Tag: Meg Hillier

Meg Hillier – 2025 Response to the Spring Statement

The response made by Meg Hillier, the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, in the House of Commons on 26 March 2025.

My right hon. Friend inherited a very difficult challenge when she became Chancellor of the Exchequer last July, and she is absolutely right that the books need to balance. This is not other people’s money we are spending, but taxpayers’ money—our constituents’ hard-earned money—and she is right to be tough as Chancellor. We look forward to quizzing her at the Treasury Committee next week, and I am sure she is looking forward to it just as much.

The Chancellor announced an extra £2 billion a year in capital spending, and she talked about extra defence spending. Could she give some more detail about where she hopes that extra £2 billion a year will go?

Rachel Reeves

I thank my hon. Friend for that question, and I do indeed look forward to attending the Treasury Committee next week. I was pleased to serve on the Treasury Committee in the past, and it is a pleasure to give evidence to it.

We will set out in the spending review—my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary will set out in the spending review—the allocation of the additional capital money. However, I was able to announce today the £2.2 billion for defence from next year, as well as the £2 billion as a downpayment to build the affordable and social housing that we need. Those are two examples of the priorities of this Government to get Britain building and to secure our national security.

March 26, 2025
Meg Hillier – 2024 Speech on the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

The speech made by Meg Hillier, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, in the House of Commons on 29 November 2024.

In my brief remarks today, I want to touch on principle, policy and practice. We have to be very clear that we are having a debate not just on the principle, but on the Bill. The principle at stake is that we would cross a Rubicon whereby someone who is terminally ill, according to the definition in the Bill, is assisted by the state to die. That is a fundamental change in the relationship between the state and the citizen, and the patient and their doctor. If we have a scintilla of doubt about allowing the state that power, we should vote against the Bill today.

Like most of us, I came into politics partly to stand up for the vulnerable, and we have heard heartbreaking stories today about those vulnerable at the point of death. We have also heard—and I concur completely with my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott)—about those who are vulnerable for other reasons and who could be coerced or persuaded down this route.

I have had the privilege of being around the hospice movement for nearly 50 years, as my father established one of the first national health service hospices in this country. I saw what he did as a doctor in a world where death was not talked about, where surgeons would say, “We’ll whip this bit out and you’ll be fine.” He would be one of the first to have to tell the patient that they were actually going to die. The work that he did, on the back of giants such as Dame Cicely Saunders, is something we should be proud of. We were the first country in the world to recognise palliative care as a separate profession, and some of the tragedies we have heard about today arose from a failure in that system. A failure in palliative care and support is not a reason to continue.

I have personal experience of this. Many hon. Members will remember when my daughter was very ill a few years ago. I had not intended to speak about this today, but she was admitted to hospital as a teenager with acute pancreatitis. The Bill would not have covered her, but I did not know for five days—in fact, many months—whether she would live or die. For those first five days she did not sleep and she did not eat, and she was crying out in pain. I saw what good medicine can do. It palliated that pain and got her to a place where, although she was unable to eat for two and a half months, she was saved and her pain was managed. Our best friends were the pain nurses and the anaesthetists. I have other examples of another family member, but I do not have time to go into them today.

I hope my daughter forgives me for raising her personal situation in the House today—

Lola McEvoy

Will my hon. Friend give way? I pay tribute to her for the strength that she is showing. Indeed, I pay tribute to all Members on both sides of the House who are dealing with this very difficult issue. Does she agree that we already have assisted dying in this country? Legislation already allows for choice, proving that people would be able to die at home with carefully administered, practitioner-led pain management. Does she agree that the inconsistency of this application of good pain management at the end of life, causing compassionate legislators to feel that the only option is to vote for the Bill, is a failure of our existing national health system, and does she—

Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)

Order. Interventions will have to be short in this debate because many Members wish to speak, so perhaps that is enough.

Dame Meg Hillier

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. She is absolutely right. When we see the system working, it is great, but some of what we have heard today has referred to a failure of the system. That cannot be a reason for us to accept the Bill today. For more than 30 years I have been scrutinising the policies and actions of public bodies and seeing the mistakes that they make, both in the care sector when I was in local government and more recently as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee.

Mr Adnan Hussain (Blackburn) (Ind)

The time for us to make this decision is wrong, frankly. At a time when 44,000 terminally ill pensioners are set to lose their winter fuel allowance—indeed, many of them have lost it—we are discussing whether we will pass a Bill, a state-sanctioned Bill, dealing with a taboo that many of us are reluctant to talk about.

