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Tag: Matt Western

  • Matt Western – 2023 Speech on the Independent Review of Net Zero

    Matt Western – 2023 Speech on the Independent Review of Net Zero

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 9 February 2023.

    I appreciate being given the opportunity to speak, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Kingswood (Chris Skidmore) on compiling this review—an impressive feat in such a short period of time since it was first requested of him. The focus on this issue is long overdue. This place and this country need far more urgency and purpose in trying to achieve our net zero ambitions. I absolutely respect him; he is a decent individual and, while I have not read the entire review, I am sure that all 129 recommendations are sensible and well-founded.

    For me, net zero is not just the right thing to do, something that is critical for our society, our future and our civilisation, but economically important. That is why I am so struck by the failure in recent years to grab that opportunity. I wish the right hon. Gentleman well in the internal discussions on this review; certainly I fear that the Government perhaps have not engaged as much with Lord Deben and the Climate Change Committee in recent years, which is a real shame.

    I think back to the signals we have had for many years now, going back to 2006 and Lord Stern’s report and the international work of people such as Al Gore, speaking about the inconvenient truth that we face and the lack of urgency in recent years. That was in 2006. We are approaching almost 20 years since then. Funnily enough, it was in the same year, 2006, that I approached my local district council, wanting to convert a building into a low-carbon property. Sadly, I was refused permission—to be fair, it was a minor change of use from a storage building, although it had been used as a house in times past—so I went to the Planning Inspectorate and appealed. The planning inspector found in my favour and I was given permission to convert that building. I wanted to prove what could be done in terms of developing a low-carbon building.

    I appreciate that in the last 24 hours the Government are now refocusing on the importance of net zero with the restructuring of the departmental teams, but we are only really going back to where we were in 2010, when we had the Department of Energy and Climate Change, in recognition of the work of Lord Stern, Al Gore and so many others. That recognition led to the world-first Climate Change Act 2008, passed by Labour in government, which I think was a fantastic piece of work. Even though I was nowhere near this place at the time, I had a huge amount of respect for the work being done.

    Sadly, in the intervening 12 to 13 years, we have seen massive retrograde actions by first the coalition Government and then successive Conservative Governments, when there was an enormous economic opportunity for us. I will come back to some of those opportunities later, but the decision to do away with the zero-carbon homes legislation was one of the most retrograde acts that they could have committed. We are now seeing why building new homes with gas dependency was such a wrong decision, first because of increasing demand for gas, but secondly because it was not the right thing to do to combat climate change.

    As I am sure other colleagues across the House do, I visited a new housing estate a couple of weeks ago. There were 130 properties on the estate I visited, and of those none had EV charging points, solar photovoltaics, solar thermal or heat pumps. Those are brand-new houses that have not yet been completed. When I asked why those things were not being done, the builders said, “Well, it didn’t need to be done, to be fair, and the owners can always retrofit them.” Trust me—having been through building a house, I can tell hon. Members it can be quite challenging, but if a house is being built from scratch, it is much cheaper to install those things there and then. The fact that we are not installing such basic things, or even making provision for energy storage units in those properties, is a massive failure of the system. That should have been going on all this time; it would have happened under Labour had the party been returned to power in 2010.

    The issue of existing homes has also been discussed and mentioned by a couple of hon. Members. I appreciate that we have a much older housing stock, but we could have been taking action over many years to change properties through secondary glazing, triple glazing and so on. When I visited properties built in the late 1950s in Germany, which had had double glazing and underfloor heating installed back then, I was struck by just how far in advance of us other nations have been on this.

    There is an economic opportunity on insulation schemes, where we can not only reduce households’ dependency on fossil fuels, but also significantly reduce their energy bills. To the naysayers who say there really is very little advantage for an individual or a household, the gas consumption in my property in the last 13 years has been 130 cubic metres. When hon. Members next look at their gas meters and see how much they have used in the last year or the last quarter, they will realise how staggeringly low that figure is.

