Tag: Chris Chope

Christopher Chope – 2023 Speech on the Protection from Sex-based Harassment in Public Bill

The speech made by Christopher Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, in the House of Commons on 24 March 2023.

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), who I know takes a great interest in this particular subject. I am delighted that she included in her remarks a reference to the fact that this legislation applies equally to men who are victims as it does to women who are victims.

When I looked at the Committee report, one of my concerns was that there was not even a mention of men and boys being victims. I therefore wanted to ensure that emphasis was given to the fact that the Bill applies to men and women equally. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) for emphasising that point and saying that, if needs be, that could be included in the guidance produced for prosecutors.

I want to emphasise the significant extent to which men are being sexually harassed. A report from Diversity Dashboard says:

“Sexual harassment in the workplace is widespread, and women suffer the most…although…a significant percentage of men are also victims of sexual harassment.”

According to the Nursing Times, many people do not report to their employer that they have been harassed and

“only 17% of sexually harassed male nurses actually report it to their employer. Overall, female nurses are more frequent subjects of sexual harassment. However sexual harassment statistics by gender tell us that men aren’t spared either.”

Indeed, 51% of the male respondents to the Nursing Times survey said they had been sexually harassed, which is a very high percentage. Diversity Dashboard goes on to say:

“Research shows that, when a man suffers a sexual assault in the workplace, a woman is a perpetrator in 76% of the cases…Additionally, it’s worrying and insensitive that such behaviour is seen as a joke when it involves male victims.”

That is why although men are overwhelmingly responsible for sexual harassment against women, we need to take into account that men are on the receiving end as well.

The reason this issue is so important at the moment is a growing belief among experts, including those in professions relating to psychiatry and psychology, about the impact of sexual politics, as it is called, on young men. Madam Deputy Speaker, you may have seen the recent article in The Spectator by Gus Carter, in which he says masculinity is now in crisis. He goes on:

“The polling company YouGov found that just 8 per cent of people have positive views of white men in their twenties, by far the lowest of any ethnicity or age group. Males are routinely presented as inherently dangerous, aggressive and animalistic, incapable of controlling their own instincts. You can see it on public transport, where government adverts announce that staring is sexual harassment. Us blokes can’t even be trusted to use our eyes properly.”

This is a very serious aspect of the debate around harassment and, as I prefer to put it, common decency, standards of behaviour and politesse. The sexualisation, in a sense, of harassment is having an adverse effect on young males. Teenage boys are being routinely disciplined by schools in circumstances in which their female counterparts are not. A female former teacher who left the profession last year is quoted in the article:

“Boys are now seen as potential perverts… There was this obsession with the victimisation of women. I thought we had been getting somewhere with sex and relationships, teaching the children to treat people with respect, but that has been totally set back.”

I will not go into all the other points that the article makes, but one that is relevant to this debate is that

“there seems to be an inability to hold two notions in our heads: that sexual assault is bad and that treating men as inherent sex pests is also bad. A reasonable worry about assault appears to have morphed into an institutional misandry. There is a lack of recognition that, as with all crimes, the proportion of perpetrators is vanishingly small. The awful behaviour of a few is leading to the mistreatment of all.”

The consequence of all this in relation to mental health issues for boys and young men, unless we are extremely careful with the language we use, will be that a situation that is already bad gets even worse. Since 2017, the NHS has found that the proportion of boys with probable mental health issues has increased by more than 50% to nearly one in five. The suicide rate for boys aged 15 to 19 has more than doubled over the past decade. The child psychologist Julie Lynn Evans has said that she thinks the pendulum has now swung too far in the other direction:

“The boys came out of lockdown into this slightly hysterical atmosphere of ‘Don’t touch, that’s inappropriate, that’s assault.’ They are being treated as guilty until proven innocent.”

The article, which I think very telling, goes on to ask what we are going to do about this. Are we going to recognise that young men aged 18 to 24 are significantly more likely to be unemployed than women in a similar age group, and that women are outperforming men in university? We have this problem of workless men living with their parents and almost being discouraged or intimidated into not going out on the street—not only not finding jobs, but not finding girlfriends and so on.

A really serious problem is developing for us, which is why I thought it important to table an amendment to put it right. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells for recognising the significance of the issue. Even—I say “even”—the hon. Member for Walthamstow seems to accept it, and I hope that when she makes remarks on the subject in future she will always emphasise that it is about not just one particular group of victims, but people in general, of both sexes.

Other amendments that I have tabled were designed to develop the debate, and I think we are having that debate. Let me deal first with the timescale and the fear that the guidance will be much delayed. I am not sure that the requirement to produce guidance is necessarily a reason that the Bill could not come into law first, with guidance to follow. The offence could still be created without being conditional on the guidance being produced first, so I do not think that an adequate reason for the Government not to accept a specific date of implementation. My right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells generously says, “I try to keep an eye on some of these things.”