Dame Meg Hillier

Where I do agree with the hon. Gentleman is that the time is not right. We have not had the proper discussions about palliative care. Some of us have been trying to talk about it for many years, and we need to ensure that this debate does not stop today, but the Bill must stop today. It is not developed to deliver the palliative care resource that we need. I do want to touch on the policy, but let me first return to the point that I was making before the hon. Gentleman’s intervention.

We have seen many failures in the system, including contaminated blood, and whistleblowing in the NHS repeatedly shows such failures. There is great trust among those who support the Bill that these safeguards will deliver. I will not go into the details, because others have already done so, and I am sure that many more will, but we made coercive control illegal in 2015, and although the Bill refers to safeguards, I fear that that will not pick up coercive control. When we ruled it to be illegal, we thought that was a moment of progress in the House.

Given the time, I will now move on to some of the practical challenges. My constituents are struggling to see doctors face to face, and seeing the same doctor twice seems like a miracle in today’s Britain. My right hon. Friend the Health Secretary is trying to sort it out, but it will take a long time. We need to sort out our battling health service, we need to support palliative care, and we need to discuss what a good death is. Cicely Saunders campaigned and triumphed to ensure that we had one of the best hospice movements in the world.

If Members have any doubt in their minds about the impact of the Bill on people who do not have the same capacity as those who are talking about this in the television and radio studios, they should think of those in my constituency who have poor English, or the woman who came to see me a month ago with terrible pain in her gall bladder. Removing it would have been a simple daytime operation, but she did not understand what the doctor had told her, and she was not going to have her gall bladder taken out because she did not know what it meant to be without a gall bladder. Let me say this to those Members: if someone who was English, a bright woman in her 60s, was unable to challenge what was said to her and to have that conversation with a doctor, just think what passing the Bill today would mean for many more vulnerable people.

I thank the House for its indulgence.

December 3, 2024
Meg Hillier – 2024 Speech on the Loyal Address

The speech made by Meg Hillier, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, in the House of Commons on 17 July 2024.

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), but I confess I am a little disappointed with him because today he walked into the Chamber. He could at least have tried a bungee jump or maybe freewheeling on a bicycle. I applaud him for his efforts in the campaign; they kept us all entertained and, looking at the number of Members on the Liberal Democrat Benches, clearly paid dividends.

I welcome and thank my hon. Friends who proposed and seconded the Humble Address, but I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) that he may be the youngest of eight, but I am the second of 10. New Members of the House will hear a lot about Big Brother, but I can tell them that they have a big sister here to support them; I am sure my hon. Friend will support them too. After 19 years in this place, I know my way around a bit, although I too still get lost, so they should not be worried about that.

I was delighted to hear the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi). I first came across her when she was a Member of the London Assembly. I knew then that she had something special about her and we saw that here today.

I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I spent nearly a decade chairing the Public Accounts Committee in this place, in the last Parliament and the previous two. In that role, I saw many egregious examples of incompetence, bungling and waste, whether it was water companies, school buildings with reinforced concrete and other things falling down, the running sore of rail infrastructure, the national embarrassment of defence procurement and the scandal of personal protective equipment procurement during covid. Time and again, we saw Government bungles, poorly drafted contracts, lack of oversight, dodged responsibility, endless excuses, and the taxpayer picking up the tab. No wonder people were so angry at the election. No wonder they voted for change and for my right hon. and learned Friend the Prime Minister.

Now the true extent of the Tory mess is coming to light. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has revealed, it is even worse than we thought. She has opened the books, looked under the bonnet and seen the true extent of the mess that is now for a Labour Government to clear up. The previous Government partied, squabbled and helped their mates, but they did not fix the roof when the sun shone. They trashed the joint. From austerity to the PPE scandal and Trussonomics—remember that?—they weakened the fundamentals of our economy and stretched our public services to breaking point.

In my annual report, which was one of my last reports as the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, I listed what I called the “big nasties”, some of which the Chancellor is revealing to us now: 700,000 pupils are in schools that are not fit for purpose; there were in fact far fewer new hospitals than the 40 that were much vaunted and they were never going to be delivered to the promised timetable; and the gaping hole in our defence budget. I certainly applaud the approach of this Government, and it seems some consensus from the Opposition Benches, that we need to see an increase in defence spending.

