a good while longer. I really do think it is a waste of intellectual and political energy for this—to mix my metaphors—dead horse to be revived. Of course the European convention on human rights and its application in our own courts, and in the Strasbourg Court, can occasionally be rather annoying, but that is not the point. The point of the convention, the point of the Strasbourg Court and the point of applying the convention law in our own courts, right across the United Kingdom, is to ensure that the courts can protect the interests of the people—the citizens.

I am not going to get too apoplectic about this, because I find that life is far too exciting already without getting apoplectic about a British Bill of Rights, and I will wait until the consultation is over—perhaps my obituary will have been written by then—before I deconstruct it. However, I urge the Government to make the consultation very thorough and to consider long and hard whether this is worth the political damage and in-fighting that it may well cause. I think it was the right hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson) who said that there is no majority in this House, let alone in the other place, for a wholesale attack on the structure of human rights in this country. I suspect that he is right, but let us see what the Government come up with when they have finished consulting. I wish them all the best in their endeavours.

To come on to the meat of what I want to say— I promise to take just a little time, not far too long—I congratulate the Government on their prison reform proposals. One of the things in which I have become interested in the past 11 years is prison reform. When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister became Leader of the Opposition in 2005 and rearranged the Opposition Front Bench, he invited me to become the shadow Minister for prisons, then shadowing the Home Office. I think that the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), who is in the Chamber, was the then Minister for prisons; if not, he certainly took on that role shortly after I became the shadow Minister.

The Prime Minister asked me to find out what was going on in the prisons of England and Wales, because the prisons world is, except to the few enthusiasts about such issues, an entirely secret world. Over the course of the next three or four years, I set about visiting about 65 of the 140 prisons, young offender institutions and secure training units in England and Wales. In all those prisons and places of custody, I found dedicated prison officers and hard-working senior management teams, including prison governors. They were all interested in doing a good job, but unfortunately the good things that went on in some prisons were not replicated in others. There was no general pattern of a sensible application of policy.

The inevitable problem that one saw as one went from prison to prison—this was quite easy to see whether one visited the big Victorian prisons of Manchester, Leeds, Wandsworth, Pentonville or Wormwood Scrubs, or more modern prisons such as Gartree in my constituency or Glen Parva, a YOI that straddles the border of my constituency and that of South Leicestershire—was that of overcrowding. Although the Government’s proposed measures are entirely laudable and welcome, nothing of lasting value seriously can be done to reform and improve the condition of our prisons and prisoners—and thus to make them fitter to come out into the community and lead sensible and straight lives so that they can look after their dependents and themselves, get a job and become tax-paying members of society—unless we stop overcrowding our prisons.

Overcrowded prisons lead to churn. Someone sentenced in Canterbury Crown court for a particular offence might go straight to Canterbury prison, but probably not if it still specialises in overseas prisoners, in which case they will probably go to a relatively local prison. If Canterbury Crown court sends 10 or 15 people to prison every day and the local prison does not have sufficient space to house the inflow of just-sentenced prisoners, they have to be moved from Canterbury to Lewes or Maidstone, but how do those prisons fit in the 15, 30 and 45 prisoners that have been sent there? They remove 15, 30 and 45 of their own prisoners and shove them down the line, so there is a metaphorical jumbo jet of prisoners going around England, moving from prison to prison. One could say, “Well, that’s just bad luck.” However, their records and education certificates do not move with them, so when Prisoner Jones goes from Canterbury to Lewes to Exeter to Bristol to Birmingham, his medical and educational records are three or four prisons behind him. It is bananas, it is incompetent, it is inefficient, and it is a waste of life and public money.

We do that because in the past, we had Governments who were good at talking about prison reform, but did not get round to doing it. Now we must, and I think we have a Government who will, because the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Justice are genuinely interested in this issue. If the Prime Minister, who has said that he will not serve another term after this Parliament, leaves nothing behind him other than real proof that what we do to prisoners and what we do within prisons can allow our prisoners to emerge from prison as better citizens—off drugs, able to read and write, having received the mental health treatment they required and fit for a job—he will have done a really wonderful thing.

I am biased. First, as I said a moment ago, in 2005 I became the shadow prisons Minister and went on a literal and metaphorical journey to find out what was going on in prisons. I also researched and wrote a paper called “Prisons with a Purpose”, which I hope has informed, to some extent, the discussion we are now having on prison reform. It is inevitable that, as Front Benches change, other people come in and want to do things their way, rather than the way of their predecessors, but I like to think, in a rather self-regarding way, that the paper I wrote has proved to be valuable. If, unconsciously or consciously, my successors have drawn on it to produce good policy, that is a good thing.

The other reason I am biased is that when I came out of government in September 2012, I was fortunate enough to be invited to become a patron of Unlock, a prisons charity, and a little while later I became a trustee of the Prison Reform Trust. It is a happy coincidence that my hon. Friend the Minister for Children and Families is sitting on the Front Bench, because his brother James has just become the chairman of the Prison Reform Trust, and the name Timpson and doing good things for prisons and prisoners run together. In a number of prisons—possibly in Liverpool and Manchester, and certainly in Wandsworth—Timpson workshops train guys who can then go out and work.

As General Ramsbotham, the unlikely but marvellous inspector of prisons, said, the three things that a released prisoner needs are a strong relationship—whether with their family, wife, husband or partner—somewhere to live and a job. The Timpson trick is to allow ex-offenders and ex-prisoners to set up shop, run it on their own and handle money. The business trusts those people and, in return, they pay back by earning money, supporting their families and providing a service to their customers. Yes, of course, the odd one fails, but the risk is worth taking. I hope the Government will feel encouraged by that example, and that they will feel that the public attitude towards prisons, prisoners and prison reform is not as conservative, with a small c, as old-fashioned or as ill-considered as many would have us believe. There is a fund of enthusiasm for good work in prisons, and I urge the Government to push hard for it and not to be upset by the occasional recidivist or the occasional disaster, because the overall direction of travel is good.

Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)

Will the right hon. and learned Gentleman take this opportunity to pay tribute to the mother of the Minister for Children and Families? I believe that she recently passed away. She was the primary driving force behind the amazing things that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has just talked about.

Sir Edward Garnier

Of course I will—I do not want to make this a Timpson-fest, but I am happy to pay tribute to the Minister’s mother. I was fortunate enough to meet her, and I was very sad when she died, as I know my hon. Friend the Minister obviously was.

That family’s story, which goes beyond the fostering of a lot of disadvantaged children and the setting up of workshops in prisons, demonstrates what private enterprises, charities and individuals can do to turn things around. If the Government can harness that work and borrow the enthusiasm and spirit of volunteers, charities, professionals in the probation world and so on, they can produce an understanding that going to prison is not the solution for a prisoner but part of a much longer journey. I have been a Crown court recorder and sentenced people to prison, and from reading their histories I know that they are often the children of prisoners or from broken families. They are often mentally ill, and they are largely illiterate and unable to function. I have sentenced people to community sentences who do not even know how to tell the time. They are told, “You are required to be at such-and-such a place at 10 o’clock next Friday, where you will meet the probation officer,” and they ask, “How many sleeps is that?” It is as rum as that.

I hope that the Government will push this agenda on with great enthusiasm. There are charities that do good work for the mentally ill and for prisoners, but we need to join things up so that ex-servicemen, for example, who are under the care of the Ministry of Defence and get into trouble when they leave the Army, can be properly treated by that Department and by the Department of Health, and do not fall through the gaps between the departmental budgets. As I have said, we have to deal with overcrowding and stop the churn, and we must be braver and have more releases on temporary licence—that issue was spoken about over the weekend.

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chair of the Select Committee on Justice, for the Committee’s report. It sounds the alarm bells and tells a story, but that story has been told and told and told. Now it must stop being told and something must be done. I hope that when the next Queen’s Speech is given this time next year, Her Majesty will not need to say:

“My Government will legislate to reform prisons and courts to give individuals a second chance”,

because that work will already have started.

I will speak finally about another pet subject of mine. The law on sentencing in this country is incredibly complicated—I would say impenetrable. I resigned as a Crown court recorder because when I went on a judges’ refresher course last October at Warwick University, I discovered that three pieces of legislation were passed at the end of the 2010 to 2015 Parliament that I had never heard of—and I follow criminal justice legislation carefully. Ludicrous. Ludicrous of me, one may say. We must stop treating this place as a criminal justice sausage machine, concentrate, and pass sensible legislation that does not repeat itself, and allows the courts to do justice, protect the public and enable wrong to be set right. I hope that one way in which we can do that is by codifying the criminal sentencing law in one easy, though no doubt big, volume so that judges can see what the law is, what has been amended, what has been repealed, what is still there and what is not yet in force, rather than having to look at 25 different books or internet sites to find out the correct sentence. That is not much to ask of the Government, and perhaps they could start.

May 19, 2016
Meg Hillier – 2016 Speech on the Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Meg Hillier, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2016.

I did not intend to be drawn on the issue of Europe, but I feel provoked by the hon. Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) first to declare my firm support for remaining in Europe, and secondly to make it clear that remaining will protect the security of citizens. I spent three years negotiating on home affairs for the then Labour Government, and, in particular, on security and safety issues. I firmly believe that if countries are at the table, they can make a difference, as we have done and continue to do, but that if a country is not there, it cannot exert influence. If we vote “out”, the very next day we will be out of all the discussions that are necessary.

I refer the hon. Gentleman to the work done by the National Audit Office at the behest of the Public Accounts Committee, and to the Committee’s subsequent work in examining the costs. That is, perhaps, close to the audit that he was seeking. It clearly shows that the net cost of the United Kingdom’s contribution to the European Union is the equivalent of 1.4% of the UK Government’s total departmental spending. I believe that that is a small price to pay for the benefits of being part of a wider community, including the peace and security that that brings.

I believe that, as a whole, the Gracious Speech is rather short on detail. I hope to outline some of the issues that I think Ministers and Departments should consider as they flesh out their plans. There are, of course, headlines when Her Majesty reads out her speech, but what worries me, on the basis of my five years as a member of the Public Accounts Committee and one year as the elected Chair, is that there is often not much more in the speech behind the headlines. I hope that the Government will heed our concerns about good policy planning, because all too frequently we have seen policy built on sand. A political pledge may be made in a press release, for instance, containing no detail and, crucially, no proper cost and impact assessments.