One reason why amendment 9 would put a specific date in clause 3 is that I had a similar experience with the Bill brought to this place by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight) on the abuse of parking rules by rogue parking companies. I suggested that the guidance that followed from the Bill should have to be delivered within a specified period; if it was not, the legislation would not take effect. I am afraid to say that as of today—this was, I think, two years ago—the legislation has still not come into effect. My right hon. Friend was sympathetic to my amendment, but the Government persuaded him to encourage me to withdraw it, in order to protect his Bill. I cite that as an example of the problems arising when we leave it to the Government to decide when and if legislation should take effect.

Perhaps my right hon. Friend the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire will, when responding to the debate, deal with the issue around prisoners. One can understand that the Government might be nervous about a consequence of the legislation being that more people may be sent to prison. Certainly, that was one of the objections of a previous Government to the suggestion that we introduce more severe penalties for people convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. The argument was that it would result in extra prison places being taken up. I hope that he will say that the number of people in prison is not relevant to the debate, because surely the law should take its course; punishment should not exclude prison if prison is merited, just because we do not have enough room in prisons. If we do not have enough room in them, we need to remove from them some of the people who are still on indeterminate sentences, which I think are pretty unjust, and/or we need to build more prisons. That is why I think it is important to put a fixed date in the Bill, and I chose, arbitrarily, 1 August 2023. Actually, it is not that arbitrary; I assumed the normal rule would apply, so I gave a date two months after Royal Assent might take place, and assumed that the Bill, all things being equal, would get through the other place before then.

I turn to my other amendments. On whether to use “because of” or “due to”, I concede that it is a “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” issue. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells for having looked at that point. On amendment 2 about primacy, proposed new section 4B(1) of the Public Order Act 1986, inserted by clause 1, says:

“A person (A) is guilty of an offence under this section if—

(a) A commits an offence under section 4A (intentional harassment, 5 alarm or distress), and

(b) A carried out the conduct referred to in section 4A(1) because of the relevant person’s sex (or presumed sex).”

I assumed that that would be the sole reason for that behaviour. Indeed, in discussing this with my right hon. Friend, I thought that that was his understanding of his Bill and no subsidiary or other reasons would be taken into account. However, I looked at the subsequent provisions and saw that proposed new section 4B(3) of the 1986 Act stated:

“For the purposes of subsection (1)(b)”—

the one to which I have just referred—

“it does not matter whether or not—

(a) A also carried out the conduct referred to…because of any other factor”.

I could not understand why “any other factor” had been introduced, because it seemed redundant and it undermined his contention that when drafting this Bill he wanted it to be clear that this was the primary, if not sole, reason for the conduct being referred to. He has used a slightly different explanation today as to why he is unhappy with my amendments and is citing various precedents from other Acts and claiming “consistency”.

I would be grateful to the Minister if he could spell out whether he accepts that “the relevant person’s sex” must be the main reason for the conduct carried out, otherwise there will not be an offence being committed under the provisions of this Bill. If he is able to spell that out, and perhaps it will be repeated in the guidance, I will go home as a relatively happy bunny. On that note, at this very moment the other place is debating the Third Reading of my Mobile Homes (Pitch Fees) Bill, which is about changing the rules from using the retail price index to using the consumer prices index. I hope that I will be able to go home a happy bunny on the basis of its getting Third Reading in the other place, and I am most grateful to Lord Udny-Lister for taking it through that House. That, however, is an aside.

My amendments 7 and 8 talk about “sex” or “presumed sex”. Let us suppose that someone is in the business of harassing people on the basis of their sex—I hope that not many people are. Let us then suppose that that person thinks that they are harassing a man but it turns out that the person they are harassing is not a man and is in fact a woman——it may be the other way round, and they may think that they are harassing a woman and it then turns out that the person is not a woman but a man. The amount of alarm or distress that will be caused to the person on the receiving end will be significantly reduced if they are not of the sex that was intended by the person who was harassing—

Greg Clark

I do not seek to quarrel with my hon. Friend. But let us consider the analogous situation in which a person with brown skin, relatively dark skin, were the subject of a humiliating torrent of racial abuse in the street but was not a member of a given racial group, I do not think that would diminish the impact and the offence intended by the person. Surely the same would apply in this case, and the person on the receiving end would feel humiliation and the perpetrator would have had exactly the same intention.

Sir Christopher Chope

With the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend, I think he is conflating two dissimilar situations, because the situation he is describing is already an aggravated offence and what we are talking about here are offences that are not aggravated. Indeed, this Bill has been introduced because they are not regarded as aggravated offences and thereby qualifying for greater punishment.

It is a mistake to try to equate a situation where something is already an aggravated offence with the situation described in this Bill. If a person is harassing or making remarks to somebody in the mistaken belief that they are trying to insult a woman, but it turns out that they are a man, that seems to me to be a mistake. Although that will probably still enable the person to be convicted of a public order offence, it will be a public order offence not because of their behaviour, but because of that person’s sex. It is semantics, I am prepared to concede, but that is why I introduced that amendment.

Peter Gibson (Darlington) (Con)

Before the intervention of my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark), was my hon. Friend saying that misgendering somebody would cause less offence to them as opposed to greater offence? To my mind, any sexual-based harassment, whether it be misgendered or correctly gendered, will still cause offence.