    On power generation, I am afraid I do not share the views of the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who has sadly just departed the Chamber. I believe there is an exciting opportunity in the field of power generation to introduce much more onshore wind, and offshore wind as well. Those of us who have the apps on our phones will have seen that for many months now, offshore wind-generated power has typically produced 40% to 50% of UK electricity energy. That is a fantastic result and just shows what can be achieved. Domestic solar is also a good and important thing that should be installed as a matter of course, not just in new build, but retrospectively, and then of course there is the opportunity for localised modular reactors to supplement power generation across the UK.

    Power distribution is another important part of the equation, as the right hon. Member for Kingswood was saying. National Grid, which is headquartered in Warwick in my constituency, is central to that. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was up in the Wansbeck constituency, where there is a National Grid site with two cables coming ashore from a plant in Norway. Those are the interconnectors about which hon. Members may have heard, whereby hydroelectric power is generated and comes into the UK as renewable energy.

    To visualise that, at that diameter, those two cables provide 3% of UK electricity. That is just how extraordinary those connections can be. Of course, more are planned, not just from Norway, say, but from Denmark and France. Those cables work both ways: we can bring power from Norway, but we can also supply power to Norway from the excess generated in the UK. That is why they present such a great opportunity. I appreciate that there is an issue on the planning side of distribution. We have to be much more joined up in the way that we approach it. Without localised power distribution, we will not be able to supply much-needed electric power to households and businesses.

    One of last areas that I will cover is transport, on which we are really behind the curve. The EV industry is frustrated by where the Government are on this. It is easy to set targets, but we need to give the industries and sectors frameworks and structures against which they can deliver those targets. They recognise that those targets are challenging, and they want to achieve them, but they need more than just the setting of a target. Currently, we do not have an EV gigafactory at scale in the UK other than Envision up in Sunderland, which is very small. We need to get many more built in the UK. Other nations, including France, Germany, the US, Japan and China, are already manufacturing, while we do not even have a spade in the ground. Unless we do that, we will miss out big time on the economic opportunity.

    Linked to that is the charging network. I mentioned the distribution of power; what we do not have is an overall strategy for the delivery of charging points across the UK. Again, we are way behind our international partners. The other point to mention on transport is the importance of the insistence on transport hubs across our towns and cities to encourage active travel.

    The report that the right hon. Member for Kingswood has put together gives hope. Every time I visit a school, there are one or two issues on the minds of the young people there, and climate change is absolutely the foremost. They do not expect us just to talk about it; they demand that we act and deliver for their futures.

    There is, as I say, an economic opportunity, and not just with gigafactories. I remember that the solar thermal unit I bought was manufactured in Scotland. I do not even know if that plant still exists, but I would be surprised if it does after the changes in 2010 and the green whatever- it-was that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) referred to. That change in legislation meant that we lost a lot of good businesses and manufacturers in the UK that could have been supplying to this economic opportunity. Even Alternative Energy Technology, a small business based in Atherstone in Warwickshire, which installed all the kit in my property, fell by the wayside because of those changes.

    I commend the right hon. Member for Kingswood for this substantive report. He spoke of challenges and opportunities, and he is absolutely right. I see huge opportunities, and we need to minimise the challenges. I appreciate the point made by the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) about how planning needs to be addressed across Departments if we are to speed it up. It is so, so slow. I hear his point about “not zero”. If we do not do this, we will miss a huge economic—as well as critical—point in our history. Many people talk about this stuff, but I think the right hon. Member for Kingswood is absolutely sincere, and I welcome his report, for which I thank him.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Speech on the Finance Bill

    Matt Western – 2022 Speech on the Finance Bill

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 28 November 2022.

    It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson).

    We have heard a great deal about the recent Budget—the last couple of Budgets, I suppose—and where we find ourselves, but we are not just talking about the events of recent weeks or what could be described as global headwinds. We have to understand what has been going on in the wider landscape—the energy price shocks suffered globally, the supply chain shortages and the rising global interest rates—but beyond what could be described as global factors, we have specificities: the factors that set the UK apart from other nations.