Let me deal with some of the specifics in the speech. If the Government finally get it right with their pledge to provide high-speed broadband throughout the country, I shall welcome that, but I must confess to a slight weary cynicism, because we have heard it all before. The Public Accounts Committee has expressed concern about the use of taxpayers’ money to fund, in particular, rural broadband. The low-hanging fruit was taken first, and many innovative technologies were priced out of the market. There are numerous “not spots” all over the country. The policy has been so successful that the Government have had to include it again in the Gracious Speech. Like the Public Accounts Committee, I shall be watching the position closely—both nationally and in my Shoreditch constituency, the home of Tech City and Silicon Roundabout, where, believe it or not, there are still so many “not spots” and problems with speed that businesses relocate to gain access to faster speeds, especially for uploading purposes. It is striking that the former editor of Tech City News, the web news vehicle for that area, had to use his home address to upload the video he recorded each week to round up the local news because his office, just off Old Street, did not have the broadband width to allow it to be uploaded there. It is important that, as the Government roll out the measure, they ensure that alternative providers get a look-in. Therefore, I welcome the access to land and buildings that seems to be indicated in the publicity, but we will be watching and we will no doubt look at the issue more closely.

Unsurprisingly—it was well heralded—the Queen’s Speech included measures on devolution and directly elected mayors. As a Member for the borough of Hackney in London, I fully recognise that a directly elected mayor can be a very good thing. I pay tribute to my colleague, the Mayor of Hackney, Jules Pipe, who was directly elected mayor for the first time in 2002 and who has overseen stability and good public service delivery in our borough. However, in the rush to devolution—it is going very fast—it is vital that it be properly thought through.

We heard from the hon. Member for Christchurch, and we hear it from other Members, that there is concern in some areas about the need, or not, for a directly elected mayor. Although I recognise that the Government, as they are devolving power, money and responsibility, need to have someone accountable for that, other models may work in different places. Perhaps one size does not fit all.

The question remains: what powers will be passed down? We had a hearing recently with the permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, who indicated strongly that, once mayors are elected with a manifesto, the negotiations over the powers they have may be reopened. How will that devolution be properly funded? Who will watch taxpayers’ money? We know that in the tri-boroughs—Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea and Hammersmith and Fulham—there was a discussion about having a local public accounts committee. That sounds like a great idea—I am in favour of public accounts committees, as you may understand, Mr Speaker—but we know that, for example, in Oxfordshire, the Prime Minister’s own county, when the council sought external auditors for its audit committee, it could find only one person. If in the whole of Oxfordshire, with the talent pool there, it could find only one person willing to be a lay person on the audit committee, that is a concern. There is also concern about resourcing and how we watch how taxpayers’ money is spent.

There is the issue of the retention of business rates. How will that work? In my area, we stand to gain quite a lot, but there is concern about redistribution to the areas where there are not businesses that would be able to accrue the business rates for the local tax payer. However, watching taxpayers’ money is key. Who decides what amount of money is right, for example, for Manchester? Once the Treasury has decided on the amount, it is for Manchester to come back and say it needs more. Who is to be the arbiter of that? It cannot be the National Audit Office in every case—it just does not have the capacity to look at that local level. We have lost the Audit Commission. Those of us who took part in the pre-legislative scrutiny warned that a lot was being thrown out when the commission was abolished. We have concerns and we will return to the issue as a Committee.

The Gracious Speech mentions mental health and the criminal justice system. My constituency hosts the John Howard Centre, a medium secure unit for people with serious mental health issues. I have spoken to patients in the unit who fear going back to prison because of the lack of mental health support in the mainstream prison service. Therefore, I wish the Government’s reforms of the prison service well. I also represent the Howard League for Penal Reform. I know that it will want the reforms to succeed, too. Again, the devil is in the detail and in the funding, of course. There has been a cut of about 20% in the budget of the Ministry of Justice. Eighteen per cent. of that 20% cut has been in prisons. We also know that there is a shortage of prison officers, so I will watch that one with caution.

The northern powerhouse is again mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. The Government heralds that, but we know from our work on the Committee that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is planning to move its policy team from Sheffield to that well known northern powerhouse—Victoria Street SW1. The team will join the 97% of civil servants working on the northern powerhouse who are already based in London. I may be a London MP but I know that that does not make sense. It is vital that the Government get the best input from around the nations and regions of the UK to ensure that policy is not London-centric.

David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)

I understand the point that the hon. Lady is making, but does she not appreciate that the whole point of the devolution thrust is to give more power back to the combined authorities and to local partnerships? That is what we are delivering, regardless of what happens to a small policy team or strategy team.

Meg Hillier

My point is that this is a litmus test for how seriously devolution is being taken. Whenever senior civil servants appearing before the Committee talk about devolving powers down, we always ask them how many civil servants will move from Whitehall to the regions. We ask them what the total percentage will be of the Whitehall civil servants who are going to shift, even if this does not involve the same people. If Whitehall is shrinking as a result of devolving powers and responsibilities to local regions and nations, we should see a reduction in the civil service. If not, we should seek an explanation for why that is not the case. We have seen some very fuzzy thinking on this, and the Committee is watching the situation closely.

The Investigatory Powers Bill has once again been mentioned in a Gracious Speech, as it did not make enough progress in the last Session. I strongly believe that we need to keep up with technology in order to keep citizens safe. In principle, therefore, I support the Bill, but I sincerely hope that the Home Secretary will listen and respond to calls from all the Opposition parties for appropriate governance and safeguards so that this legislation can gain cross-party support. We must unite against terror and those who wish our country ill, and we need to work together in that spirit to ensure that the Bill is the best bit of legislation it can be and that it achieves all its aims.

Talking about security brings me to the issue of tackling extremism and radicalisation. I do not believe that this can be done from Whitehall. It is important that Whitehall should set the framework, but the best way of doing this is to work at grassroots level. We have had the Prevent strategy in the past, but we need to ensure that we really work hard to deliver this, this time round. We need to do this in a spirit of unity, and it has been shocking to me over the past few weeks and months that senior Government Ministers—even the Prime Minister himself, from the Dispatch Box—have been casting aspersions on the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. That is beyond the pale. It is unacceptable that someone in his position has been pilloried in such a way when he is part of the solution and certainly nothing to do with the problem. I therefore hope that we can now move forward in a spirit of greater unity, because we need to tackle these issues as part of our long-term strategy to make our country secure.

The three main issues in the Gracious Speech that I wish to talk about are housing, health and education. Obviously, I am as concerned about what has not been included as I am about what has been included in the sketchy details. In the Gracious Speech, the Government are making a commitment to building 1 million homes, but let us replay what happened in the last Parliament. At the beginning of the last Parliament, the Government committed to releasing public land to build new homes. When the Public Accounts Committee looked into this matter five years on, however, the Government could not say how much the land had been sold for, how many homes had been built on the land or whether there had been any appreciable value for money for the taxpayer. You really couldn’t make it up.

The Public Accounts Committee remains concerned about the pledge in this Parliament to release public land for home building. It is interesting that there is such a definite figure in the Gracious Speech, given that Ministers do not consider it necessary to count such numbers as an outcome. One of my colleagues on the Committee has pointed out that none of our constituents wants to live in a potential home; they want to live in real ones. We should not only count the homes that are being built but ensure that they are the right ones, and that means allowing local authorities to determine what is necessary in their own areas.

The Gracious Speech mentions tackling poverty and the causes of deprivation in order to give every child the best start in life. I represent a borough that is in the top 11% for child poverty and I believe strongly that the main foundation for tackling poverty and giving people the best start in life is housing. A stable home is a basic right. The recently passed Housing and Planning Act 2016 will do huge damage to my city and my constituency. It pulls the rug out from under Londoners on low and moderate incomes. It takes social housing away from local authorities to pay for the right to buy. In my own borough, 700 such properties will have to be sold in the next five years to pay for the right to buy for housing association tenants.

I do not begrudge people wanting to own their own home or having the opportunity to do so, but that must not happen at the expense of others who need affordable quality homes that are permanent and secure to live in. There is also pay to stay, which was introduced to push up rents for people on a household income of £40,000 a year. To some hon. Members, that might sound like a lot of money, but in London it does not stretch very far at all. The average property price in London is now £691,969. It has gone up about £7,000 since I last raised the matter in the House a few weeks ago. There has been an 85% increase in the past six years.

As of February this year, the median rent for a one-bedroom property in my borough was £1,399 per calendar month. To afford that, people would require a gross household income of £48,000. I do not know where people who are expected to pay and stay are supposed to go. They could not afford to buy their own home and they could not afford to rent privately. That particularly affects a number of pensioners in my constituency. There is also the problem of overcrowded households. Adult children who cannot leave because of those prices keep the household income ticking over. They are paying not for huge palaces, but often for overcrowded accommodation.

Under the Housing and Planning Act 2016 there is a proposal to replace, one for one, homes sold under right to buy, but that is not necessarily like for like. The replacement homes could be of a different size, in a different location or even in a different city, and of a different tenure. It is not good enough for the Government to sit back and allow that to happen. I hope they will work with Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, to come up with a work-around—a London solution—because the Act will not work as it is. I am fed up with hearing Ministers and the Prime Minister talk about starter homes being the solution. Starter homes in London would need a household income of £71,000 on average to be affordable. The average household income in my constituency is £33,000 and there are many households with an income much lower than that. Government policies are fuelling house prices, but not providing a solution.

The figures underline the crucial need to sort out housing in my borough, where 11,000 people are on the council housing register. In 2014-15, 1,338 social rented homes were allocated. At that rate people will have to wait a very long time. There are 2,286 households in temporary accommodation. My surgeries are the busiest they have ever been in the 20 or so years since I was elected. I thought the situation could not get worse when I was visiting people in bed-and-breakfast accommodation twenty-something years ago. It is worse now. There are people living in hostels for a year or 18 months and others being relocated a long way away from schools and family, increasingly having no hope and no security. I do not know where people will go.

I speak also for people in private sector accommodation. I meet people in good jobs but not well-paid jobs—people in their 40s who have rented privately quite happily all their lives, and who suddenly find themselves priced out. They cannot buy and they cannot rent. Heaven forbid that they are on any housing benefit. People on low incomes in London require some housing benefit to pay the rent, but landlords do not want to look such people in the eye. Where do those people go? We are hollowing out London. People on low and moderate incomes cannot afford to remain in London. That must be tackled. The Gracious Speech could have and should have included a clear outline of how the Government will work with London. I hope the Housing Minister will take the matter up.

In the Gracious Speech there is the promise of a seven-day NHS, but in a series of reports the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee have concluded, on a cross-party basis, that the NHS budget is far too squeezed. It is like a balloon—if it is squeezed in one place, the bulge moves somewhere else. Earlier this year we saw acute trusts nearly bursting, with three quarters of them in deficit. The proposal for a seven-day NHS has not been costed. NHS commissioners and providers in 2014-15 had a deficit of £471 million and the Public Accounts Committee concluded:

“There is not yet a convincing plan in place for closing the £22 billion efficiency gap and avoiding a ‘black hole’ in NHS finances.”