Sir Christopher Chope

I have tried to avoid—and have done so up to now—getting into the debate about the difference between sex and gender. I will not rise to my hon. Friend’s bait to try to develop arguments around that. The Bill, commendably, is specific to sex, and it leaves out gender. I will leave it at that if that is all right with my hon. Friend.

This brings me to the conclusion of my remarks. I will not say what my intentions are in relation to these amendments until I have heard from the Minister, which I hope, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will think is a reasonable approach to take.

March 27, 2023
Christopher Chope – 2023 Parliamentary Question on the Rapid Response Unit

The parliamentary question asked by Sir Christopher Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, in the House of Commons on 16 March 2023.

Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)

9. When the rapid response unit was disbanded and what happened to the information it collected. (904112)

The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Alex Burghart)

The rapid response unit was created in 2018 and disbanded in August 2022. It was formed as a central resource in the Government Communication Service that used publicly available information to improve Government’s ability to identify where certain narratives about our work were gaining traction online and to understand public sentiment about Government policies. On disbandment, the information collected was archived and it will be retained in line with the Cabinet Office information retention policy, which is available online.

Sir Christopher Chope

But why has my hon. Friend refused to admit in answer to parliamentary questions that the rapid response unit collected and stored information on sitting MPs? As my subject access request has confirmed that I was one of those MPs, can he explain why the unit was using taxpayers’ money to snoop on me, who authorised this and why?

Alex Burghart

My hon. Friend is welcome to come and have a meeting with me and officials in the Cabinet Office to discuss any concerns that he has about the rapid response unit. I have asked them this morning whether there were any monitoring emails that contained his name. I have been given assurances that there were not, but I am very happy for him to come to the Department and talk through all the possible implications. The truth is that the Government have a number of media monitoring services that check what is going on. They monitor not just what MPs and peers say, but what journalists say and anything that is reported in the mainstream media. As my hon. Friend’s name has appeared in newspaper articles in connection with various stories, it is natural that it would be picked up by those monitoring services.

Mr Speaker

I do have concerns about what has been mentioned. If there are dossiers on MPs, we need to know. If someone put in for an urgent question to get to the bottom of this, I would be very tempted, because I do think it needs clarification. A Government Department holding records on MPs may be fine, but it may not be, so I do have great worries.

Alex Burghart

As I said, Mr Speaker, we have media monitoring units so that when people’s names appear in the media, be they MPs, peers or people who are not Members of either House, they will be recorded on those systems. There is nothing untoward about this, I can assure you.

Mr Speaker

Well, we will certainly find out at some point.

March 19, 2023
Christopher Chope – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

The tribute made by Sir Christopher Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, in the House of Commons on 10 September 2022.

My constituents and I thank His Majesty the King for his words of comfort and reassurance following today’s proclamation of accession as sovereign. We send His Majesty and the whole royal family our deepest condolences on the death of Her Majesty.

The second Elizabethan age has received many references in the last day and a half of debate. Christchurch probably has more people than any other constituency who can remember the beginning of the second Elizabethan age, in 1952, and I am among those privileged to have lived throughout the late Queen’s 70-year reign. I first saw her at her coronation in 1953, when my parents were invited to watch it on a friend’s black-and-white television—I think it was the first time I had ever seen a television.

I have been lucky enough to meet Her late Majesty on several occasions, first at an investiture in 1982 and last at an investiture in 2018, but the meeting to which I shall allude took place when I was asked by the Secretary of State for Transport to host the occasion when Her Majesty opened the Queen Elizabeth II bridge across the Thames, linking the two parts of the M25. As a junior Minister, I was tremendously nervous, but Her Majesty put me at my ease. We had a long private conversation about the bridge, its construction and its funding, and I remember assuring her that the tolls would be lifted as soon as the bridge was paid for. I am pleased to say that Her Majesty kept her counsel on that, as today the tolls are still there even through the bridge has been paid for several times over. I remember that occasion distinctly.

So also do I remember the occasion when Her late Majesty attended the 80th birthday party of Margaret Thatcher. The way she showed her support and encouragement to Margaret Thatcher on that occasion was really moving, because she was not in the best of health. That is an example of the way in which Her late Majesty rose to the occasion. She was not doing something party political—I think Tony Blair was there as well—but her compassion showed through to all of us who had the privilege to be present.

The Queen encapsulated and exemplified all those qualities that make our nation the envy of the world, and make us so proud to be British. The second Elizabethan age, which has drawn to a close this week, will be revered for centuries to come. Weren’t we lucky to be part of it?

September 11, 2022
Christopher Chope – 2021 Speech on the British Library

The speech made by Chris Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, in the House of Commons on 15 March 2021.

New clause 1 provides that the Act expires at the end of a period of five years beginning from the day on which it is passed, otherwise known as a sunset clause. I have tabled this new clause because I think it is particularly apposite in relation to this subject.