    I take on board a lot of the comments that have been from the Government Benches, but as the Institute for Fiscal Studies put it, it is clear that the UK is in a much worse position because of its economic own goals. We could talk about the impact of the bodged Brexit deal, which economic forecasters have shown has impacted our growth figure by 4.5%, or the shocking, catastrophic kamikaze Budget of 23 September, but we have suffered a decade of anaemic growth and now we are set for even weaker growth.

    As has been said, of course the pandemic impacted on our economic situation, as it has across the world—we need only look at what is happening in China right now and what will be happening to Chinese GDP as a result of all the measures there. However, we face even weaker growth than others. We will have the weakest growth out of all the major economic nations of the G7, and over the next two years we will have the lowest growth out of all 39 nations in the OECD, other than sanction-ridden Russia. In fact, the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that over the forecast period growth is set to average just 1.4%, compared to an average of 2.7% that we enjoyed over 13 years under the last Labour Government.

    Last week, in its “Economic and fiscal outlook” report, the OBR confirmed that the autumn statement measures added nothing to growth in the medium term. Real wages are lower now than they were when the party opposite entered power in 2010. That is the harsh reality of what we are talking about. We can talk about all sorts of statistics in the abstract, but people will know just how hard this is already hurting and how hard it is going to get. I do not know whether any of us will be able to recall this, but the last time we had such a 12-year period of wage stagnation was back in the Napoleonic wars, which is a pretty damning indictment.

    This has real impacts for everybody in our society, and I will set out a few markers. My constituents, along with people across the country, will see a staggering 7% real-terms reduction in their income over the next two years, leaving the average worker £40 worse off. To give a different perspective, the Resolution Foundation said that compared with trends seen when Labour was in government, people will be £15,000 worse off, coupled with sky-high inflation that disproportionately falls on poorer households, as the hon. Member for Leicester East (Claudia Webbe) said. While food inflation has increased by 14% across the board, certain basic staple products have increased by as much as 60%, as I can see in the shops in my constituency of Warwick and Leamington.

    Businesses are also suffering. I appreciate that measures have been put in place, but the lack of business rate support is a glaring omission by this Government. One of the things that should be concerning them the most is the lack of business investment and the OBR forecast that we will now see business investment growing by 6.7% less over the coming years. That must give all of us concern for our long-term economic growth.

    Something else that should concern us is what has happened to the FTSE 100. Okay, it is just a bellwether indicator, but it is now smaller than the CAC 40 in Paris—the first time that Britain’s stock market has lost its position as the most highly valued in Europe. When we look back to 2016, we see the significant reversal of fortune: London was worth about $1.4 trillion more than Paris.

    Ten days ago, there was a political choice in respect of the Budget: stealth taxes on working people, or a fairer tax system. I fear that the Chancellor has gone in too hard on hard-working people when it comes to footing the bill. He claimed to be fair, but he has not been. The recent Bank of England monetary policy report spoke of the impact of UK-specific factors on borrowing costs. The Financial Times estimates at just under £17 billion the real-terms spending increase in the mini-Budget due to the increase in the gilt rate. This economic crisis was made in Downing Street and its cost is being put on the shoulders of working people: the tax burden is the highest since world war two.

    The Prime Minister’s decision to give oil and gas giants such large untargeted tax breaks has been surprising. It will cost the taxpayer £8 billion over the next five years. He and his Chancellor could have closed the tax loopholes, introduced VAT on private schools, tightened the energy profits levy, abolished non-dom status, launched a massive, much needed investment in skills and support for SMEs, and turned the UK into a green superpower. What we have instead are stealth taxes, which will take us backwards. I accept and agree with some of points made about corporation tax, particularly those of the hon. Member for Amber Valley (Nigel Mills). We saw a dreadful experiment under George Osborne that actually yielded very little for the UK but lost us a lot of tax take.

    Under clause 6, there are changes to income tax, and the concern is how those will affect a lot of earners across the UK. What analysis has been done on the upper decile, or the top 2% of taxpayers? How does the impact on them compare with that on the lowest decile of earners?