There are not enough GPs to meet demand and NHS England does not have enough information on demand, activity or capacity to support decisions on general practice—another conclusion from the PAC—and a target of 4% efficiency savings for trusts is unrealistic and has caused long-term damage to trusts’ finances.

Workforce planning is dire, with a 5.9% shortfall in clinical staff nationally. That masks a number of regional variations. There is a vacancy rate of more than 7% for nurses, midwives and health visitors, and a vacancy rate of 7% for ambulance staff. We have seen the fiasco of the handling of the junior doctors contracts. If the Government are planning to legislate on a seven-day NHS, they must do the maths, which are pretty basic. It is about time somebody gave the Health Secretary a simple calculator. We see from a number of reports that GP services are being squeezed and acute trusts are bursting. Increased demand for specialist services will squeeze acute trusts even more. There is an over-reliance on expensive agency staff and locums. The basic maths is not being done and much more needs to be done to ensure that this proposal is deliverable.

Currently, the seven-day NHS is a notion, a promise, a hope, but the evidence shows that it is not planned, it is not funded and it is not realistic. The Government must address these fundamentals. I think that there is cross-party support on both sides of the House for our national health service. It is something we all treasure and love, and that we all know is there for us when we need it. But it is not going to be there if we allow this approach to continue. There has to be a better approach.

Education was mentioned in the Gracious Speech. My borough needs no lessons in educational excellence. Thanks to the London Challenge, decent funding, committed teachers and headteachers, and the vision of our mayor, Jules Pipe, we have some of the best schools in the country, and a number that are ranked in the top 1% nationally. When I was selected to run for the seat 12 years ago, I was asked what I thought about university tuition fees. I pointed out that so few pupils in Hackney went to university that it really was a bit of an academic question in my borough. Now we see scores of young people going to Oxbridge and Russell Group universities. It has been a major success.

But I really worry now. It is easy for the Government to talk about raising excellence for all, but London is under threat. When they talk about fair funding, what they really mean is reducing funding in London. That is unjust, foolish and short-sighted, and it risks putting back the progress made by and for London’s young people. Nationally there are lessons to be learnt from London, but we must not hammer London while trying to resolve issues in the rest of the country.

There is a lot to look at in this Queen’s Speech, and my Committee will be busily examining it, but I really hope that the Government will learn lessons from some of their policies, particularly on housing and the funding of the health service, and that they will work out a better way of having a stable financial footing for these policies, so that where policies are good, they are deliverable, and where they are not good, we get a chance to amend them, and not just through secondary legislation, but in primary legislation that is debatable and amendable in this House, and the Lords must not be so neutered. The penultimate paragraph in the Queen’s Speech talks about the primacy of the House of Commons, but it is really vital that the experts in the Lords get their say too, to ensure that these polices are better. It is no proud thing for a Government to introduce policies that increase poverty, deprivation and inequality. I fear that, without proper scrutiny and detail, that is what will happen as a result of this Queen’s Speech.

May 19, 2016
Jeremy Corbyn – 2016 Speech During Debate on Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Jeremy Corbyn, the Leader of the Opposition, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2016.

I am pleased that we have dispensed with the Outlawries Bill, which will ensure that we have civility and freedom of speech in this Chamber. I intend to adhere to the civility part of it; it is up to others to decide on the freedom of speech.

July will mark the centenary of the battle of the Somme, an episode of needless carnage and horror. This week marked the centenary of the Sykes-Picot agreement, in which Britain and France divided up the Ottoman empire into spheres of influence, arbitrarily establishing borders that have been the cause of many conflicts ever since. Those two events should remind us in this House of two things: first, the decisions that we take have consequences, and secondly, it is our armed forces that face the consequences of failed foreign and military policy. Our duty to our armed forces is to avoid the political mistakes that lead to their being sent unnecessarily into harm’s way. As the hon. Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) pointed out, the effects of war go on for the whole lifetime of those who take part in it.

By tradition, at the beginning of each parliamentary Session, we commemorate the Members of the House we have lost in the last year. In October, we lost Michael Meacher. He was, as all who met him knew, a decent, hard-working, passionate and profound man. He represented his constituency with diligence and distinction for 45 years. He was a brilliant Environment Minister, a lifelong campaigner against injustice and poverty, and a brilliant champion of the rights of this House and of Parliament. We remember Michael for all those things.

Harry Harpham sadly had only a few months to serve this House. He represented his constituency and the concerns of the steel industry in Sheffield with incredible diligence. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss), who now represents the constituency, told me at his passing:

“We have admired the bravery and courage he showed in his life, which was formed during the miners’ strike and carried him forward for the rest of his life.”

Harry and Michael were incredibly decent and honourable men who were absolutely dedicated to serving their communities and standing up for strong socialist principles. We commemorate them both.

I congratulate the mover and seconder of the Queen’s Speech motion. It is a job I have never had to do myself—it is one of those powers of patronage. First, I congratulate the right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) on her excellent speech, which I attribute to the excellent training she received early in her career. It is possible that many members of her own party are unaware that sister Spelman, or comrade Spelman, was, like me, a full-time union official before entering Parliament. While industrial strife raged across the country during the early 1980s—I was part of it—[Hon. Members: “Was?”] They are just too fast, Mr Speaker. While that was happening, the right hon. Lady was travelling the whole country defending sugar beet workers from disreputable and exploitative bosses. At least, that is what I think the National Farmers Union was doing at that time. Alas, time changes things, and she and I now sing from a slightly different hymn sheet.

Talking of which, I understand that the right hon. Lady has been a stalwart of the parliamentary choir for many years. Perhaps she will find time to give me some singing lessons. Given her background, perhaps together we could sing “The Red Flag” as a duet. [An Hon. Member: “Or the national anthem.”] We will sing from the widest hymn sheet, don’t you worry.

The right hon. Lady has an excellent reputation for her outstanding work in international development, both in opposition and then in government. She steered her party—some might ungraciously say kicking and screaming—into delivering the pledge that 0.7% of our GDP would be spent on international aid. I pay a huge tribute to her for the way in which she championed the rights of women and young girls in the developing world. She stood up for their needs and their rights and ensured that our aid budget, correctly, went disproportionately to help them, and I thank her for that.

I think that underneath it all, the right hon. Lady is a bit of a closet radical, actually—so we will talk later. After some research, I can exclusively reveal to the House the roots of her radicalism. Her constituency includes the town of Dorridge, and the waters of Dorridge are very important. In the early 18th century—long before she was elected, I should add—her constituency was a nest of rebellion and sedition, led by a local landowner, George Frederick Muntz. A refugee, Muntz was one of the founders of the Birmingham Political Union, an organisation that was pivotal in the introduction of the 1832 Reform Act. The union later became part of the Chartist movement, to which we trace the origins of socialism in this country and the Labour party. Naturally, I hugely admire the Birmingham Political Union for what it did.

A member of the parliamentary choir, the right hon. Member for Meriden was in fine voice today, and I am sure the whole House will join me in thanking her for her speech.

I turn to the seconder of the Loyal Address, the hon. Member for Bracknell. Before joining the House, he worked as a doctor. Today, he has lanced the myth that doctors are bad communicators. In his maiden speech, he said:

“I am often asked why I…moved away from being a doctor to being a Member of Parliament. To my mind, people who come in here should want to make this country a better place.”—[Official Report, 16 June 2010; Vol. 511, c. 913.]

The hon. Gentleman and I come from absolutely opposite sides of the political spectrum, but we are both sincere in sharing the same goal: to make our country a better place for those who live here.

Researching the hon. Gentleman’s career, I thought I had uncovered yet more evidence of the deep fractures that exist within the Government today. I was informed that he was a leading member of an organisation known as the Grumblers. However, we have been into this in some detail, and further research indicated that this was not another group of malcontents on the Government Back Benches—that is already full—but a cricket club of which he would have us believe he is a leading light. I did not want to leave any of that research undone, so I approached the club to get a sense of the hon. Gentleman’s character before making today’s speech. [Laughter.] Yes, it’s definitely coming.

The House will be eternally grateful for the words of Mr Anton Joiner, the chairman of the Old Grumblers cricket club, for his insightful and helpful response to my request. If I may quote from Mr Joiner’s letter, the House will be all the better informed. He wrote:

“Dear Sir,

We are glad you have established contact with our team, as we are desperately seeking recovery of several seasons’ overdue match fees by our hon. Friend. Please communicate our willingness to waive penalty interest in return for prompt payment.”

The letter goes on:

“In an undistinguished and tragically all too long career as a top order batsman, the good doctor managed an average of just 11.2 runs with the bat. His efforts with the ball yielded a solitary wicket—that of a French farmer’s wife during a tour match in Brittany in 2008.”

The hon. Gentleman’s generosity knew no bounds:

“As a Doctor, Mr Lee advised on numerous sporting injuries to club players. The misdiagnosis of many led to a string of unnecessary early retirements and an acute player availability crisis, from which the team has only recently recovered.

As Captain of the Old Grumblers Cricket Club, I rarely had to handle as obstinate and disruptive a character as the Doctor, who stubbornly refused to stand in any conventional field placement and very openly demonstrated a disdain for team sport, command structures… Presumably this led him to the logical career choice of Tory backbencher.”

The letter concludes:

“Please pass on my regards…and the attached invoice.”

I very much hope that the hon. Gentleman is a good sport as I understand that he is an equally distinguished rugby player, but those stories were beyond my research capabilities and must be saved for another occasion. I thank him for his more acceptable exploits in the House today.

The Opposition will judge the Government’s legislative programme against three tests. Will it deliver a more equal society, an economy that works for everyone and a society in which there is opportunity for all? Sadly, it appears that many proposals in the Queen’s Speech militate against those aims, as have the proposals in previous years. Still this Government do not seem to understand that cuts have consequences. When they cut adult social care, it has an impact on national health service accident and emergency departments. When they saddle young people with more debt, it impedes their ability to buy a home or start a family. When they fail to build housing and cap housing benefit, homelessness and the number of families in temporary accommodation increase. When they slash local authorities’ budgets, leisure centres, libraries and children’s centres close. When they close fire stations and cut firefighters’ jobs, response times increase and more people are in danger of dying in fires.

This austerity is a political choice, not an economic necessity. It is a wrong choice for our country, made by a Government with the wrong priorities. Women have been hit hardest by the cuts. More than 80% of cuts fall disproportionately on women. As the Women’s Budget Group has pointed out, all the cuts mean that opportunities for women are systematically reduced and diminished in our society. The Government are failing to deliver an economy that meets the needs and aspirations of the people who sent us here—a Government who are consistently failing to meet their own economic targets. They have failed on the deficit, failed on the debt, failed on productivity and failed to rebalance the economy.