When the Government, or the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, first contemplated the idea that the British Library might be given the power to borrow, which it does not have at the moment, the report said that there would be an opportunity to have a full debate about the pros and cons of so doing, and I am not sure that that debate has ever really taken place. I am also not sure that the British Library board is that keen to exercise these powers. The reason for that may well be associated with the fact that borrowing incurs future costs, and those costs then have to be budgeted for from a grant in aid. It is well established that many of what are described as “arm’s length authorities”, which are the subject of grant in aid from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, believe that it is better to rely on grant in aid, where they know where they stand, than to go down the route of borrowing.

My concern is that the Bill could be used as a means whereby the Government cut their grant in aid to the British Library board and, if the board whinges, tell it to borrow the money instead. Given that our national debts are at record levels, it seems to me that such an attitude would be completely out of place. If the Bill becomes law, however, there is no guarantee that that will not happen—that it will not be used as an excuse to ramp up costs for future generations: “Spend now, pay later”. The grant in aid process is designed to ensure that the British Library board can receive funding sufficient to enable it to do its work during the course of the year.

My background interest in this comes from the fact that I was the Minister responsible for the Property Services Agency. One of the biggest projects on its books was the construction of the new British Library. That whole process and the way in which it was funded should be the subject of a treatise.

The grant in aid process was used to fund the construction project each year; there would be an agreement between the Government, the Department and the British Library about how much money could be spent on it in any given year. But no limit was put on the overall costs. It was only when the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher got to hear about that that she decided that we could not carry on just funding the capital project of the British Library on a year-by-year, hand-to-mouth basis. We needed to say that that could not go on indefinitely and that there should be a finite sum of money for the project—and that would be that.

I do not know whether you have been round the British Library, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it is almost in two halves: part of it is adorned with fantastic panelling and money-no-object interiors, but I can only describe the second part as rather more utilitarian. That is a direct consequence of the then Prime Minister’s having said that there had been an abuse of the grant in aid process. I still have the trowel used in the British Library topping-out ceremony—as we would expect for such an extravagant project, it is made of finest silver and came from Garrard, I think. But that is by the by.

Just as the grant in aid was abused before Margaret Thatcher got a grip on it, I fear that the power to borrow could also be abused if we do not keep a tight rein on it. A five-year sunset clause would enable that assessment to be made, so that at the end of five years, if it had been a great success, it could be renewed, and if not, there would not be any need to renew it. Effectively, it would give this House the opportunity of policing what had actually happened under the powers being granted in this primary legislation. I go back to the point that we are not even sure that the British Library really wants these powers, and certainly it does not want these powers if the consequence is a reduction in its grant in aid.

Amendment 1 is designed to limit the amount of borrowing in any calendar year to £1 million. That is an off-the-cuff, arbitrary sum of money, but it seemed to be a reasonable sum for starters, in the absence of any other evidence as to what the British Library needs to borrow and for what purpose it needs to carry out those borrowings. I have tabled this more as a probing amendment, rather than one that I expect to be accepted just like that by the Government. This is quite a short point—and, indeed, it is a short Bill—but in the context of the national situation of public borrowing, it takes on a totemic significance greater than it might have had when the Bill was introduced last year.

I hope that those introductory remarks in support of my new clause will engender not only a debate but an opportunity for the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman), who I am pleased to see in his place, to respond and to share with the House his vision for the British Library and how much he thinks that vision is dependent upon the British Library Board having the borrowing powers set out in the Bill.

I would be interested to know whether the Minister has any idea of how much the British Library Board is thinking of borrowing. The explanatory notes make it clear that the board would not just be able to borrow willy-nilly; it would have to get approval for so doing from the Department. My understanding is that, at the moment, there is a sum of £60 million available for borrowing for all the arm’s length bodies that the Department sponsors. Would the British Library Board’s borrowings be subject to that limit, or would they be in addition to it? In the spirit of the need to ensure that we scrutinise these proposed pieces of legislation, I would be grateful if we could get some response on those issues.

March 15, 2021
Christopher Chope – 2020 Speech on Proceedings in Parliament

Below is the text of the speech made by Christopher Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, in the House of Commons on 2 June 2020.

I begin by expressing my embarrassment on your behalf, Madam Deputy Speaker, that all your entreaties to the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) fell on deaf ears. I think he shows little respect for you in the Chair.

I wish to participate in the debate because I am a member of the Procedure Committee and I have a slight difference with my right hon. Friend the Chair of the Committee. Although I agree with the Committee’s plea for people to be able participate in the proceedings as far as possible, and I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House will table a motion tomorrow, I do not believe that remote voting is necessary.

In normal times, my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) would be sitting here. He cannot be here today on medical advice. Ever since I was first elected to this House in 1983, no person who is away from the House on medical advice has been able to do anything other than get a pair. That system worked well in the 1983 and 1987 Parliaments. When I raised that in the Procedure Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) said that the genie was out of the bottle and it was no longer possible to persuade members of the public that, if we were not physically present to vote and we were paired, we were going about our business. I think we have a big education job to do to explain to our constituents and the public that we can do a really good job as Members of Parliament without physically being here to vote every time. When Ministers go on trips or Select Committee members meet outside this place, they are often paired.