The consequences of the mess that has been left behind by the previous Government are human. According to the House of Commons Library, nearly one fifth of children in my borough of Hackney live in absolute poverty. Four in 10 children in Hackney live in poverty after housing costs are taken into account, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s recent figures. My constituency is in the top 5% of English constituencies with children who are income deprived. That is the shameful legacy of 14 years of failure.

In one of the world’s greatest and richest cities—a bus ride from the financial powerhouse of Liverpool Street—no child should be cold or hungry, or lack a winter coat or decent shoes. Schools in Hackney have kit rooms for the children who turn up without the requisite uniform and lend it for the day in return for a token like their Oyster card. No parent should be having to skip meals to feed their kids, which is happening too often in Hackney and elsewhere in the country. No child should be arriving at school with a rumbling tummy, which is why I welcome the breakfast clubs that we already have in Hackney and the fact that one of the first acts of this Labour Government will be to make sure that every child in primary school has a decent breakfast.

When we talk about stagnant wages, low productivity, flattening growth, lack of investment in skills and schools, the abolition of Sure Start, and the gig economy, there is this human cost. Right now, in a Hackney school, there is a hungry child whose huge potential is being wasted, whose opportunities are stunted and whose life chances are hobbled. When I first arrived in this place 19 years ago, I had to tell people about the good things that were going on in Hackney, because people had written off my borough as a poor and deprived area where things did not happen. Now people think of the Shoreditch hipster, the tech companies and the city fringe, but underneath that there is this huge poverty and opportunity being stunted for our children. This is the mess that this Government now have to clear up.

Another example of that is the housing crisis. A safe, warm and affordable place in which to live should be, and is, a basic right. We all need a roof over our heads before we can do anything else in our life—whether it be study, work, or bringing up our families—yet, after 14 years, my constituents face a housing crisis whatever the tenure.

According to Hackney council, the median household income in Hackney is just under £36,500 a year, yet the median house price in my constituency—which has doubled since 2010—is £610,000. For those who have not caught up on the maths yet, this means that a house costs more than 16 times the median household income. According to the Land Registry, the average first-time buyer in Hackney paid just under £600,000: over half a million pounds for a first-time buyer. Well, that’s not most first-time buyers, is it? It is the lucky few who either have a very good job, or have got help from the bank of mum and dad or other family members. I do not deny them that help, but it should be an opportunity available to all.

It is utterly ridiculous that we are in this situation. Young professionals with double incomes are simply unable to afford a deposit to get a place of their own and are often stuck living with family members into their 30s. Others are forced into rented accommodation, with no security of tenure and rents so high that there is no spare money to save to get on the housing ladder.

According to the work of the Public Accounts Committee, around 13% of privately rented properties—589,000 properties—pose a serious threat to health, so landlords are getting the rent but landing their tenants in hospital with lung diseases, mental illness or physical injury. I hope the Chancellor’s ears are pricking up, because the Public Accounts Committee estimated that this situation costs the NHS £340 million a year. That goes to the broader point: economic inefficiency, child poverty, the housing crisis and failing public services all cost us more money. The economics of decline is an expensive business, but—we see hope now, with this Labour Government—investment in jobs, homes, schools, skills, roads, the NHS and tackling crime saves the public money down the line. As I was often saying when I had the honour of holding the role of Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, a penny of waste is theft from working people’s pockets, and a fair economy is also an efficient one.

I warmly welcome the measures in this King’s Speech under a Labour Government; how nice it is to say those words after 14 years. Since 5 July my colleagues in the Cabinet—I was about to say the shadow Cabinet; old habits die hard—including Labour Secretaries of State, have moved into action from the inertia of what went before, and that means that we are on the road to recovery. It is going to be a long haul, but I welcome the measures to support start-ups and tech companies, particularly as I represent Shoreditch, where so many are based; to revive skills; to modernise our health services, particularly prioritising mental health; to get more teachers into Hackney schools; and, crucially, to build more affordable homes.

We need many affordable homes in inner London, in constituencies such as mine, where social housing is the only option for so many people. Only last week, a woman came to my surgery who had four children in a one-bedroom flat, and her elderly, sick father had had to come to live with them. That is how the family lived—four children in a one-bedroom flat—and it is not uncommon at all. We need to drive change to deliver housing around the country, but particularly in the inner city.

I also recognise the lead and step change in tackling the issue of net zero to decarbonise our economy with investment in renewables, insulation, carbon capture, and green jobs—things I have examined a lot over the last decade and on which we have seen the previous Government fail so often.

