The comments made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for East Leeds, on Twitter on 31 October 2022.
What a terrible decision by the BBC to interview Nigel Farage over the Manston migrant centre.
What the hell does he have to offer in this debate?
This is the time for a serious discussion on the impact of the Tory’s cruel immigration policies. Not more myths and scapegoating.
The comments made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for East Leeds, on Twitter on 23 October 2022.
With Boris Johnson pulling out of the race, Rishi Sunak could well be Prime Minister by Monday evening.
So Parliament’s richest MP will be the one unleashing huge cuts to our public services.
What a sick joke. General Election now!
The speech made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, in the House of Commons on 8 September 2022.
Six months ago, households faced energy bills of £1,300. Today, we are told that doubling that and fixing prices at £2,500 is the best we can do to help. It is not. People were struggling with their energy bills last winter and many more will struggle this winter, too, with prices doubled. Private energy profits are being put before the needs of people all while energy firms are set to make £170 billion in excess profits. This is a huge transfer of wealth with big corporations hoovering up even more of the wealth in society, paid for by millions of ordinary people. The new Prime Minister, a former Shell employee, has been frank: energy firms, in her view, should be able to keep those undeserved excess profits.
A different principle should guide us. The companies should not be allowed to make a single penny from excess profits in this crisis. That will require a package of measures from public ownership to full windfall taxes and caps on the prices at which North sea oil and gas can be sold. That should all be guided by the principle that energy should be run for the public good. The public support these policies. There are growing movements for them. The debate is not going away; today has not solved this crisis.
Today’s announcement on energy prices, without a windfall tax, does not limit the profits of the North sea oil and gas companies, and it is at great social cost. The claim that we need to protect the profits of North sea oil and gas firms to guarantee their investment is completely bogus, because they were investing when they were making their normal profits just a few months ago. They were never expecting this windfall. Taxes on oil and gas companies overseas, including in Norway’s North sea fields, are much higher than they are here, even at current windfall tax rates.
Energy security cannot be achieved by making ourselves more dependent on the expensive fossil fuels that have driven this crisis. We do not need more North sea exploration. We do not need fracking. Let us be clear: that gas will not be cheaper. It will be sold at world prices and, anyway, gas is nine times more expensive than renewables. Retrofitting would save people money and reduce our gas use, so the greater reliance on fossil fuels is quite simply ideological. The Government are using the crisis to undermine their own inadequate climate responsibilities.
The profits of fossil fuel companies are being put before the people and before the planet. This approach is quite simply failing people who are today hit by higher bills, and I am afraid that it will also fail future generations hit by climate catastrophe.
The speech made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, in the House of Commons on 18 July 2022.
Three minutes is not enough to sum up or express the misery, suffering and hardship caused to people in my constituency and across this country by this rotten Government. Of course I have no confidence in the Government, and of course my constituents have no confidence in the Government. They saw through the Prime Minister from the very start, and millions and millions more people are seeing through the Prime Minister. Just think of all the suffering that has been caused in the last 12 years of this Government to those who have had the bedroom tax inflicted on them and those who have been humiliated with the indignity of the appalling unfair fitness to work tests, where they are signed off as if they were fit to work when they are not. Think of the people deported from this country during the Windrush scandal. Think of all the people who died unnecessarily because of covid. The Government brag about their covid response, but I think it is some kind of sick joke. We were told once that 20,000 covid deaths would be a “good” outcome. There have now been more than 200,000 deaths. If we had had the same rate as Germany, Japan, Canada or Australia, tens of thousands of people would still be alive, but the truth is that to the Government, that does not seem to matter.
The Government have attacked hard-won civil liberties and hard-won democratic rights. There has been anti-trade union bile and more anti-trade union legislation, making it harder and harder for trade unions to take strike action legally. We have the Government’s draconian attacks on the right to peaceful protest. They have also pushed forward a voter suppression strategy through the introduction of voter ID.
It is good riddance to this disgraceful, law-breaking Prime Minister, but the truth is that it is not one politician or one Prime Minister who has created the situation in our country where there are more food banks than branches of McDonald’s. It is not one Prime Minister who has created the hostile environment for migrants and for those who people presume are migrants. It is the whole rotten system. The truth is that, over the past 12 years, we have seen what the reality of Conservative Government means to people in our country. The reason that Conservative Members decided to get rid of him is that they want to push forward with even more unpopular policies, pushing down living standards and letting the billionaires and the oil and gas giants off the hook. They merely want to find somebody who has the political capital to push forward that abhorrent policy, and that is why we need a general election.
The statement made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, in the House of Commons on 16 June 2022.
I beg to move,
That this House has considered the fifth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire.
I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate, and I especially thank those MPs from across the House, including Back-Bench MPs from the governing party and all the Opposition parties, who supported its application. It is essential that we have a moment like this in the House to remember the events at Grenfell, to mark the worst domestic fire in living memory, to commemorate the 72 people killed and to acknowledge all those whose lives were changed for the worse that day. Such a debate is an important moment of reflection. It should also be an opportunity for the House to show that it is learning the lessons of that atrocity by taking the action needed to prevent it from ever happening again.
I ask the Government for an annual debate in Government time when the House can receive and debate reports on progress made on the Grenfell fire inquiry recommendations and to discuss changes to our justice system and the changes that must be made to make homes safe if we are to show that lessons are truly being learned. If we allow the memory of Grenfell to slip away, there is a real risk that the changes needed to prevent another Grenfell will slip away with it.