There is something to be said for making that pairing arrangement more transparent, as the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) suggested earlier, but let us not demean ourselves by saying that pairing is a second-best arrangement. Pairing is a fair way of ensuring that people who are ill and unable to attend the House can have their votes counted. Under a pairing system, one person’s vote on one side is cancelled out by someone else on the other side. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) has been in the House almost as long as me and he knows that the system works well for those who are ill. It would be wrong to change it now. The Procedure Committee has an inquiry on the matter, but we cannot resolve that today. Let us therefore proceed with the motion in the name of the Leader of the House and allow ourselves to have real voting here. For those who cannot get here to vote, let us encourage pairing, while perhaps making the system more transparent.

June 2, 2020
Christopher Chope – 1986 Speech on Elderly Persons in Rest Homes

Below is the text of the speech made by Christopher Chope, the then Conservative MP for Southampton Itchen, in the House of Commons on 12 March 1986.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have a debate about the financial arrangements for people in registered rest homes for the elderly. I know that I am not alone among hon. Members in being concerned about the matter. My hon. Friend the Member for New Forest (Mr. McNair-Wilson) wishes me to associate his name with some of the concerns which I want to express.

I appreciate the keen interest which my hon. Friend the Minister has taken in the subject since taking over responsibility for it. May I thank him in particular for the way in which he has listened to the representations of my constituents? In January he visited Southampton and, after meeting several residents at the Brookvale care home, he had a discussion with other rest home owners, a consultant geriatrician, general practitioners and nurses about the problems of residential care for the elderly. Later the same day he opened a new rest home which I am pleased to tell him is prospering, although it is charging fees greater than those who are on supplementary benefit can afford. More recently, my hon. Friend had a follow-up meeting lasting about an hour with two registered rest home owners in Southampton. If he paid the same attention to every constituency, I do not think he would have time to do anything else. I am most grateful for his concern.

The Conservative Government have an excellent record in extending care in the community, and the expanding national network of residential and nursing homes in the private sector is testament to this. The passing of legislation to improve the standards of care in these homes has ensured that those who look forward to spending the later years of their life in residential care can do so with confidence. The national picture is fully reflected in Southampton and Hampshire. In Southampton, the success of the programme of extending care in the community is such that, despite increasing numbers of elderly, and particularly frail elderly, there are now fewer on the waiting list for long-stay hospital care. My hon. Friend will know, however, that one does not seek a debate on the Adjournment merely to praise the Government but to draw attention to particular problems.

The first problem to which I draw attention is the position of those who were in receipt of supplementary benefit in respect of their rest homes charges at 28 April 1985. When my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State first proposed a new structure of national limits for the residential care and nursing home sector on 29 November 1984, he said,

“These new limits will be designed to reflect the varying cost of providing different types of care. There is no question, however, of elderly, handicapped or disabled people being moved out of their existing accommodation, and their position will be protected.” — [Official Report, 29 November 1984; Vol. 68, c. 1098–99.]

In circular LASSL 86(1), issued on 14 January 1986, there is confirmation that the level of charges being met in a person’s supplementary benefit before 29 April 1985 will be maintained indefinitely where the person is over pensionable age. I welcome that, but it does not meet the problem of rising costs and charges. Most residential rest homes have had to increase their charges since April 1985 or, if they have not already done so, will soon have to.

Who is to pay the increased charges? The DHSS will not if the charges are already above £120. By definition, the residents do not have the means to pay the extra and even if they did this would be offset against their supplementary entitlement. I know of several proprietors of rest homes in Southampton who will have to take a crunch decision soon — next month is the crunch time—about whether to waive increased charges for the residents in the category I have described or ask those residents to leave. Surely if my right hon. Friend is to be consistent with his pledge to “protect the position” of such residents, he should be willing to allow increased supplementary benefit in line with the retail prices index. He should not rely upon the charity of the home owners, and should remember that because the residents do not enjoy security of tenure both they and their relatives are extremely worried about what may happen.

The second problem to which I draw attention is the position of those who were resident in rest homes at 28 April 1985 but who were paying privately and whose means subsequently fall to such a level as to cause them to qualify for supplementary benefit. Many of those who enter residential care use the capital released from the sale of their homes to meet the costs, but even £30,000 from the sale of a house pays for only three or four years in a rest home at £150 per week. These people expected that, once their capital was depleted, they would be in the same position as anyone else who qualified for supplementary benefit. Surely the pledge given by my right hon. Friend to which I have referred should extend unequivocally to these residents as well.

In this context I welcome the contents of paragraph 5 of the circular of 14 January, which states:

“For those claiming supplementary benefit after 29 April 1985 the new system of national limits applied straight away. But Ministers have decided to introduce a new provision to help some long standing residents in residential care homes who did not claim supplementary benefit until after 29 April 1985…Where application of the new limits could produce exceptional hardship the Secretary of State has the discretionary power to extend to an individual the benefit of transitional protection so that he could receive the same rate of benefit as he would have received had he claimed before 29 April”.