    As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on electric vehicles, I have a particular concern about clause 10, although I make these comments personally. The introduction of vehicle excise duty for zero-emission vehicles risks stalling the entire electric vehicle industry. We have already taken away consumer support, apart from some support for business users; we are the only major nation in Europe that does not provide such support for electric vehicles. There could be a real challenge as a result of the vehicle excise duty supplement, which will unduly penalise more expensive vehicle technologies when we should be ensuring that the sector expands and is successful. If we are to meet our net zero obligations, we have to persuade the consumer to come with us and increase the uptake in new electric vehicles.

    We needed a framework that would encourage consumers and businesses to buy electric vehicles and get the industry to invest in the infrastructure network of EV charging points. Like the industry, I am really concerned that the change will have a serious impact and that investment, including from vehicle manufacturers, will be lost.

    Labour’s plan would be to reboot the economy, to create the frameworks for businesses to operate within, to scrap business rates and to replace the apprenticeship levy with a skills and growth fund. We need to invest in skills and further and higher education, particularly to address the matter of productivity; it is disappointing that we did not hear about that from the Minister. Productivity is one of the greatest challenges for the UK, yet we have heard far too little over the last 12 years about how that will be addressed.

    I will not support Second Reading, although I will, of course, support the Labour amendment. The Bill raises taxes unfairly on working people and introduces what will essentially be a fiscal drag over the coming years. We should have started by going after the easy money—the tax status of non-doms and further reductions in the tax allowances available to oil and gas companies. We should have replaced business rates with something far more progressive that would help our local businesses and maintain and restore our town centres.

    Since 2016, 1.2 million zero-carbon homes could have been built; it would have meant zero heating bills for 1.2 million families. Sadly, the legislation got scrapped in 2011—just think of the impact that would have had on our energy demand and the relative prosperity of those households. Instead, we have austerity. Under Obama, the US had the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009—and look at its trajectory since.

    I am afraid that this Finance Bill has sold the UK public and UK businesses short. We have had 12 years and the last 12 weeks—far too long. We need a Labour Government.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

    Matt Western – 2022 Speech on Documents Relating to Suella Braverman

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 8 November 2022.

    It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar).

    Trust is a really important value, and it something that I fear people listening and watching outside, and perhaps even people in here, feel is deserting this place, particularly after the last three years of what could be described as virtual mayhem, a certain amount of lawbreaking and a certain scandal. The new Prime Minister promised

    “integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”,

    and I think all of us wanted to take him at his word—the country certainly did after the complete and utter chaos of the previous six or seven weeks. We know that as Home Secretary, the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) was guilty of six separate breaches of security in six weeks. Previously, as Attorney General, her record showed Cabinet leak inquiries on three occasions in the past year. How many breaches would there have been during the 133 weeks that she was Attorney General?

    The Prime Minister should have done due diligence. He has an investment background, and we would have expected that in who he appointed to the top three or four roles in Government. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, there is evidence of insider trading, and if we were talking about a football manager, they would have been sacked a long time ago. We know the Home Secretary has broken the ministerial code at least twice. These are not one-off mistakes, so why was she reappointed after just six days? That calls into question the judgment and credibility of the Prime Minister, after three years of a Prime Minister trashing the office of No. 10.

    Indeed, we know that the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May) restricted the access of the then Foreign Secretary to papers while he was in that position, and she did the same for the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire (Sir Gavin Williamson). We then had six weeks of chaos, with the Prime Minister and Chancellor trashing the economy. The country demands integrity, but it is not getting it in the shape of this Home Secretary. Businesses, public sector workers, and in this case civil servants expect professionalism. They expect decency, integrity and standards in public life.

    The hon. Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson) asked for common sense to be applied, and whether we had visited Ashfield. I have visited Ashfield recently, as he will know. He accused us of being a bunch of bullies. I have never been accused of being a bully in my entire life, yet he asserts that. On behalf of the public we are seeking to understand the degree of breaking of the ministerial code that is going on, and the sense of judgment of the Home Secretary and, by extension, the Prime Minister. I speak to ordinary people on the street, to businesses and others, and a director of a business would have been struck off for this pattern of behaviour. A doctor would have been struck off. This kind of behaviour does not meet the test of being fit and proper to practise.