Above all, I welcome the commitment of His Majesty’s Government—our Labour Government—to kickstart growth in our economy. Without steady, sustainable economic growth and without the proceeds of growth fairly shared across the nation, we will continue our national decline. Instead, in this King’s Speech, we are offered a hopeful prospectus for change, the prospect of progress, and a new sense of national renewal and hope after 14 years. We know it will not be easy, nor will it be as quick as we all impatiently want it to be. As a former Minister and having been a member of the Public Accounts Committee for 13 years, I know that modernisation and reform can be frustratingly slow. I have seen many good ambitions frustrated by poor delivery.

If I may proffer a word of advice for those on the Treasury Bench, finding themselves newly surrounded by eager officials, many of whom came in front of my Committee, and red boxes, it is this: “Please stay focused. Look up at that horizon. Think of the people who sent us here, who voted for that change you want to deliver and we all want to see. Keep an eye on that guiding goal of growth. Test every proposition that comes across your desk against that simple question, ‘Does this promote or hinder growth?’”

Successful government, as the Prime Minister said, is mission led. Of course we want to tackle poverty, build homes and transform our NHS, but the main mission is growth, because without that we cannot deliver any of the others.

July 17, 2024
Meg Hillier – 2023 Speech on the Loyal Address

The speech made by Meg Hillier, the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch, in the House of Commons on 7 November 2023.

Before I start, I must declare an interest—I am a leaseholder and, as per my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, I am a landlord—since I want to comment on both those issues.

First, however, I congratulate the right hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Sir Robert Goodwill) and the hon. Member for Stroud (Siobhan Baillie) on proposing and seconding the Humble Address. Both were entertaining, and it is one of the pleasures of the parliamentary year to sit back, relax and have a few laughs. I thank them both for giving us that as we move on to the serious business.

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). I think she needs to join me on my campaign for slow politics, because clearly we have the same agenda here. Some of the best political decisions are those where we are looking 10, 20 or even 30 years ahead, and she is right that we need to be looking at net zero now and planning ahead. Unfortunately, though, this King’s Speech, and indeed the record of this Government led by the party of which she is a member, are thin gruel in that respect.

We have in this King’s Speech the offerings of what has really now become a zombie Government. I do not use that word lightly—I am not just a soundbite woman—but in a Parliament, where we too often break early because there is not enough business to carry on, there are many things that could have been in this King’s Speech to deliver for the people of Hackney South and Shoreditch and for those up and down the country.

It has to be acknowledged that this King’s Speech is not landing out of the blue in a new parliamentary term; it comes on the back of 13 years of this Government, who have led through chaos and created chaos. Austerity has left a long shadow and a lack of resilience in our public sector, and it is telling now. The wage freezes brought in by the former Chancellor George Osborne are now hitting and have, with the cost of living, created a perfect storm for our constituents up and down the country.

On the handling of Brexit, which the right hon. Member for Maidenhead knows about only too painfully, it was poorly delivered in the end, in the hands of her successor, and none of the promises of the early days of that campaign was delivered. We on the Public Accounts Committee see that through our work. We have produced 12 reports on the delivery of Brexit, all of which found the Government wanting. We have seen gimmicks at Budgets. Again, the former Chancellor was one of the worst for that—or best, depending on our point of view. The lifetime ISA, for example, has withered on the vine as a novel financial product that was not kept up, either by that Chancellor or by subsequent Chancellors. I will touch on that in a moment.

Of course, we cannot look at the King’s Speech without mentioning the premiership of the right hon. Member for South West Norfolk (Elizabeth Truss), who crashed the economy and has caused havoc in the lives of our constituents. In this Chamber, on these green Benches, it can sometimes seem that we are remote, but week in, week out I am on doorsteps in Hackney South and Shoreditch seeing the reality of people struggling to pay for the food that they need, living without food, going to the food bank when they can, and living in massively overcrowded conditions.

It is not long covid that is leading to a lot of those issues; it is long austerity—that lack of resilience in public services and the public sector; that lack of investment in schools, hospitals and other areas such as defence. Basically, most capital spending was frozen or reduced, and that has led to a growing problem. Whichever party is in power after the next general election, which cannot come soon enough, will have—to borrow the words of Laurel and Hardy—another fine mess to deal with in so many areas of the public sector. The Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, regularly examines capital spending, as well as day-to-day spending, and we see the problems. Report after report highlights that issues were missed or not dealt with, and that we are now reaping the problems.