I hope that much greater publicity will be given to this very welcome concession by the Government, because I know that the problem has been a cause of concern to many. I have met many residents and their relatives who are still concerned, however, about what will happen when the money runs out. I doubt that the discretionary power will allay all their worries and concerns. I find it hard to contemplate a situation in which my right hon. Friend would choose not to exercise his discretion to extend transitional protection. If I am right in that, why cannot he go the whole way and guarantee that, in the situation that I have described, the transitional protection will be extended?

The third problem on which I seek my hon. Friend’s comments is the rigidity of the limit of £120 a week on supplementary benefit payments for residents in residential rest homes for the elderly. In most homes in Southampton this limit is well below the fees charged to those who pay privately. I imagine that £120 a week is probably too much for a pensioner who is up and about and fully in command of his faculties and who does not qualify for attendance allowance. Such a person should not, perhaps, even be in a residential rest home—at any rate, not at the expense of the taxpayer.

However, at the other end of the scale there may be a nonagenarian who qualifies for the full attendance allowance, who is very frail and who is incontinent. For such a person, living in a centrally heated, single room with full board, 24-hour care and free laundry, £17 a day is a bargain. It is clearly far below the reasonable cost. One needs only to consider the cost of care in a long-stay hospital. It is £48 a day. Therefore, £17 a day is very much on the low side where a very considerable degree of care is required.

I do not underestimate the problems involved in having separate levels of supplementary benefit entitlement, depending on the extent of the infirmity and the degree of care being provided. But the present system, particularly now that the attendance allowance payments are taken into account and set off against supplementary benefit, discriminates against the very people that we should be most eager to help. My hon. Friend saw some such people on the occasion of his visit to the Brookvale care home in Southampton.

The fourth problem is the one of topping-up payments. If a person is below pensionable age and a home’s charges exceed the supplementary benefit limit a local authority is able to top up the balance above supplementary benefit. The same principle does not apply, however, to a person who is a pensioner. I am sure that many local authorities would much prefer to top up a payment rather than have to provide home help services and meals on wheels. A district health authority might also be willing to make a topping up payment because it thereby saves on district nursing services. In Southampton, in the light of a recent decision to remove payments for incontinent aids, it would mean a saving of between £40 and £50 per resident per month if a person moved into a residential rest home.

There is also a problem about topping-up payments by relatives. I hope that in his reply this evening my hon. Friend will spell out clearly what those rules are. I have spoken to the officials in the supplementary benefit office in Southampton. They are in a state of confusion. The result is that some of the decisions that have been handed down seem to be wrong. I understand that under the regulations it is possible for relatives to top up payments, but I do not believe that that is the general understanding. I look forward to hearing what my hon. Friend has to say about that problem.

The fifth problem concerns the inflexible arrangements which apply to the categorisation of residents. A nursing home resident can receive between £170 and £230 per week from supplementary benefit, yet I have had constituency cases of individuals who would clearly qualify for nursing home provision but who would prefer to stay in a residential rest home where they have already spent many years, where the environment is familiar and the standard of care is as high as they would wish or need. My hon. Friend wrote to me about one such case on 28 February. The 89-year-old lady has charges of £180 per week. When I wrote to my hon. Friend he suggested that, in view of her disabilities and the high degree of care she needs,

“it may be that she should now be accommodated in a nursing rather than a residential care home. The limit for a non specialist nursing home is £170 per week. This higher limit could not be paid for”—

this particular lady’s—

“present accommodation unless the home were jointly registered also as a nursing home.”

But joint registration of this home is not a practicable possibility. There are planning problems and the additional facilities which the owner would have to provide would only be worthwhile if all her residents were in need of the level of care provided in a nursing home. The owner does not wish to register as a nursing home and the resident does not wish to move to a nursing home.
If a pensioner resident suffers from disablement but had become disabled before reaching pensionable age, the maximum supplementary benefit payable is £180 rather than £120, provided of course that the home is duly registered for the elderly and physically disabled. Yet if a pensioner resident becomes frail and disabled in old age, the limit is fixed at £120.
Circular LASSL 86(1) explains:

“This distinction is intended to avoid ambiguity between those suffering from substantial and permanent disablement and those simply becoming frail in old age.”

That is Civil Service newspeak of the worst sort. If an 85-year-old bedridden amputee is frail and incontinent, he is disabled. Why should the cost of looking after him be deemed to be £60 a week less, if he was disabled at the age of 65 rather than 64? That is one of the worst anomalies.

There is a similar inflexibility in the assessment of those with mental disorders. Senile dementia is not apparently classified as a mental disorder, although its symptoms are often similar. The amount of care needed to look after someone with it is a great deal more than that for an ordinary old person. Yet supplementary benefit allowances are no different.

I know that my hon. Friend does not have responsibility for incontinent aids, but does he agree that it is desirable for health authorities to provide incontinent aids at no cost to residents in local authority, private and voluntary residential rest homes? I can understand why such facilities should not be provided to nursing homes because by their definition they are meant to provide full care and treatment, including all nursing services. But at a time when resident rest home owners are being pressurised from all sides, it is most unfortunate that in the Southampton health district the provision of such incontinent aids to residents in residential rest homes has been withdrawn by the health authority.