    The motion before us asks whether the Prime Minister undertook a risk assessment. That is critical to understanding what he understood at the moment when he appointed the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham to her position, and back into the Home Office after six days. His leadership has to be understood. Judgment is critical to that, and I am afraid that he failed in that not just once, with his appointment of the right hon. and learned Lady, but a second time with the appointment of the right hon. Member for South Staffordshire. Once upon a time, when Ministers broke the ministerial code or were found to be enmeshed in scandal, they would walk. The Prime Minister talks about integrity, professionalism and accountability, but I am afraid the Home Secretary fails on all three.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Speech on the Contribution to the UK Made by International Students

    Matt Western – 2022 Speech on the Contribution to the UK Made by International Students

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in Westminster Hall on 2 November 2022.

    It is good to see you in the Chair, Mr Stringer. Let me express my thanks for the way that you have chaired the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) for bringing this debate about, and I welcome the Minister of State, Department for Education, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), to his new role.

    We have heard widely about the passion for higher education across these islands. The hon. Member for Stirling talked about its importance and power to inform, enlighten and aid discovery. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) not just about the economic contribution that universities make, but about how they are cultural, social and economic powerhouses. My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) talked about the soft power that our institutions have earned among Governments and institutions around the world, and the great achievements of the APPG. It is not just the size of the contribution that our institutions make that is so impressive; their cultural, societal and economic value cumulatively adds to the UK’s global reputation.

    Let us be clear: the UK is the aspiration destination for most international students. Through a powerful combination of our world-class lecturers, leading facilities and institutions’ international standing, UK higher education is the benchmark around the world. As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central said, that is clearly seen in the Higher Education Policy Institute’s soft power index, in which the UK is positioned second.

    The virtues of British higher education are reflected and amplified through Governments and leaders around the world. Closer to home, international students turn university campuses into melting pots of cultures, traditions, languages and thinking. Only two weeks ago during a visit to Oxford Brookes University, I sat around a table with half a dozen students hailing from Bulgaria, Nigeria and Hong Kong, as well as from the UK, all studying international development and sustainability. They were using their individual experiences from back home to help to shape their learning and that of their fellow students. Many expressed a desire to return to their country of birth to show what they had learned from their lecturers and fellow students, but many want to stay.

    International students add enormous value to the UK economy and research base. The Entrepreneurs Network estimates that nearly half of Britain’s 100 fastest-growing start-ups have at least one immigrant co-founder. That leads me nicely on to the economic value of international students. Their precise economic value is really secondary to the wider social and cultural benefits that they bring, but it is still an important contribution to the UK.

    Research conducted by The London Economic and HEPI, commissioned by Universities UK, found that the 2018-19 cohort of international students delivered a net economic benefit of £26 billion to the UK economy. Although our economic benefit is most concentrated in London, as we have heard, the material benefit to each of our constituencies is marked, ranging from £460 per constituent in the north-east and Scotland to £330 per constituent in the south-east, and a staggering £2,200 in Sheffield Central. In spite of the clear and obvious benefits that international students bring to the UK, Government rhetoric on migration, including international students, has tarnished the UK’s reputation as the aspiration destination—a point made by the hon. Member for Glasgow North West (Carol Monaghan).

    I note the fiscal black hole caused by the recent Budget, which hovers at £40 billion to £50 billion. Let us put that into the context of the £26 billion that international students bring to the UK. It is important that we welcome international students and do all we can to enhance our reputation rather than to trash it. Two weeks ago it was suggested that the then Home Secretary was set to announce sweeping reforms that would have seen international student numbers capped and limits imposed on the number of dependents that international students can bring. Not long before that statement was due, she resigned. Policies such as those, circulating in a sea of chaos at the heart of Government, dent the UK’s international reputation and risk putting off international students. I urge the Minister to set out his Department’s commitment to international student numbers and to seek a commitment from the Home Secretary that international students will not be the latest front in her culture war.