This King’s Speech and this Prime Minister promise change, but we see nothing of that in what has been announced. There is no real hope here for renters or those who want to buy their own home, and no plans to tackle poverty and to really level up. In Hackney South and Shoreditch—in fact, across the whole borough of Hackney—one in two children lives in poverty. In London in 2023, we have that level of poverty. In the borough of Hackney as a whole, which comprises two constituencies, 28% of people are private renters, 28% are owner-occupiers and 44% are social renters, while 77% of properties—nearly four in five—were leasehold properties, which means that leasehold reform is of particular interest to me and my constituents. The median house price in Hackney South and Shoreditch is £600,000. That is more than 16 times the median Hackney household income, so home ownership is out of reach for generation rent and for the people living in social housing, which is massively overcrowded, often with four children to a bedroom and many teenagers sharing bedrooms with their mothers because there is nowhere else to sleep. They have no opportunity to get on the housing ladder or to rent privately.

That brings me to the lifetime ISA. I have not seen the detail of the King’s Speech because I came here to talk about it, but the lifetime ISA cap for first-time buyers is still £450,000. The average first-time buyer in Hackney paid £595,000 in August this year, so that cap does not reach anywhere near what is needed. Even the Government’s proposed solutions do not keep up with demand, and their complete detachment from the reality of the choices that people have to make is a real issue.

Sir Peter Bottomley

I have two brief points. First, will the hon. Lady join me in commending Martin Lewis for spelling this out on MoneySavingExpert.com? Ministers ought to pay attention to it. Secondly, through her, may I say that I too am a leaseholder? I do not think I am affected by the Government’s proposals, but I should have put it on the record.

Dame Meg Hillier

The Father of the House and I obviously share support for the work that Martin Lewis does in bringing these consumer finance issues to the mainstream and managing to explain things that people think are complicated in an incredibly simple way.

No Chancellor should make these policies up at the Dispatch Box, because they wither. The Chancellor themself loses interest, as do subsequent Chancellors and the Treasury. The child trust fund has not kept up since the Government withdrew it, and there are many other examples like that.

I have a lot of constituents who are trapped in the private rented sector, with no security. The average two-bed rent in Hackney was just £2 shy of £2,000 a month this year. We have a huge challenge in that there is no security for those residents, including the security that is needed to bring a family up, because they get moved on far too quickly, yet we have seen the lack of the promised abolition of section 21 evictions in the Renters (Reform) Bill, which was introduced just before the King’s Speech and is expected to continue in this Session of Parliament.

The reason is that the courts are backed up. That is a valid reason, but whose fault is it that the courts are backed up? It is due to a lack of investment by this Government over the years. It is not just covid, because as we have highlighted on the Public Accounts Committee, the delays in the courts were there before covid hit; covid had an impact, but the delays were there. We will not be back to pre-covid court delay times until 2025. It is no wonder that private renters are living in despair. The promise of this measure being delivered has been dangled repeatedly, and once again we see it whisked away, leaving tenants with no security and no knowledge of whether they can make a house a home.

We have a big shortage of social housing in Hackney. We have 8,351 households on the wait list for council housing in Hackney. That is after stringent rules were brought in to reduce it, so that people had some hope. The current waiting time for social housing in Hackney is about 12 years for a three-bedroom property. It is simply unacceptable.

Renting is out of reach, home ownership is out of reach and there is not enough house building, which is why I welcome my party’s proposal to build significantly more homes. The Under-Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley) is on the Front Bench. He knows, because he does the maths and he has been a member of the Public Accounts Committee, that even the Government’s downward revised targets for affordable housing have not been met. They set a target and had to reduce it, and even that reduced target has not been met. That is happening while people are living in overcrowded and difficult conditions.

Leasehold reform is oft promised, but nothing has yet been delivered, and I would like to see it voted through. As a Labour and Co-op MP, I would like to see a move towards commonhold. There is work being done on that in other countries that we can build on. It is not a quick path—it is slow to deliver this—but that is another reason we need to get moving and start on it now. I commend the Father of the House for his pioneering work to champion the issues of leaseholders in this place.

The King’s Speech talks about delivering on the NHS workforce plan. Of course, the Public Accounts Committee took an interest in that as well. I welcome the NHS workforce plan, because it is a good start, but it is only funding the training of people listed in the NHS workforce plan for the first five years. There is no plan or long-term strategy for how we fund those health professionals who are working in frontline healthcare and hospitals, delivering for patients, which will cause a problem down the line. It is another fine mess waiting for any future Government.