Once again, the northern powerhouse was announced—if only the rhetoric matched the reality. In March we discovered that the northern powerhouse has 97% of its senior staff based in London—a northern powerhouse outsourced to the capital. For all the Chancellor’s rhetoric, there has been systematic under-investment in the north, and only 1% of projects in the Government’s infrastructure pipeline are currently in construction in the north-east.

Much could be said in a similar vein about housing. The Government claim to aspire to build 1 million new homes, but housebuilding has sunk to its lowest level since the 1920s. So out of touch are those on the Government Benches that they think that £450,000 is what people can afford for a starter home. The announcement again today about Britain’s digital infrastructure is welcome. Perhaps this time it will become a reality—I hope it does. Perhaps the Chancellor—sadly, he is not here today—is a convert to our fiscal rule. It is a rational rule, backed by leading economists, which allows for borrowing on capital spending.

I point out to the Prime Minister that whether on the northern powerhouse, building homes or investing in digital infrastructure, simply saying things does not make them happen. It takes commitment to fund them. This Government are failing to deliver even on their own proposals, although often that is for the better. The Prime Minister said two weeks ago:

“We are going to have academies for all, and it will be in the Queen’s Speech”.—[Official Report, 27 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1423.]

Just a fortnight later, there is no sign of that. Parents, governors, pupils, teachers and headteachers will be relieved to get final confirmation today that the wrong-headed proposals to impose forced academisation have finally been dumped.

The Government have been forced to back down on a number of issues in recent months: on tax credits, the Saudi prison deal, police cuts, cuts to personal independence payments for disabled people, the solar tax, the tampon tax, freedom of information, Sunday trading, and aspects of the Trade Union Bill and the Housing and Planning Act 2016. To call that “disarray” would be generous, and that is without discussing the resultant black hole in the Government’s finances.

Perhaps the most worrying proposal of all is the decision to try to redefine poverty and deprivation. Apparently, it is all about instability, addiction and debt—all things that can be blamed on individuals about whom Governments like to moralise. Well, no! It is about 1 million people in our country using food banks, record levels of in-work poverty and the fact that absolute child poverty, after housing costs, is up by half a million. Poverty is up in disabled households on the same basis. Homelessness has gone up every year since the Prime Minister took office, and 100,000 children spent last Christmas in temporary, insecure accommodation. The causes of that are cuts to welfare benefits, cuts to employment and support allowance, the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, wages being too low, insecure jobs, and housing—whether to rent or to buy—being too expensive. We will not tackle poverty by moving the goalposts. Poverty and inequality are collective failures of our society as a whole, not individual failures.

On current form, much of what Her Majesty announced today will not require her signature. I very much hope that the Government’s proposals announced today to consign into ever deeper debt those seeking to learn will be rejected.

I hope there will be a cross-party consensus on one element of the Government’s proposals—[Interruption.] The hon. Member of all people should understand what I am about to say. I am talking about the proposal to repeal the Human Rights Act, which was introduced at the very start of the Labour Government. It brought the European convention on human rights into British law, thus empowering British citizens and giving rights to everybody in our society. We will defend our Human Rights Act as we defend the human rights of everyone in this country, and indeed all those who benefit from the European convention on human rights.

I understand—this is quite bizarre—that the Home Secretary is the driving force behind tearing up the Human Rights Act and leaving the convention, which is strange because she has very strong European credentials. What it shows is this: whether we are in or out of the EU, the main obstacle holding back the people of this country is not the EU, but the Conservative Government—a Conservative Government who are displaying a very worrying authoritarian streak.

The primacy of the House of Commons is not in doubt. We are committed to replacing the House of Lords with a democratic Chamber, but we will scrutinise sceptically any proposals that seek to weaken the ability to hold the Government to account, as the other place rightly does. Democracy requires accountability for the decisions that are made.

The national health service is in record deficit, yet there is no legislation in the Queen’s Speech to improve it. Perhaps the Prime Minister can belatedly adopt the central medical principle of first doing no harm. Unfortunately, pending legislation will affect the NHS—the decision last year to cut nurses’ bursaries. Will the Prime Minister confirm that that decision will be put to the House and voted on in this Chamber? It is opposed by all the unions involved in the NHS and the royal colleges representing nurses and midwives.

The move to dissuade people from taking up nursing is all the more bizarre coming as it does at a time when the Government are planning to train nurses to take on more responsibilities from doctors.

We welcome the Government’s proposals to support driverless cars in our society, but can they address a Secretary of State for Health who appears to be asleep at the wheel in control of the NHS?

With regard to the sugar tax, we have made it clear previously that we will look favourably on proposals to tackle childhood obesity.

We welcome the Government’s U-turn on forced academisation.

Several hon. Members rose—

Jeremy Corbyn

I will continue my speech, if I may, Mr Speaker.

As with schools, we would like to see all Ministers being good or even outstanding, but they need the freedom to listen to the public and the people who understand services best, so we look forward to scrutinising the surviving proposals in the Government’s education Bill to ensure that they are better thought through. Just as we have opposed the increase in unqualified teachers in our classrooms, we hope that the Government will get to grips with the £800 million being spent annually on supply teachers because of the recruitment and retention crisis in schools. With school budgets scheduled—[Interruption.] We just agreed to behave with civility in this Chamber. Some Government Members have very short memories. [Interruption.]

Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)

On a point of order, Mr Speaker, am I not right in thinking that it is a customary courtesy in this House for people, though they do not have to, to give way in speeches that last over 20 minutes?

Mr Speaker

The essence of the hon. Gentleman’s point was encapsulated in that first sentence: customary, but it is not required. There is no obligation. Members may want the right hon. Gentleman to give way, but he is not obliged to do so. I gently say to the hon. Members for Winchester (Steve Brine) and for Sherwood (Mark Spencer) that they can have a go, but if the right hon. Gentleman does not want to give way they will not advance their cause by shouting. That, in itself, is uncivil, of which the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) is never guilty.

Jeremy Corbyn

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

School budgets are scheduled to receive their biggest real-terms cut since the 1970s. Education is actually quite important in our society. The Government can therefore ill afford to be spending so much on supply teachers. We have to move away from agency Britain. We will look at the proposals for a national funding formula that would encourage the Government to look, for example, at the school meals and breakfast policies that have been introduced in Labour Wales, which help young people in Wales.

We welcome moves to speed up adoption. That is in the interests of both children and those families committed to adoption, but the priority has to always be the welfare and safety of the child. But at a time when social services and children’s services are being slashed, we have to ask whether the funding will match that desire. We should also put on record—I am sure all of us can agree on this—our thanks to all those families who foster, adopt and give children the very best lives they possibly can. They are heroes in our society.

Students today are in more debt than ever. I make it clear to the Prime Minister that he will not get any support from the Labour Benches on raising tuition fees. The Government are penalising students, announcing the abolition of maintenance grants last year and now announcing that fees will be raised even further. This is a tax on learning—as the Chancellor of the Exchequer called it in 2003—from a Government that cut taxes on capital gains. What message does that send about the economy they want to create? It is that wealth generates more wealth with minimal tax—that and effort and hard work land you in a lifetime of debt, with no support while you make that effort. What an insult to the aspirations of young people wanting an education. We are deeply concerned too about the implications of a free market, free-for-all in higher education.

The Government have committed to more apprenticeships. We welcome that if it means more high quality apprenticeships and if it inspires young women to become engineers and young men to become carers. Apprenticeships give opportunities to every young person in our society. But they should not be seen by any employer as a means of circumventing paying a decent wage, while offering little training. We all hear too many cases of that.

We will scrutinise carefully proposals to give prison governors more freedom. It seems the policies of this Government have been to give greater freedoms to prisoners. That is the consequence of overcrowding prisons and cutting one third of dedicated prison officer positions. We welcome proposals to give greater time for education and reform and to reduce reoffending rates. When I was a member of the Justice Committee, I visited young offender institutions in Denmark and Norway. Their approach works. [Interruption.] The prison crisis is one that does not require laughter to solve its problems. The approach adopted in those two Scandinavian countries requires more funding and more staff, but it has a very good effect on reoffending rates.

There is, equally, an urgent need to invest in the care of prisoners suffering from mental health conditions. The alarming rise in the number of prison suicides in recent years means that two prisoners every week are taking their own lives, which is a truly horrifying statistic but only part of the disarray in our prisons. Last year, emergency services were called out 26,600 times, or every 20 minutes on average, to incidents in UK prisons. The tide of violent attacks in prisons is rising and has to be addressed. That is the House’s responsibility.

Many more of our public services are under threat. The Land Registry is threatened with privatisation—a move considered and then rejected in the last two Parliaments. Those Governments listened to the concerns of public and expert opinion. I hope and trust that this Government will consult and come to the same conclusion and that, rather than selling off the family silver, they will retain the Land Registry in public ownership and administration.
We are very clear that the BBC is a valued national institution, but its success is anathema to this ideological Government. Labour will continue to stand up for the licence fee payer and will fight any further Government attacks on the BBC and its independence. Whether it is the NHS, good and outstanding schools, the east coast main line in public operation or the BBC, the Government just cannot stand the threat of a good example of popular, successful public services. We will stand up for them against the Government.

The Opposition have long highlighted the injustice of the unequal funding allocations to local authorities. I hope that a local government finance Bill will provide an opportunity to address the disgraceful situation in which the poorest areas, mainly in the inner cities of this country, suffer by far the greatest cuts to expenditure. The cuts imposed on local authorities have had a devastating impact on services for both young and old. Just this week, despite the protestations of some local residents, Oxfordshire Council, the Prime Minister’s favourite county council, announced that it was closing half of its children’s centres. In the past five years, £4.5 billion has been cut from the adult social care budget, which has taken away dignity from elderly and disabled people. Again, the effects of those massive cuts in the adult social care budget fall disproportionately on women in our society.

We will scrutinise very carefully the devolution of business rates, which, if not handled correctly, has the potential to exacerbate inequalities between areas of this country. We have a deeply unbalanced economy, and we will oppose plans that widen regional inequalities, rather than narrow them.

On a positive note, we wholeheartedly welcome moves to devolve powers to re-regulate bus services, and we will look to expand those provisions more widely. Whole areas of the country, particularly in rural Britain, have no bus services at all, and they should be provided with them, particularly where people do not have access to their own cars.