    In contrast, Labour is fully committed to protecting, encouraging and advancing the interests of all students, including international students. A simple comparative approach between the replacement Erasmus+ scheme in Labour-run Wales and SNP-run Scotland shows that, where action is required, Labour will always put opportunity for our young people ahead of political manoeuvres. Earlier this year, the Labour Government in Wales launched Taith.

    Graham Stringer (in the Chair)

    Order. Can I ask the hon. Gentleman to bring his remarks to a conclusion, so I can bring in the Minister?

    Matt Western

    I will. Gambling on our young people’s prospects with politics is short sighted and narrow. The same could be said of the UK Government’s decision to withdraw from the European University Institute, a university based in Bologna that provided opportunities for young people, free of charge, to study for masters degrees and PhDs. Guided by our beliefs in opportunity, collaboration and partnership, Labour will support international students and continue to champion their worth, because, put simply, universities are forces for public good, and we should all champion and be proud of the international students who contribute to that good.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

    Matt Western – 2022 Tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

    The tribute made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 10 September 2022.

    Yesterday morning, I bumped into Helen, a constituent. She was visibly upset. It was an ungodly hour—quarter to 7—and she was walking in early for work at a local butcher’s shop in the heart of Royal Leamington Spa, a shop so well regarded that it holds a warrant to supply the royal household. She told me how she had dreaded the coming of this day. Like so many of us, she was shocked by the news. An hour later, as I stood in the queue for a train ticket, the guy in front of me, in jeans and a torn black leather jacket, confided that he was going to Buckingham Palace because he needed to be there. Those are two simple vignettes that, I am sure, were replayed up and down our country.

    For a person of such slight figure, the Queen seemed to stand above Presidents, Prime Ministers, and other Heads of State. It was not simply her longevity or her manner; there was invariably a genuine respect for her, for her experience and her wise counsel. Her virtues were many: dedication, diligence, integrity, respect, loyalty, humility, compassion and constancy, for at times of turmoil, she provided calm. At times of national self-doubt, she reassured us, throughout her reign and even before—in wartime, after various bombings and the Aberfan disaster, and then during the pandemic, when she proposed hope and that we would meet again. Her state visit to Ireland in 2011, where she made one of her most significant speeches, was the first visit there by any British monarch for 100 years. She also celebrated with us in moments of national joy, such as VE Day—imagine the liberation she felt at being able to be out on the streets with the people—that magic moment of presenting Bobby Moore with the Jules Rimet trophy, and dropping by for the Olympics in 2012. She was the woman for all seasons.

    Warwick and Leamington was blessed by her visits on three occasions. The first was in 1988, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s granting of the royal warrant to Leamington. In 1996, she visited Lord Leycester Hospital and Warwick castle, and she made her final visit in 2011, to open the Warwickshire Justice Centre. I am not sure whether she had time to drop by the butcher’s, but hopefully King Charles III will make time in the coming years.

    On behalf of the good people of Warwick, Leamington, Whitnash and villages, I pay tribute and offer our thanks for the life of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, for her dignity and commitment to our service, and express our sincere condolences to His Majesty King Charles III and all the family. Her late Majesty the Queen was not given to sentimentality. She would have wanted us to look forwards, and perhaps she would have put it this way: “The firm has a new boss.” May our late Queen rest in peace. God save the King.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    Matt Western – 2022 Speech in the No Confidence in the Government Motion

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.

    Lord Hague was right, David Cameron was right, and in June 2019 Max Hastings said:

    “I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister.”

    Now we have a Prime Minister squatting in No. 10 or partying at Chequers. If he needs help with moving, Gary’s Removals or Cleavers in my constituency are available. He is a Prime Minister who 10 days ago scrambled around trying to keep his premiership from sinking, but he rearranged his deckchair Cabinet, desperate to not go down as the worst Prime Minister in history.