In a masterly understatement in a letter to me, my hon. Friend said:

“We do not regard the present arrangements as immune to change if the need can be shown.”

I hope that he will show that he has thought further about the possible ways in which the system can be improved and changed, and that he will not delay in putting right some of the present shortcomings which threaten to discredit an area of Government policy for which there should be only properly great praise.

August 27, 2019
Chris Chope – 2016 Speech on the European Convention on Human Rights

Below is the text of the speech made by Chris Chope, the Conservative MP for Christchurch, in the House of Commons on 9 May 2016.

I am most grateful to Mr Speaker for giving me the opportunity this evening to raise the issue of the UK’s membership of the European convention on human rights. I want to focus on the issue in the context of the referendum that will take place on 23 June—and let me say, as a Brexiteer, that it is good to know that a fellow Brexiteer will be responding to the debate.

I should, at the outset, set out my position on sovereignty and human rights. I want our Parliament to make the laws to which United Kingdom citizens are subject, and I want our independent judges to interpret those laws without fear or favour. I believe that if Parliament does not like a court’s interpretation of the law, Parliament should be able to change that law, prospectively but not retrospectively. I also believe that supranational courts should not be able to legislate for us by judicial means. If the wording of a treaty is to be changed, it should be changed by an amending protocol and not by judges.

That is why I support the European convention on human rights, but am very uneasy about the way in which it has been extended by judicial activism into fields that Parliament has never approved—a prime example, obviously, is giving votes to prisoners, an issue which the Prime Minister told us made him feel physically sick—and that is why I am so keen for the United Kingdom to take back control over the making and interpretation of our laws. Currently, 60% of our laws are made by the European Union, and they can be changed at will by the European Union against our wishes, because even if all United Kingdom Members of the European Parliament vote in one way, they can muster fewer than 10% of the votes in that Parliament.

I applied for this debate because I am very confused about Government policy on UK membership of the European convention on human rights. I read the speech delivered by my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on 25 April, entitled “The United Kingdom, the European Union, and our place in the world”. In that speech, my right hon. Friend set out what she considered to be the principles for Britain’s membership of international institutions. She said:

“We need…to establish clear principles…Does it make us more influential beyond our…shores? Does it make us more secure? Does it make us more prosperous? Can we control or influence the direction of the organisation in question? To what extent does membership bind the hands of Parliament?”

Having asked all those questions, she said that

“the case for remaining a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights—which means Britain is subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights—is not clear.”

She went on to say:

“The ECHR can bind the hands of Parliament, adds nothing to our prosperity, makes us less secure by preventing the deportation of dangerous foreign criminals.”

“If we want to reform human rights laws in this country, it isn’t the EU we should leave but the ECHR and the jurisdiction of its court.”

Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)

If we want to have influence, we should bear in mind that tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of the imprisonment of seven Bahá’i leaders in Iran. They are prisoners of conscience, and were imprisoned as a result of their religious belief. That is an unquestionable violation of their human rights.

Outside Europe, the United Kingdom’s membership of the European convention on human rights sends a strong signal of our continued commitment to upholding and advancing human rights globally. Is there not a good reason for our being a member of the convention when we can do something for those Bahá’i leaders in Iran who have been violated and persecuted because of their beliefs? That is one example.

Mr Chope

The hon. Gentleman has made his point very well. However, I am concentrating on what the Home Secretary said. She seemed to be announcing a Government policy that the United Kingdom should leave the convention but stay in the EU. Her speech led to an urgent question, which was granted by Mr Speaker, and I—and other people who were present on that occasion—could not understand how we were going to be able to deliver the Home Secretary’s agenda on human rights if we remained in the European Union and subject to the EU charter of fundamental rights.

Questions were raised by Members during those exchanges, and it became clear that the Home Secretary—and, indeed, the Government—were indeed rather muddled about this. One of the questions that was asked was whether membership of the European Union required us to be a party to the European convention on human rights. The Home Secretary was not answering the urgent question. The Attorney General answered, as a Law Officer. He said:

“It is not…in any way clear that membership of the European Union requires membership of the European convention on human rights…there are considerable legal complexities”.—[Official Report, 26 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1291.]

My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) then cited article 6.3 of the treaty on European Union, which states:

“Fundamental rights, as guaranteed by the European Convention…shall constitute general principles of the Union’s law.”

He went on to refer to the fact that the Commission had said that any member country of the European Union that sought to disengage from the European convention on human rights might have its voting rights suspended.

Then, as so often happens in this House, my hon. Friend the Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) asked a really pertinent question. He said:

“Can a country remain in the European Union and still come out of the convention? What is his legal opinion on that?”

The Attorney General replied:

“As I have suggested, the legal position is not clear.”

He went on to say that he did not

“have the time to go into all the ins and outs of that particular question now, but I suggest it would also be wrong to say that it is clear in the opposite direction.”—[Official Report, 26 April 2016; Vol. 608, c. 1301.]