We are very sceptical about competition in the water industry, which actually goes against the trend in much of the rest of Europe, which is of re-municipalising water and giving it back to communities—a Government committed to devolution might consider that, but this Government want competition. Perhaps we can have competition in reservoirs, pumping stations and mains pipes. We could even have three standpipes on every corner. Imagine the vision of Tory Britain: one for Evian, one for Perrier and one for Malvern water.

Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Jeremy Corbyn

No, I will not give way. We have no objection—

Several hon. Members rose—

Mr Speaker

Order. I am well aware that there are Members who want to intervene, and it is perfectly reasonable of them to want to intervene. Equally, there is no obligation on the Leader of the Opposition to give way. [Interruption.] Order. Somebody mutters from a sedentary position, “Too long.” The hon. Gentleman is entitled to his opinion; I am telling the House what the factual position is, however uncomfortable, which is that the right hon. Gentleman is in order. What is not in order is for Members to shout and barrack, in total violation of what has been set out at the start of our proceedings. I urge Members who may be irritated to behave with dignity.

Jeremy Corbyn

Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

Jeremy Corbyn

No, I am not going to give way.

We have no objection to reviewing the franchise with regard to overseas citizens, but I hope the Government will take this point seriously and will be minded not only to look at those who have lived abroad for several decades, but to look at 16 and 17-year-olds in this country—old enough to marry, old enough to work, old enough to join the Army and rightly allowed to vote in the Scottish referendum, but not able to vote in our elections. There is something perverse in a Government enfranchising thousands of people who have not lived in Britain for years when they are disfranchising hundreds of thousands of British residents through their individual voter registration plan. That is why, as part of the EU referendum campaign, many of us are spending a lot of time encouraging young people to ensure that they are registered to vote. It is their future that is at stake.

Everyone in this House understands the risks posed by terrorism. This city, London, has experienced it before, as have other cities here and around the world. We will of course support strong measures to give the police and security services the resources they need, but we will also support checks and balances to ensure that powers are used appropriately. We would welcome any proposals from the Government to reform the Prevent strategy and instead to emphasise the value of community-led work to prevent young people from being drawn into extremism in any form.

In foreign policy, we must put our promotion of human rights at the centre. We cannot continue to turn a blind eye and, worse, sell arms to those countries that abuse human rights either within or beyond their borders. I welcome the forthcoming visit of President Santos of Colombia and I look forward to meeting him to discuss human rights in what is hopefully on its way to becoming a post-conflict society.

The Government’s legislative programme spoke of “humanitarian challenges”. We are grateful to Lord Dubs for taking on the challenge of making the Government more humanitarian. Just a few weeks previously, this Prime Minister was referring to refugees fleeing persecution as “a bunch of migrants” and “a swarm”. I have to say this: those words were wrong. I hope the Prime Minister will think again about them and recognise, as everyone should, that refugees are simply human beings, just like any of us in this Chamber, who are trying to survive in a very dangerous and very cruel world. We need to solve their problems with humanity, not with that kind of language.

All parts of the House will have been heartened by the increased turnout in the elections for police and crime commissioners—particularly welcome in Cheshire, Gwent, Humberside and Leicestershire—and we welcome any moves that will give them the powers to improve accountability for their communities. Our police forces mostly do an excellent job, but the recent Hillsborough inquest and the results of it showed that they must never be above scrutiny, to ensure that they do their jobs properly.

We Opposition Members know that decent public services are necessary for a good society, but also that they depend on tax revenues. We welcome any measures designed properly to tackle tax avoidance and evasion, but this Government’s record on this subject is one of continuous failure. Just a month ago, the Prime Minister welcomed here EU proposals on country-by-country tax transparency, but on 26 April Conservative MEPs yet again voted against these same proposals. Did they not get the memo from the Prime Minister? That same Prime Minister continues to allow UK tax havens not to issue public registers of beneficial ownership and he opposes wholesale the introduction of beneficial ownership registers for offshore trusts. People expect companies that trade in this country and people who live in this country to pay their tax in this country—it funds our public services. Aggressive tax avoidance and tax evasion are an attack on our NHS, on our schools, on care for elderly and disabled people and on our social security system that prevents poverty, homelessness and destitution.

Mr Speaker, if you want to deliver a more equal society, an economy that works for everyone and a society in which there is opportunity for all, it takes an active Government, not the driverless car heading in the wrong direction that we have with the present Government.

May 19, 2016
Phillip Lee – 2016 Speech on the Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Phillip Lee, the Conservative MP for Bracknell, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2016.

It is a privilege to second the Loyal Address, and I am honoured to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) this afternoon. This is not the first time I have done so. Among her many achievements, one of her proudest must be that she is captain of the parliamentary ski team, of which I am a junior member. In that role she has responsibility for leading a team of large egos and hidden talent, some with little sense of balance or direction, navigating up peaks and down slippery slopes. I cannot imagine where she gained the experience, but such skills make her an extremely valuable member of this Chamber and of her party.

I was surprised to have been given the privilege of seconding the Loyal Address this afternoon. I am not, for example, the son of a bus driver, although my father did once drive a milk float in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker). Just as an aside, why is it always the case that we have to wait so long for these sons of bus drivers, and then two come along at once?

It might be my education. I am, like the Leader of the Opposition, an ex-grammar school boy and like him, I gather, I rather screwed up my A-levels, so perhaps there is hope for me yet. Or it might be my extensive experience of PR before entering politics. As the House knows, I am a practising doctor. Unfortunately, in a medical context, PR does not stand for public relations, but is shorthand for the type of examination that involves putting on rubber gloves, applying gel and asking a man to cough. May I give my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister a little advice? If, in the future, he finds himself speaking at a medical profession dinner, under no circumstances should he tell the audience that in his life before politics he was into PR, and that he found the work very stimulating.

Many of my predecessors in this role have had a reputation for humour, so I think that it was courageous of the PM to ask a doctor to second the Loyal Address. As the House can already tell, medical humour is a famously acquired taste, and it would be all too easy to share some of the stories of which every doctor has an infinite supply—many may not be appropriate for this place and its refined audience. However, I can perhaps report on the lady who complained of, as she put it, a history of “erotic” bowels. I resisted the temptation to ask whether her erotic symptoms were erratic in nature. Or the elderly man who said that his secret for looking so healthy was to do Kama Sutra exercises every morning, only to be corrected by his wife: “Gareth, I think you mean Tai Chi!” If colleagues do not think that I deliver this speech very well today, just be grateful that we are not holding this debate at a weekend, when I understand from some that doctors do not perform as well.

I had hoped that my medical background would be an advantage in politics, but I have been disappointed. My first disappointment came when I stood for election as the Conservative party’s candidate in Blaenau Gwent. I am not sure that the current hon. Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) is with us today, but I am sure he would agree that sporting a blue rosette outside the Tredegar Kwik Save takes a certain type of character: mostly delusional, and perhaps even masochistic. In fact, the president of my constituency association, Mr Rob Stanton, was elected to Wokingham Borough Council with more votes than I received at that election. However, I was able to comfort myself with the fact that my modest 816 votes nevertheless represented the biggest swing to the Conservative party of any candidate in Wales that night. In retrospect, I should have taken more note of the lady in Abertillery market who, when I asked her why she supported Labour, replied, “Don’t you get complicated with me!”

Delivering this speech is, of course, really an honour for the constituency of Bracknell, which I am privileged to represent. It is a particular honour in this year of Her Majesty’s 90th birthday. The constituency has long-standing royal links. It is proud to host the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which celebrated its bicentenary in 2012 and has trained successive generations of British, Commonwealth and international officers serving in Her Majesty’s Army and elsewhere around the world. My constituents also enjoy access to the extensive woodland of Swinley forest, which is wonderfully maintained by the Crown Estate. With its vibrant economy and town centre regeneration, the Bracknell constituency has a very bright future.

This is the 63rd Gracious Speech that Her Majesty has given since her accession to the throne. On this occasion, it is apt to look back to Her Majesty’s first Gracious Speech and at the changes that there have been since. The preservation of peace was the first emphasis in 1952. Our country was still recovering from war. The grandfather of my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) was Prime Minister. The nationalisation of iron and steel was the subject of heated debate. Slums had to be cleared and people housed. This led to the creation of new towns, of which Bracknell was one. Communicable diseases such as tuberculosis challenged our young health service. Abroad, closer unions were foreseen to cement the ties on which peace depended: with the United States of America, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, with the Commonwealth and with a recovering Europe.

The vision of the post-war political generation was a big vision: of a country that would never again suffer the insecurity and hardship experienced by those who had to pick up arms and fight for our existence; of every person being able to get a chance in life—of health, education and employment; and of a society that is fair, just and free, in which freedoms are earned because we value our country, our environment, our world, and in which rights are balanced by responsibilities, for each other and for ourselves; and, most importantly, to prepare for the future. Variations of this vision have guided successive Governments ever since, with varying degrees of success.

The generation Her Majesty addressed in 1952 had fought for that vision, displaying a deep consciousness throughout our nation that individual lives are fleeting: that we must take care of the world we inherit—conserve it—so that we pass something better to our children; that we achieve more by coming together with our neighbours, with our friends and with our former enemies by respecting our riches, and each other; and that humanity is the vital bond without which our society, globally and nationally, our communities and our families will disintegrate.

On a personal level, I am humbled by the experiences of that wartime generation. My grandfather was under fire at the age of 20, in the tail end of a Halifax bomber. I also recall caring for an 89-year-old Polish patient who was short of breath and experiencing angina. He had taken the time to put on a tie and a suit adorned with military ribbons, and he apologised for taking up my time. I asked him about his military experience. He told me that his village in eastern Poland had been overrun by the Soviets in 1939. He was deported to a Siberian work camp and, in his own words, wore the same socks for two years. He was handed over the British in 1942 in Baghdad, and fought with Montgomery’s 8th Army across north Africa and up the spine of Italy via Monte Cassino. When reflecting on his heroic story, I humbly ask whether my generation would display the same values, the same stoicism, the same modesty, the same courage, and the same respect for others, and I recall his loyalty to his adopted country.

The closest I have come to fighting has been as a doctor battling ageing, obesity and the challenges of cultural dislocation. In the course of Her Majesty’s reign, life expectancy has increased by a decade. The percentage of people aged over 85 has grown by a factor of five. The world’s population has virtually trebled, and our own has gone up by a third. The proportion of our population of foreign birth has more than trebled, albeit from a low base. It is clear that we must not only treat the symptoms of the challenges that come with such marked change, but strive to cure their causes. That is why this Government’s commitment to helping to improve the life chances of those who have the misfortune to be born or raised in circumstances over which they have no control is admirable and right.