    The Government still claim that they got the big calls right, but they are rewriting history. They sought to change the rules over Owen Paterson. They disposed of PPE without replacing it, ahead of what was to be the pandemic, then they blew £37 billion on the test and trace scheme and lost £4 billion to fraud. They bodged the Brexit deal, which has led to a 4% hit to the UK economy. They claimed that they were the lead nation in supporting Ukraine, but when Crimea was invaded in 2014 they refused to provide or sell weapons to that country, preferring instead to normalise relations with Russia. Now, with the economy in crisis, we have one in 15 suffering with covid, we have ambulance services and social care in crisis and we have the worst inflation in the G7 and the worst growth anywhere in the G20 except Russia.

    Now we have the Conservative party leadership contest, which is seemingly a triennial navel-gazing event. The public will not forgive this. We had it in 2016, in 2019 and now in 2022. This is like the three-year itch. I hate to disabuse this Government of their belief that they are irresistible to the public, but after Wakefield, after Chesham and Amersham, after North Shropshire and after Tiverton and Honiton, the public have stated, loud and clear, that they feel misled by this Government, who have lost the public trust. Two weeks ago, a YouGov survey found that, irrespective of the new leader, 57% of the public wanted a general election; 27% said that they were against that and 17% did not know. I fear that Conservative Members are not listening to the public. They are out of touch. They should give way to public opinion and give way to a general election. The public have no confidence in this Government, and I am on the side of the public as usual.

  • Matt Western – 2022 Speech on Standards in Public Life

    Matt Western – 2022 Speech on Standards in Public Life

    The speech made by Matt Western, the Labour MP for Warwick and Leamington, in the House of Commons on 7 June 2022.

    I welcome the debate because it is important. Like so many of my colleagues, I want to see the full package of recommendations in the committee’s report accepted in their entirety. We must collectively restore transparency and integrity, and improve the accountability of all our institutions. That is why an incoming Labour Government would clean up politics and restore standards in public life, starting by introducing an ethics and integrity commission—a single, independent body, removed from politicians, that would roll at least three existing bodies into one.

    Standards in public life should concern us all, as Members elected to public office. It is the highest honour, and the public rightly expect us to exercise the highest of public standards. When one of us breaches those standards, we all lose. One parliamentary scandal reflects poorly not just on the governing party of the time, but on our institutions, our democracy and our willingness to govern in the interests of the British people. That is why the Opposition have tabled a motion asking Members on both sides of the House to back the full package of the committee’s recommendations. We have done so because the ministerial code has been cracked by this Prime Minister and his Government. Until now, the code included the “overarching duty” of Ministers to comply with the law and to abide by the seven principles of public life: the Nolan principles, a set of ethical standards which apply to all holders of public office, with the general principle that

    “Ministers of the Crown are expected to maintain high standards of behaviour and to behave in a way that upholds the highest standards of propriety.”

    The ministerial code should be important in providing an essential backstop to prevent the degrading of public standards, as indeed it once did. When viewed alongside the Nolan principles—selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership—the code provides a key cornerstone for standards in our public life. What is most damaging is that, at a time when the Prime Minister’s lawbreaking and industrial-scale rule breaking at the heart of Government have finally been exposed, and at a time when he should have been tendering his resignation, he has instead rewritten the code. I am afraid that the Prime Minister is debasing the principles of public life before our very eyes. He is doing so through careful and calculated manipulation of the rules, bending them to suit his own interests. Now, following the publication of the Sue Gray report, in which she concluded that there were

    “failures of leadership and judgement in No 10 and the Cabinet Office”,

    he has concentrated even greater power in his own hands, while weakening standards in public life.

    Far from “resetting the culture” of No. 10, the Prime Minister promised following the report’s publication, perhaps most self-servingly of all, to end the long-standing principle that those who breach the ministerial code should have to resign automatically. That might save not only him, but all those who would be complicit in these acts. Let us recall that, back in November 2020, the then adviser Sir Alex Allan resigned his post after the Prime Minister disagreed with the finding that the Home Secretary had broken the code. We now have an absurd situation in which the person who breached the ministerial code carries on with impunity, while those who are victims of the breaches feel that their only way out is to resign. The Prime Minister has also failed to outline the concrete sanctions for major breaches of the code. Here again we have the ridiculous situation of the more major the breach, the less clear the sanction. On this side of the House, we support graduated sanctions for minor breaches of the code, but the cherry-picking of sanctions to suit the Prime Minister is plain politicking with standards in public life.