So that was what the Government were saying about this particular matter.

This morning, I heard the Prime Minister chiding Brexiteers for having no clear comprehensive plan for life outside the EU, but that was a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black. As I have just said, the Prime Minister and the Government have no clear plan for life inside the European Union if there is a remain vote on 23 June. They do not know what will happen to their human rights agenda. There are many other examples beyond that.

It is a failure by the Government not to address this issue up front, and to leave it hanging in the air pending the referendum. We have had some quite clear advice from lawyers of great distinction. For example, Lord Woolf said:

“You can legally reconcile the doctrine of the sovereignty of Parliament with the European Convention on Human Rights. You cannot do that with regard to the European Charter, because the position there is that you can trump a statute.”

Lord Woolf was being quoted there in the House of Lords paper 139, which was published today. We now have a situation in which the Home Secretary seems to be arguing that we would be more secure if we left the convention on human rights but retained European law relating to fundamental rights.

I should like to give the House some examples of how EU law is undermining our security. In The Sunday Telegraph yesterday, it was reported that six Algerian terror suspects with links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were to be allowed to stay here after a 10-year battle in the courts. I think that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) has made the point that the number of people fraudulently trying to gain entry into the United Kingdom has almost doubled in a year. That is because those people realise that we do not have the power to turn them away at our borders if they are waving a European Union identity document.

I was speaking at a conference on European freight security last week, at which it became apparent that we are not allowed to X-ray lorries in Calais to see whether they contain illegal migrants because it might be damaging to the human rights and health of those illegal migrants. That is another example of how human rights laws undermine our ability to keep our borders secure. Another example is that we are not allowed to take DNA samples from migrants who refuse to give their fingerprints when they enter the European Union, which is expressly prohibited by the Eurodac regulations.

Then we have the example, which came out a couple of months ago, of Abu Hamza’s daughter-in-law. We found out that she was his daughter-in-law only through a freedom of information request. An advocate-general in the European Court of Justice said that it was in principle contrary to European Union treaties to remove the lady from the United Kingdom, notwithstanding the fact that she had been convicted and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. It was subsequently revealed that she had been convicted of attempting to smuggle a Sim card to Abu Hamza while he was in a high-security prison, but even that grave crime was insufficient to allow the courts to remove her from the United Kingdom because of the intervention of the European Court of Justice, which exercised its powers under the EU’s fundamental rights laws.

I cannot understand how the Home Secretary can consistently argue that we should stay in the European Union when the logic of everything she said in her speech was that we should be leaving the EU. It is potentially misleading for members of the public to think that they can have their cake and eat it by leaving the European convention on human rights while still remaining subject to the European Court of Justice.

Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)

Perhaps all these complexities explain why so little progress is being made on our manifesto commitment to leave the European convention on human rights. When the Minister replies, I hope that he will make it clear that the Government have not gone cold on that.

Mr Chope

I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to that. We had a debate towards the beginning of this parliamentary Session in which the Minister made it clear that the Government intended to bring forward a consultation document on this sooner rather than later. I think he envisaged that that would be before Christmas, but it then became after Christmas and now it is after the referendum. They were talking about a consultation document, so why can we not have even a discussion? I fear that it has been kicked into the long grass on the instructions of No. 10, because it was realised that it would lead to lot of awkward questions. The Government have demonstrated throughout the course of the referendum debate that they are quite happy to ask hypothetical questions and complain when people are unable to answer them, but they are unwilling to respond positively to the questions that people are asking them.

Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)

I am sorry that I missed the first part of my hon. Friend’s speech; I very much look forward to reading it tomorrow. While the view of the general public is that infringements on the rights of Parliament are the result of the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights, will my hon. Friend confirm that even if we were to leave the European convention on human rights and remain in the EU, we would still be subject to the same kind of interference from the European Court of Justice?

Mr Chope

Yes. It would be not only the same type of interference, but graver. That is the conclusion of the House of Lords EU Justice Sub-Committee, the report of which I referred to earlier and came out today. The European Court of Justice has much greater powers and can effectively remove legislation from our statutes. The European Court of Human Rights is much more restricted and can deal only with individual cases, which then can be the subject of negotiation and we can ultimately exercise more discretion or have a greater “margin of appreciation”, to put it in legal language. As Lord Woolf was saying, the European convention on human rights may not be perfect, and we may not like the way in which it has been changed by judge-made law, but most people would agree with its actual wording.

The European charter of fundamental rights is anathema. You may recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, that when the charter was first brought forward and the then Labour Government were saying that it would have no application to the United Kingdom, the then Minister for Europe, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), memorably said that it would have no more status in UK law than a copy of the Beano. That just illustrates the speed with which change comes about. One moment we think something has been passed which is not going to apply to us and now we find, on the highest authorities in the land, that we are indeed subordinate to the European Court of Justice and that the European fundamental rights agency and charter are supreme. My plea to the Minister is: can we get this sorted out? Will he confirm that the UK would be in an absurd position if it wanted to stay in the EU but denounced the European convention on human rights?

May 10, 2016