The generation Her Majesty addresses today must rediscover the values of the past to face an ever-accelerating pace of change. It is a world that is more connected and more conscious of its differences, but also more conscious of what we have in common than ever before. This time, we have the opportunity to rediscover those values peacefully, and the important legislation outlined in this Gracious Speech will help us to do so. The challenge of overcoming extremism without compromising our humanity is one that deserves the support of the whole House. My right hon. and good Friend the Home Secretary knows that dealing with our society’s failure to integrate some communities will be integral.

The space industry received the attention it deserves as one of Britain’s most successful industries with a power to inspire that is unmatched. I am sure that all members of the previous Parliament recall that I mentioned the UK space industry in my maiden speech in 2010. As British astronaut Tim Peake was a graduate of Sandhurst, I am shamelessly going to claim him as having been educated in my constituency. As such, I am concerned for his welfare. Tim is due back from the international space station just before the EU referendum vote, but if he is slightly delayed, and the country votes to leave in June, he need not worry about getting home, since the European Space Agency sits outside the European Union. Seriously, though, the Government’s support of the space industry will help to secure Britain as a globally recognised centre for high technology, whether we are inside or outside the European Union.

Finally, some hon. Members will know that I have kept my own counsel on June’s big European event, but the time is fast approaching when I feel I should make my position clear, if only to deal with the alarming possibility that as time moves on, I and other hon. Members who have taken a similar approach will have to deal with the advances of two charming men, one with blond hair and one with spectacles, approaching us in the Members’ Lobby to ask when we are coming out. I can see no good reason why we should exit—at least not before the semi-finals, and preferably not after the pain of extra time and a penalty shoot-out.

Keeping up with change is a tough enough job for any Government. Conservative Governments do not just want to keep up; they want to do better. That is why I am not only privileged to represent the good people of the Bracknell constituency, but proud to second this motion on the Gracious Speech.

May 19, 2016
Caroline Spelman – 2016 Speech on the Loyal Address

Below is the text of the speech made by Caroline Spelman, the Conservative MP for Meriden, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2016.

I beg to move,

That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, as follows:

Most Gracious Sovereign,

We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in Parliament assembled, beg leave to offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty for the Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament.

It is an honour to be asked to propose the Loyal Address, especially in Her Majesty’s 90th year. When I was asked to see the Chief Whip, my first thought was: what have I done? The relief in discovering that it was for a good reason was followed almost immediately by the angst of how to do it well. I looked carefully at how my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Sir Simon Burns) tackled it last year. Unfortunately, he cannot be with us today as he has to attend a funeral. We all now know of his unswerving admiration for Hillary Clinton. We have shared with him the anxieties of the primaries, so I put all colleagues on alert that if they are standing next to him when the news of the presidential election comes through, be prepared to provide moral support whichever way it goes, but especially should Hillary be trumped.

First, may I say to my constituents in Meriden how grateful I am to them for electing me to Parliament? I am always proud to represent them. A lot has changed since my first day here 19 years ago. I was often the only woman in meetings. I was one of very few women around the Cabinet table with school-age children. This could prove awkward, such as at the shadow Cabinet meeting interrupted by the news that one of my sons had fallen off a drainpipe at school.

In 1997, only 18% of MPs were women. This has now risen to a total of almost 30%—not yet parity, but we are heading in the right direction. It has also been a great privilege to help mentor newcomers, and in return I have been especially grateful to Baroness Shephard for her mentoring down the years.

The Chamber now looks more like the electorate at large. [Interruption.] On all sides! Better decisions are made when those who make them are more diverse. For example, when assessing the priorities for public transport, men rate reliability and cost as the most important factors, but women put something else first—their personal safety. Put the two perspectives together and a better outcome is achieved.

I hope that by now the nearly new Members are beginning to make friends in all parties and discover that they can have allies across the Floor. In fact, the work of Parliament is often enhanced by the friendships that transcend party lines. When I was party chairman, the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) asked me to organise a debate with him on the subject of dying well, as we each had a parent with a poor experience of that in hospital. The Whips did not bat an eyelid at that. The only objection was to the title: dying was considered far too controversial, and we had to call it end-of-life care.

I also worked with the right hon. Gentleman on the Modern Slavery Bill, as we both served on the Joint Committee of both Houses. If ever there was an outstanding example of a cross-party approach to tackling a terrible injustice, this is it. The Home Secretary deserves the credit for securing a piece of landmark legislation, which is a world first in this area. The legal expertise of Baroness Butler-Sloss forced us all to think very hard how to get this absolutely right, and I felt that it was my red letter day when the noble Lady uttered these magic words to me: “I think the right hon. Lady has a point.”

I have been in a cross-party prayer fellowship all the time I have been here. It consists of two Conservative MPs, two Labour MPs, one Liberal MP and one Democratic Unionist MP. We could not have done that better by using proportional representation if we had tried. We and our families met up in each other’s constituencies, and my children were initially perplexed by the fraternisation until I explained that it was like when your friend supports Aston Villa and you support Coventry: you think he is misguided, but you are still friends.

We will shortly face a big decision about our membership of the EU. Whichever way the vote goes, we will need to ensure good relations with our neighbours. I commend to the House the recent concert by the Parliament Choir in Paris to show our solidarity with the people of France after the terrorist attacks last year. There are often opportunities for soft diplomacy, and we should take them. My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) and I may not see eye to eye on Europe, but his rich baritone and my alto voice have produced delightful harmony.

I welcome the clear references in the Gracious Speech to the life chances agenda, and I am pleased that this is to be a key theme in the year ahead. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith) pioneered this approach, and the new Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has the life experience and the ability to drive it forward. My constituency has a council estate of nearly 40,000 people, and I have seen how the life chances of my constituents have improved through the regeneration of housing and schools by Solihull Council. When I took a Minister on a visit there recently, two tenants emerged from one of our 37 refurbished tower blocks to express their delight that their energy bills had halved as a result of the new energy-saving features. The Minister turned to me and asked, “How much did you pay them to say that, Caroline?”

Buildings can be regenerated but it is the life chances of the human beings within them that really make the difference, so I am delighted that so many of our young people are getting apprenticeships as engineers, including many young women, in the great tradition of those women who built the Spitfires in the last world war. All of this is made possible by the renaissance of manufacturing and the economic recovery that we have seen.

Parts of my constituency are rural, and despite being at the very centre of England, we have mobile and broadband not spots, so I am glad to hear that a renewed effort is being made to address the digital divide. With my Church Estates Commissioner’s hat on, may I remind the Government of the offer of church spires and towers to help to crack this problem? They may bring us closer to God, but a proper signal can feel like heaven on earth to those who have had none.

Prison reform is well overdue. We know that reoffending can be dramatically cut with the right kind of help. The Justice Secretary and the Education Secretary know how important it is to improve the life chances of school children, as far too many prison inmates are unable to read and write. I am glad that the Justice Secretary is now using his reforming zeal to give prisoners a better chance to turn their lives around. I have witnessed at first hand how this can be achieved. I helped to set up a charity called Welcome to tackle drug and alcohol abuse and to get people free of addiction and into work. We started with just one employee in a community hall; now we employ more than 20 and we do the triage for the NHS in our borough of 200,000 people. Some of the best advocates are our volunteers who have achieved this themselves and are role models for others.

No party has a monopoly on compassion, and Members on both sides of the House have sought to help the vulnerable. On entering politics, it was my personal resolution to speak for those who were unable to speak for themselves. Few people in our country are more vulnerable than a child leaving care. The state has not often proved to be a great parent, and knowing how hard it is to be a parent, we should not be surprised. But I take my hat off in particular to the parents who adopt. We need more parents to come forward to foster and adopt, so I welcome the Government’s intention to speed up adoption—indeed, this was the objective of my private Member’s Bill on the subject—but children can still be left too long in care and the damage can be irreparable. so let us improve the follow-up care and keep it going until a young adult is fully fledged. Eighteen may be the notional age of adulthood, but, in my experience, it takes a good few more years of parental support before young adults’ wings can take life’s turbulence.

New measures are clearly needed to prevent sections of society feeling alienated, but I appeal to the Government not to take a hammer to crack a nut. Good role models and moderate voices are what are needed, and I have high expectations of the new Mayor of London, who is not only an excellent cricketer, as the Lords and Commons cricket team will testify, but uniquely well placed to help. Good luck, Sadiq—no pressure!

Let me return to my opening theme of making friends across the House. Over the years, there have been a good few Members whom I have sought to encourage after they had suffered setbacks in their parliamentary careers. My key piece of advice has been, “Don’t give up! Get stuck back in and fight for the causes you know and care about, and this House will ultimately respect you for it.” May I therefore say a heartfelt thank you for the way the House has helped me rediscover the fulfilment of being an elected Member of this mother of all Parliaments. As long as you have the chance to make a difference, there is no such thing as having had your day. We are elected to change things for the better and to take up the issues that confront us, so seize the day! I commend the motion to the House.

May 19, 2016
Matt Hancock – 2016 Speech on Data Science Ethical Framework

Matt Hancock

Below is the text of the speech made by Matt Hancock, the Cabinet Office Minister, in London on 19 May 2016.

When Alan Turing proposed the Turing Machine and his theory of machine intelligence, he would not have imagined that his early ideas of computing and algorithms would be enhanced and evolved using the quintillions of bytes of data we generate today.

This explosion of data has a profound and positive – socially, in work, in public services and in life.

Turing’s work on enigma during the war, working with Bill Tutte who remained less recognised, is a piece of history we are all familiar with. But some of Turing’s most influential research came later, in artificial intelligence.

When Turing devised the Turing Test, to determine whether a computer was human or not, the idea of machines thinking and working for themselves was in something which may have seemed like science fiction.

But we have come to expect Siri to tell us about delays on the Jubilee line, for Google to translate a webpage automatically, or to use an automated till at the checkout.

Now there are those that worry that technological change will make us worse off, that automation raises the prospect of mass unemployment. Machines will take over all our jobs, and there will be nothing left for humans to do.

We’ve heard this before – from the Luddites to Keynes to Harold Wilson, history is littered with those predicting the end of work. And history has proved them wrong every time.

Digital transformation

Technological progress does not remove the need for human endeavour. There is no fixed amount of work to be done.

Technology improves productivity and reduces costs, allowing people to spend more on other things, in turn creating new jobs.

The trick is not to hold back the machines, but to harness their power.

We should celebrate the fact that technology can replace, and in some cases improve, administrative tasks, freeing us humans up to focus on what we’re best at, using our creative skills to iterate and improve services.

But transformation is disruptive, and it’s understandable people worry.

As a government we must support them, making sure we provide all the support people need.

And this support is well worth it. Because the increasing use of data, digital services and automation provides citizens with a huge opportunity if we manage it properly.