    By failing to guarantee the independence of the adviser or allow them to open investigations independently, the Prime Minister has gained a stranglehold over the whole process. He continues to retain the power to veto investigations, stripping the so-called independent adviser of any meaningful power. This is utterly wrong. In the Prime Minister’s latest diluted version, integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency and honesty have all disappeared from the face of the code. These changes, and the lack of changes, have hollowed out the ministerial code and created a centralised, authoritarian Government.

    I find it telling that, in one of the letters of no confidence published yesterday, the Prime Minister was accused of importing

    “elements of a presidential system of government that is entirely foreign to our constitution and law.”

    One of the consequences of a centralised presidential system is seemingly the power to do away with accountability, scrutiny and criticism. It is just a shame that more MPs from the Conservative side could not see that last night. If the ministerial code now no longer has the teeth it needs to hold Ministers to account, Labour’s call for an independent integrity and ethics commission becomes all the more powerful. Labour has shown before how committed we are to improving standards in public life and we will show it again. Back in 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair widened the terms of reference of the Committee on Standards in Public Life to cover the funding of political parties, and more recently my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) agreed to do the decent thing and resign if they were found to have breached the covid rules. That is probity, decency and trustworthiness.

    It is a sad day for high standards in public life when we have to resort to taking this out of politicians’ hands because the current governing party manipulates the process to suit its leader’s interests. A failure to act now will see a continuing erosion and degradation of standards in our public life. From Paterson to partygate to allegations of sexual assault, now is the time for Conservative Members to vote for this motion. They could restore public trust in our politics, which would be in all our interests and strengthen the foundations of our democratic institutions.

  • Matt Western – 2021 Comments on Turing Scheme

    Matt Western – 2021 Comments on Turing Scheme

    The comments made by Matt Western, the Shadow Universities Minister, on 4 August 2021.

    The Conservatives’ rhetoric on the Turing Scheme does not match the reality. Ministers are claiming to be targeting disadvantaged students, but their scheme provides no support to cover tuition fees which will make accessing this incredible opportunity impossible for many students.

    Boris Johnson has yet again created confusion for students and chaos for providers, by breaking his promise to keep the UK in the Erasmus+ programme. Subjecting the Turing Scheme to future spending decisions will create financial uncertainty for organisations and young people. It’s being reduced to the status of Erasmus minus.

    Ministers must ensure the Turing Scheme maintains the UK’s status as an attractive study destination for international students, protecting and promoting our global standing.

  • Matt Western – 2021 Comments on the National Student Survey Results

    Matt Western – 2021 Comments on the National Student Survey Results

    The comments made by Matt Western, the Shadow Universities Minister, on 15 July 2021.

    The Conservatives’ failure to control the spread of Covid and in letting successive variants into the UK has denied students the university experience they deserve.

    Universities have worked tirelessly to protect students learning throughout the pandemic, but the Government has let them down with late and inadequate guidance and pitiful student hardship support which has trailed far behind the Welsh Labour Government.

    Instead of supporting students and creating the opportunities young people need, the Conservatives are wasting time on unnecessary legal protections which would enable Holocaust Deniers and anti-vaxxers to sue universities if they are denied a platform to spread their ideas across campuses. These are clearly the wrong priorities.

  • Matt Western – 2021 Comments on Free Speech at Universities

    Matt Western – 2021 Comments on Free Speech at Universities

    The comments made by Matt Western, the Shadow Universities Minister, on 17 May 2021.

    The Conservatives are out of step with public opinion.

    Ministers have created a row over freedom of speech which panders to those whose sole aim is to hurt and offend.

    The Government must explain why they are determined to press ahead with such unpopular and damaging plans.