I welcome discussion about how artificial intelligence is handled. I agree with the right hon. Member for Maidenhead about making sure that we keep the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 up to date with how the modern digital world is working. We need to do that in a calm, professional, cross-party way, because this should not be a political football. There will be difficult choices at the margins about—rightly—protecting civil liberties, rights and access to data and about protecting the most vulnerable in our society. We need to make sure that, in the heat of an election year, that discussion is had sensibly.

I also welcome the Prime Minister’s personal commitment to reduce smoking, which I think will be a game changer in public health for our children’s generation. I was pleased with the proposal on safeguarding of the future of football. It sounds like a bold promise, but I would like to see more detail. As a Co-op MP, I am a long-standing champion of Supporters Direct, which enables fans to part-own their club. If we go down that route, I am happy to support the Government, but we will wait to see the exact details. I am pleased that unlicensed pedicabs will finally be dealt with. I have worked with the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) to tackle that issue, and it is time that it is dealt with.

We have had too many broken promises from the Government. We now need delivery, but the King’s Speech does not do that. We have chaos in this country. People are struggling with the cost of living and we need change. Frankly, we need a general election. We need opportunity and hope, and the only way we are going to get that is with a Labour Government.

November 8, 2023
Meg Hillier – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Meg Hillier on 2015-10-28.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the appropriateness of the time taken to secure appeal hearings at the First-tier Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber.

Mr Shailesh Vara

The most recently published average time for appeals to be disposed of by the First-tier Tribunal is 30 weeks between April and June 2015. This compares to an average of 29 weeks in 2014/15. HM Courts & Tribunals Service remains confident that it continues to have the capacity to deal with the volume of appeals it expects to receive. We are preparing to put additional court time in place to make sure waiting times do not increase.

January 1, 2023

Meg Hillier – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Meg Hillier on 2015-12-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many disclosure and barring applications have been sent to the Metropolitan Police in each year of the last five years; and what the average time taken by the Metropolitan Police to process checks for Disclosure and Barring Service applications was in each of those years.

Karen Bradley

The number of applications that the Disclosure and Barring Service sent to the Metropolitan Police in each of the last five years is set out in the follwoing table, together with the Metropolitan Police’s average processing time for each of those years.

Time Period	Volume Despatched	Turnaround Time (Days)
November 2010 to October 2011	336,358	68.68
November 2011 to October 2012	207,571	33.77
November 2012 to October 2013	191,273	26.95
November 2013 to October 2014	194,984	40.81
November 2014 to October 2015	192,950	65.44

January 1, 2023

Meg Hillier – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Meg Hillier on 2015-12-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) and (b) Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) hearing centres have closed in (i) London and (ii) the UK in the last five years.

Mr Shailesh Vara

No First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) or Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) hearing centres in London, or the UK, have closed within the last five years.

January 1, 2023
Meg Hillier – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Meg Hillier on 2015-12-07.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) First-tier Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) and (b) Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber) hearing centres are projected to close in (i) London and (ii) the UK in the next five years.

Mr Shailesh Vara

There are currently no plans to close any First-tier Tribunal or Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum hearing centres.

January 1, 2023
Meg Hillier – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Meg Hillier on 2015-12-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what support her Department provides for community solar projects.

Andrea Leadsom

This Government is proud to support the community energy sector. We have provided £2m to support over 100 community groups through the Urban and Rural Community Energy Funds and community solar projects are able to access funding. We also provided £885,000 to Bristol City Council to develop a Local Authority Best Practice Programme, including community solar projects. The DECC-funded online Community Energy Hub helps communities across the UK share knowledge and information on community energy projects.

Community solar projects, up to 5MW in capacity, can also currently seek support through the Feed-in Tariff scheme. The scheme provides a generation tariff for the electricity generated by the installation and a tariff for electricity exported to the grid. These payments are in addition to bill savings for those projects that consume electricity generated onsite.

January 1, 2023
Meg Hillier – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Meg Hillier on 2016-01-04.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will review the funding received by police forces operating in areas where crime levels are rising.

Mike Penning

Police reform is working and crime is falling. According to the independent Crime Survey for England and Wales, crime has fallen by more than a quarter since 2010. This is the lowest level since the survey began in 1981.

The Government has protected overall police spending in real terms over the Spending Review period, when precept is taken into account. This is an increase of up to £900 million in cash terms by 2019/20. Funding allocations for individual police force areas were published in the Provisional Police Grant Report on 17 December.

January 1, 2023