For government it gives the chance to improve the services we provide by making them more efficient, accurate and suited to citizens’ needs. Data helps us better serve citizens.

Across government we are working hard to ensure data and data-science techniques are put to good use; improving data quality and security through canonical registers, integrating data into digital services; and using cutting edge data science techniques to improve government policy and services.

For example, using the thousands of feedback comments we receive on our digital services to predict prominent problems or peaks in demand.

Data science advancement

Using social media posts about sickness in the local area to predict where norovirus might next strike ahead of medical lab reports. Or harnessing blockchain technology to follow the use of money given on behalf of taxpayers in grants.

Our Digital Economy Bill, set out by Her Majesty yesterday, will help us unlock more advances.

But the technology is only part of the overall solution. Digital transformation has no meaning or real world effect unless it is the driver for business transformation, of changes in culture.

To get that right, advances in data science must be made in a strong framework that is protective of privacy and reassuring to the public.

The Bill will allow more modern use of data, to improve services or tackle fraud. And it will do this within a strong framework of data protection and protection of personal information.

It is vital we seize the opportunities that data science presents. The biggest risk would be to do nothing and to miss out on the enormous potential to improve the lives of our citizens.

Data privacy

Privacy or cyber security are nothing without reliable verification of identity. So I’m delighted to announce that GOV.UK Verify has passed its service assessment and will go live next week.

Verify allows secure and straightforward identity checking without the need for an identity database – and underpins the digital transformation of government and I want to thank the Verify team for their innovative, determined and dedicated work.

Now with these safeguards we want to unlock the progressive power of data science to improve lives.

And we want people in government to feel confident using new techniques. This means setting out clear guidance that brings together the relevant laws and best practice, gives data scientists and their teams robust principles to work with. It is all about encouraging new and innovative ways to better solve problems and deliver.

So today we are launching our new Data Science Ethical Framework, setting out in one place our framework for using data. It will help people using data to ask the right questions and take appropriate steps.

Today’s publication is a first version developed across government,civil society, industry and academic partners.

We aren’t saying that it is a finished article. Today we ask for your help to iterate the framework to keep abreast of the changing landscape and developments and ensure it is a document that continues to work.

Technology is constantly changing, new techniques constantly invented. These offer huge opportunities to improve lives, to create jobs, to connect better the citizens and the state. We must be at the forefront of this change, secure yet ambitious, else we will count the cost.

The opportunities are greater than Alan Turing could have imagined, all those years ago. Let us seize them, to improve the lives of the citizens we serve.

Thank you.

May 19, 2016
Claire Perry – 2016 Speech on Sustainable Railways

Below is the text of the speech made by Claire Perry, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport, in London on 18 May 2016.

Introduction

Good morning.

This morning I want to address a subject that perhaps isn’t currently receiving the attention it deserves.

And that is the subject of sustainability.

In recent years, we’ve talked a lot about investment, capacity and connectivity.

And rightly so – there’s a huge amount happening in rail under each of those themes.

But I believe our job to revitalise Britain’s railways isn’t finished until have a railway that is not just high-capacity and well-connected, but a railway that is also sustainable.

So I want to set out what I take sustainability to mean in the context of rail, and why it is important.

What is sustainability?

First, then – what is a sustainable railway?

To my mind, the answer is clear.

It’s a railway that is fit for the future.

One that helps solve the environmental challenges we face, rather than contributing to them

It’s a railway that is properly connected to the communities it serve

And it’s a railway that has invested in the workforce it needs for the decades ahead.

A railway meeting environmental challenges

So, first, let me talk about how our railway can best meet the environmental challenges we face.

When I speak to my rail counterparts, from everywhere from Canada to Egypt to Taiwan, they talk about environmental sustainability as the driving reason for their investment in rail.

They see railways as a way of tackling congestion and improving our air quality.

But in this country, talking in those terms is less common.

That’s a real missed opportunity, because there’s so much for us to be proud about.

We are one of the greenest transport modes, and we are getting greener.

Right now we are on target to reduce per-passenger kilometre carbon emissions by 37% between 2014 and 2019.

We need to talk about these successes more.

But our words must be matched with continuing activity.

Trains

Let’s carry on making our new trains ever-lighter and more efficient.

The new class 700 trains for Thameslink, for example, will be 20% lighter than the existing fleet and will use a third less energy.

And I don’t agree with those who say that because some stretches of our rail network are not currently being electrified, we will never have a rail network without diesel trains.

I can see a future in which all-electric trains can run on non-electrified track by switching to battery power.

Last year my department sponsored the trial of a battery powered Class 379 train in Essex.

We demonstrated that battery technology is able to power a train reliably.

Yes, we need the range to improve.

But longer-lasting batteries are the holy grail of industry the world over, so the technology will mature sooner than we expect.

And I am working with colleagues in DECC to see how government investment in battery storage solutions for renewable energy can be applied to improving battery train ranges.

Sustainable stations

Our stations, too, can make their contribution to sustainability.

Take Blackfriars.

It’s a stunning symbol of a modern railway.

But too-few people know that it is also a sustainable structure.

Blackfriars’s roof’s 23 tennis-courts-worth of solar panels provide up to 50% of the station’s energy; enough to heat 80,000 cups of tea a day.

Very few buildings have expanses of roof like our stations do, and they are often perfect for installing solar panels.

Imagine if all our stations used their roofs in this way.

Freight

I believe there’s a real opportunity for rail freight to contribute to sustainability, too.

One of the greatest challenges of our age is the emission of particulate matter from vehicles.

This is not just a problem for future generations or far-away places.

Particulates are here now, on our streets, already shortening lives.

And one of the key contributors is road freight and the need to bring goods from out-of-town distribution centres into city centres.

Yet our rail lines already reach into stations located in the heart of the city.

Imagine if we could run electric freight trains into stations outside peak hours.

Or run passenger trains that can be partly converted to carry freight.

Goods could be offloaded onto electric vehicles, for distribution across the city.

Lets set ourselves the challenge of investing in new freight technology and joined up logistics.

Launch of RSSB Sustainability Principles

These are just a few ideas for creating a railway that meets our environmental challenges, rather than contributing to them.

If we are to achieve our sustainability goals, we need to design them into policies, procurement and operations right from the start.

So today I am delighted to launch the Rail Safety and Standards Board’s Sustainable Development Principles 2016.

The previous edition set the standard for the industry.

We recently started including the principles in franchise competitions, where they have prompted bidders to increase energy efficiency of stations and trains and to reduce waste.

But we want to take these refreshed principles further.

From now on, they will form an important part of all future rail franchises.

And in doing so they should have an effect throughout the whole industry.

Railway connected to communities

Now, the major change to the principles, is that they include an aspiration for rail to have a positive social impact, focussing on engaging with local communities in making plans, and in deciding how local assets are to be used.

And that brings me to my second point.

A sustainable railway is one that is connected to the community it serves.

After all, a railway is not a closed system.

It’s rooted in neighbourhoods, and part of the fabric of local life.

Everyone has a stake in the success of our railways.

And the railway has a stake in so many local communities.

It’s a reciprocal relationship that I want the industry to take seriously.

Station assets used by the community

In many places, it’s already happening.

A once-disused waiting room at Great Malvern Station is now a shop selling craft made by people with learning disabilities.

And I have been really pleased by the way that, under the terms of the Northern franchise, we have agreed that disused railway assets should become community centres.

There are underused railway buildings like this in towns, cities and villages all over the country, and it would be great for more of them to put to use for local benefit.

Community railways

I’m also a big fan of community railways.

Across the county, thousands of volunteers are together giving 250,000 hours a year in support of their local railway lines.

In March we launched a competition for ideas to make it easier for tourists to use heritage and community railways.

These railways reach into parts of the country that tourists often miss.

So last week we held a Dragons’-Den-style pitching event.

We got some great ideas and will be announcing the winners soon.

By putting our railways in the service of local life in these ways, we are gaining support for the railway even from the people who don’t currently use it.

And a widely-supported railway is a sustainable railway.

Sustainability of rail workforce

But my final theme today is about the rail workforce.

I make no apologies for returning to a theme that I know will be familiar to many.

A sustainable railway needs a sustainable workforce.

But, today, parts of the rail industry are set to lose half their staff to retirement within 15 years.

That’s unsustainable, but so too is the idea that we can run a railway with a workforce that looks nothing like the public it serves.

In particular, we need more women working in rail.

Women make up 51% of the population.

47% of the national workforce.

But only 16% of the rail workforce, and a shockingly low 5% of train drivers.

Crossrail has shown what women can do if they are brought into the industry.

Of those who have undertaken work experience on Crossrail, over a fifth are women.

Of those taking part in Crossrail’s graduate programme, many of whom will go on to be the future leaders of the industry, women make up almost a quarter.

And in total, of the 10,000 people working on Crossrail, nearly one third are women.

The result is clear.

Crossrail is on time.

On budget.

We are the proven world-leaders in urban and soft-ground tunnelling.

And there it seems there’s barely a dignitary or minister in Europe who hasn’t donned an orange jacket to marvel at Crossrail’s incredible underground structures.

That’s what a sustainable workforce can achieve.

And it’s a model for the rest of the industry to follow.

Conclusion

And so I hope that will spark some debate.

We need to build a railway that is sustainable.

A railway that works for the people it serves.

And a railway that looks like the people it serves.

Thank you.

May 19, 2016
Alun Cairns – 2016 Speech on Wales in a Reformed EU

Below is the text of the speech made by Alun Cairns, the Secretary of State for Wales, at Liberty Stadium in Swansea on 19 May 2016.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for inviting me today to deliver my first major speech as Secretary of State for Wales.

And I am especially pleased to be able to do so here in Swansea – my home city, so close to the village of Clydach where I grew up.

And it is particularly special to speak at the home to the Swans and the Ospreys.

We are also of course in Landore, close to the heart of Swansea’s industrial heritage where the first copper works opened in 1717 and where, by the 1870s, one of the World’s largest steelworks was operating.

From its beginnings as a Viking settlement right through to its pivotal role in the industrial revolution, Swansea has been an ambitious and confident city, forging links with the wider world.

And this is what I want to talk about this morning– my vision of a Welsh nation which is ambitious, confident and outward looking, which capitalises on opportunities for economic revival.

As Secretary of State, I am passionate about seeing good things happen in Swansea.

Where the UK Government is driving exciting regional initiatives such as the Swansea City Deal and its innovative ideas for internets of energy, well-being and technology….

To the electrification of the mainline from Swansea to London as part of the largest investment in our railways since the Victorian era; or

Through to International business success stories such as Swansea-based Lumishore… recent winners of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise- developers of LED lighting for boats who export 40% of their product to Europe.

Swansea today is an outwardly ambitious city forging ever closer links to Europe and the world.

For this to continue I believe we need to be a strong part of the UK, engaging with Europe and the wider world.

And I want to explain why, with practical examples, that is so important. And why accessing the single European market and staying in the EU is so fundamental to that ambitious, outward looking nation.

Wales’s Own Challenges

Of course in Wales we face our own immediate challenges.

Most urgently, we face a crisis in our steel industry. You will be aware that much is being done and offered by the UK Government to attract a buyer and to support an industry that is part of our heart beat.

I should underline at the outset that I am limited in what I can say about steel because we are following a process…. A sales process in which I must – and am legally obliged to – respect the confidentiality of each party.

But let me say, at each and every stage – and even before matters came public, the UK government has been actively working with Tata to see through a sales process. At various stages we have had to stay quiet to respect confidences, in spite of the calls for public statements in the 24 hour news cycle.

The reality is we are working in a context where there is a global over supply of steel.

I strongly believe that our steel industry is better off as part of a single market – as a bloc we can act against steel dumping far more effectively than we could on our own – and where we can get the best deal for our steel industry in what is their biggest market. Although there are no guarantees, be in no doubt, our membership of the EU makes our chances of gaining that buyer and of defending our industry so much stronger.

Let me explain why:

First, access to the EU market is fundamental to any steel manufacturer – with 69% of all steel exports from Wales going to Europe last year.

Secondly, the joint action taken across Europe to defend our industry from steel dumping has led to steel imports from outside the EU fall massively.

We have pressed the European Commission for firmer, faster action against unfair dumping and we’re pleased that the EU has listened and acted on this. There are now 37 trade defence measures in place across Europe, with nine investigations ongoing.

As a result, Rebar and Wire Rod imports have fallen by 99% respectively, with similar number in other areas.

Third, membership of the EU is fundamental to simply attracting investors because of the benefits the single market of 28 countries brings.

And Fourth – imagine the action other member states could take if we were outside the EU.

We could be subject to the same tariffs that are now having a positive impact against cheap dumping; and Tata’s competitors in Europe would naturally frame the EU market response to suit their operations, rather than one that includes us.

And anyone who knows something about steel – Tata, the unions, investors or (dare I say) the government – all recognise the opportunities of the single market – negotiating around the table, rather than being spectators awaiting the impact of their decisions on our industry and our jobs.

So the prospects of saving the jobs at Port Talbot and across other Tata operations in Shotton, Llanwern and Trostre and across the UK are much stronger because of our membership of the EU.

Welsh Exports and the Single Market As well as supporting our Steel Industry, the EU is a major driver for the wider Welsh economy.

The single market gives British businesses access to over 500M customers – eight times the size of the UK market.

Businesses in Wales already recognise the value of these opportunities – the number of exporting businesses here is growing six times faster than the UK as a whole.

The value of Welsh exports for the last year available was £12.2Bn, equivalent to £4,300 per person, with the EU receiving 43% of all our exports and 11% of total Welsh output.

If there was ever any doubt, the EU is Wales’ largest trading partner and is the lifeblood of 100,000 jobs here in Wales.

The EU as an Investment Driver Our membership of the EU is also key to the UK in attracting investment – just look at the success stories of companies like Airbus in Broughton or Toyota on Deeside.

Airbus is home to one of the UK’s largest manufacturing plants.
The Broughton site employs over 6,000 people and in recent years it’s provided around £100 million a year in pay to Welsh workers.

It has spent around £120 million annually through its Welsh supply chain.

And over the last decade, the Airbus site has seen major investments totalling more than £2 billion in facilities and infrastructure improvements.

It’s a key part of the British economy making highly technical wings for all Airbus commercial aircraft, as part of a much larger global operation.

This high value, highly skilled work depends on Britain remaining competitive for business.

Paul Kahn, President of Airbus said: “If after an exit from the European Union, economic conditions in Britain were less favourable for business than in other parts of Europe, or beyond, would Airbus reconsider future investment in the United Kingdom? Yes, absolutely.”

And like aerospace, automotive is an expanding sector of our economy. It is interesting to note that Sunderland now exports more cars than the whole of Italy, and Wales is a crucial part of this supply chain.

18,000 people make car parts in Wales in more than 150 companies of all sizes. The CEO of the Wales Automotive Forum says that we make enough component parts to almost make a complete vehicle.

It is an industry that injects £3.3bn into the Welsh economy.

I was delighted that Aston Martin reinforced our position with an investment in my constituency – a project that was secured through both the UK and Welsh Governments working together.

Toyota, is the world’s top-selling carmaker – for four years running – Their plant on Deeside employs 540 people, creating 950 engines a day that are exported internationally.

Earlier this year, they announced a further £7 million investment in their North Wales plant – a further example of a Wales winning investment.

Investments like these at Toyota are fundamental to our economy. They highlight again and again the importance of the single market to their presence and their operations; saying specifically, “British membership of the EU is the best for our operations and… long term competitiveness.”

Airbus and Toyota are just two examples of what Wales needs to do more of – being ambitious, confident and outward looking in high end manufacturing sectors.

These companies operate in global industries whose success depends competitiveness. They feed on an integrated business model, with the ability to move products, people and ideas around Europe without any restriction.

The supply chains are relevant to us all.

There are a host of companies that thrive on such investments that in turn create wealth and prosperity.

They could be small engineering businesses or electrical operators, such as the ones I visited recently who supply TATA, though to those larger operators who supply Airbus and Toyota.

Take Toyoda Gosei, – not far from here, where the PM visited just two weeks ago. A Japanese owned supplier of car components, has invested over £65 million in their Gorseinon site.

The company’s workforce has grown from just 13 in 2010 to more than 600 on the back of the success in the automotive sector and supply chain. Today they supply Nissan, BMW, Jaguar Land Rover and Toyota.

A clear demonstration of how large operators elsewhere in the UK have a major local impact. And the same could be said for Airbus

But Europe also offers other features that support other types of investments too. Take the European Investment Bank. It’s the world’s largest lending institution, owned by the 28 European Union member states. They raise the bulk of their lending resources on the international capital markets through bond issues – their excellent rating allows them to borrow at lower cost.

In 2015 they provided £5.6 billion to help deliver UK projects, contributing to £16 billion of investment – a record year.

In Wales projects in social housing, transport, energy, water and education have benefited for more than forty years.

Most recently the EIB was a major investor in Ford at Bridgend and Norgine at Hengoed.

But they were also key to one of the most exciting investments on our doorstep- Swansea University’s new Bay campus.

The stunning new £450m campus, which houses the College of Engineering and School of Management. In 2014 the Vice-Chancellor said: “This massive campus development is the largest university-led knowledge economy project in the UK and one of the best in Europe. It would not have been possible without funding support by the EIB (who) demolished the argument that the project was too big for Wales”.

It is one of the largest knowledge economy projects in Europe, providing internationally acclaimed academic-to-industry collaborative research opportunities. The development wouldn’t have been possible without such financial support.

The economic impact from the construction of the Bay campus alone is estimated at over £3 billion.

The EU Supporting Higher Education And Europe’s role in Higher education is much wider.

Cutting-edge investments have been made in Universities right across Wales. These institutions offer some of the best routes for individuals out of poverty and to growing the productivity of our nation.

Europe plays a key part in bringing together the Higher education networks, international academics, the research excellence and even the students who choose to study here.

Thousands of Welsh students have benefited from the Erasmus Exchange. A programme that was established in 1987 by Ceri Hywel Jones, a native of Port Talbot.

These investments go right to the heart of our local communities across Wales.

Bangor – The Institute of European Finance provides specialist consultancy and project reports. It houses Europe’s longest established and most comprehensive research library to banking and financial sector material.

Cardiff Met has received 27 million Euros for schemes involving student and staff mobility to enhance teaching and learning, over 10 million Euros from the European Structural Funds to help with enterprise and commercialisation projects for local businesses, and over 2 million Euros for dedicated research projects.

Trinity Saint David in Carmarthen, Lampeter and Swansea will receive £2.4 million of EU funds to develop the skills of employees through the Institute for Work-Based Learning.

These projects are central to that goal of an ambitious, confident, outward looking Wales.

Welsh Farming

I’ve already highlighted steel, manufacturing and HE so let me touch briefly on a totally different sector.

Seafood and agriculture. Industries that are both important to Swansea and to Wales. The EU receives over 90% of agriculture exports from Wales.

That’s 98% of dairy exports, 97% of lamb, and 92% of beef.

Leaving the EU could see tariffs of up to 70% imposed on our produce and would put the foundation of many local economies at risk.

Furthermore, Welsh beef, Welsh lamb, Pembrokeshire Early Potatoes and Anglesey Sea Salt have protected status under EU laws. No company or region can seek to reproduce those products elsewhere or pass them off as substitutes.

Welsh farmers could lose hundreds of millions of pounds on lamb and beef exports if we weren’t able to access the single market.

I think it is fair to say that we could look to other markets. What about the US?

And we have a special relationship -but that does not necessarily break down trade barriers. Yet in spite of our relationship, we exported zero welsh beef or welsh lamb to the US last year.

Be it steel, automotive, HE or agriculture – leaving the EU would be a leap in the dark that Wales can’t afford to take -against the security of unfettered access to the single market and the role that it plays in attracting investment, along with our dependency on exports.

Conclusion

So, that is the positive case I would make for Wales staying in the EU.

I am not here to advocate the status quo either.

I am sure that there is recognition that Europe has to change to tackle the challenges ahead.

And that is what the Prime Minister achieved with his deal in February.

A recognition from European leaders that it must adapt to the needs of different nations and by delivering that special status for the UK.

….That allows us to steer clear of the aspects of the EU that just don’t work for Britain – things like the Euro, open borders or the prospect of ever-closer union.

Along with an emergency break option on access to our benefits.

But ultimately, we have a strong voice at the heart of Europe so we can influence how it meets the challenges of migration, terrorism and maintaining the free market rather than simply reacting to their actions and their decisions.

If we’re not around the table, we could be on the menu.

This is the case for Wales being stronger, safer and better off in a reformed EU.

The benefits of membership affect all of our lives – from supporting investment in infrastructure and education to manufacturing, agriculture and social programmes.

From the breadth of Europe to the heart of our local economies.

Just as Swansea has been making its mark on Europe and the world for several hundred years, my vision for Wales is of an ambitious and innovative country that looks to the opportunities that Europe and the wider world create.

This is a positive case for remaining part of the EU and its access to the single market.

Let us confidently and proudly ensure our voice and influence is heard.

May 19, 2016