I want to focus on two areas: the need for justice for all those killed, for the survivors, for the bereaved families and for the wider community; and the changes that we need to ensure that it never happens again. Five years on from the fire, it is clear that bereaved families and survivors feel deeply let down by our justice system, and they have every right to do so. They are rightly asking, “Where are the criminal charges? Why are those who made the decisions that turned Grenfell into a deathtrap still walking free, and why, five years on, have those who ignored residents’ warnings not been held to account?”
The deep sense of injustice goes all the way back to day one of the atrocity. Hours after the fire, a public inquiry was announced, even though families had wanted the criminal investigation to go first. I remind the House that, while bereaved and affected families were mourning their loved ones, seeking a new place to live and trying to continue to bring up their children and look after their parents, they had to launch a public campaign over the nature of the public inquiry to stop it from being done to them rather than with them. They were initially refused the simplest of demands for the public inquiry to be led by a broad-based panel; a demand to help them have trust in it. There had to be protests, marches and petitions signed by more than 150,000 people to get the House to even debate such an inquiry panel before it was belatedly granted.
As shadow Justice Secretary during the fire and its aftermath, I was privileged to work with the families as they campaigned for that simple demand, but I remember feeling sick to my stomach that their energies had to go into fighting for something that should be a basic right.
From the very outset, the confidence of the survivors and bereaved family members in the justice system was damaged and it is clear that it has not been repaired. As Grenfell United said this week:
“For 5 years we’ve had to endure a justice system that protects the powerful. A system that prevents justice. Whilst this system exists, we face the same unachievable battle as the many before us. From Aberfan, to Hillsborough, justice has been denied & #Grenfell is no different. They left us to search for answers, they mocked us publicly. Now, they stand in the way of justice. We must pave a new way forward. We must hold those responsible to account.”
We know that this experience of our justice system is not a one-off. Hillsborough and Bloody Sunday are just two examples of when the state blocked the truth and justice for years, sowing distrust and undermining justice.
Going forward, one way to show that lessons have been learnt would be to make changes, so that families do not have to fight for years more than necessary in inquiries to get justice. For many, the history of inquiries in this country often gives the impression that they are there to slow down justice and deny justice. We should implement the Hillsborough law, backed by the Grenfell families, as a matter of the utmost urgency. It would not address all the issues that led to such appalling treatment of the Grenfell families, but it would ensure that in future the scales of justice are not so tilted against ordinary families and in favour of public authorities who hold all power. But of course, true justice will only be done when those responsible, be they politicians, officials or company decision makers, are fully held to account, including through the criminal courts.
We have heard a lot in recent days about ensuring that this atrocity never happens again, but the Grenfell families believe that, five years on, another Grenfell is a very real possibility. Already at the inquiry there has been a mountain of evidence of how profits were prioritised over safety, how privatisation and deregulation watered down building standards, and how cuts and austerity contributed. All that must be tackled if the words “never again” are not just platitudes from politicians. The lessons from the inquiry must be implemented in full, however uncomfortable that is for the Government. But there are already deep concerns that lessons will be ignored and that they already are being ignored.
The Government, so far, have failed to implement a single recommendation directed at them from the first phase of the inquiry. Worse still, they are actively rejecting some of the recommendations. One key recommendation from the inquiry’s first phase was to make it mandatory for owners of high-rise flats to arrange personal emergency evacuation plans, known as PEEPs, for disabled people. Of the 37 disabled people living at Grenfell, 15 lost their lives—41%—yet the Home Office recently rejected that recommendation. It is a total scandal that once again profits seem to be being put before life, with the Government labelling this recommendation impractical and too costly. That breaks a previous Government promise to implement the recommendations in full. What is the point of an inquiry if the recommendations are then rejected?
Peter Apps, the journalist who has perhaps best covered housing and fire safety in the aftermath of Grenfell, says that that happened after the Home Office had one-to-one conversations with building owners and ignored its own consultation responses. No wonder Edward Daffarn, a Grenfell resident who warned of a catastrophic fire months before it happened, says that the Government are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.
Sarah Jones (Croydon Central) (Lab)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I am sorry that I will not be able to make a speech in this debate as I will be in Committee.
Does my hon. Friend agree that it was quite extraordinary that plans for people with disabilities to leave in the event of a fire were not already in place and legally required in the first place? It is even more extraordinary that, with the evidence that emerged during the inquiry that such plans were needed, the Government, having said repeatedly in this House that they would implement the findings of the Grenfell inquiry in full, are now backtracking and putting at risk our most vulnerable people, which we find quite unacceptable.
Richard Burgon
My hon. Friend makes a very important point. I hope that after this debate the Government will revisit their position and their rejection of that important recommendation from the first phase of the inquiry.
That is not the only concern about fire safety measures not being addressed. Government officials did not heed coroner advice after the Lakanal House fire killed six people in 2009. It was followed by an even more deadly fire. We cannot allow the same to happen after Grenfell. Yet as David Badillo, the first of many firefighters who went into Grenfell Tower, wrote this week:
“Apparently 72 lost lives is not enough. There is still no requirement for a second staircase in high rises. No requirement to fit fire alarms in all high rises. No national strategy on how to evacuate high rises.”
The figure revealed this week by the Fire Brigades Union, of 221 firefighter positions cut since Grenfell, represents a serious failure to change course after the loss of 11,000 firefighter roles between 2010 and 2017. Of course, a failure to sufficiently address the housing safety crisis is another reason why we have to take with a healthy dose of scepticism claims that lessons have so far been learned. Even on the ground in Kensington and Chelsea the situation is not yet resolved. Three Grenfell households are still to be rehoused, while 50 more have replacement homes unsuitable for their needs in numerous ways. After five years, it is unacceptable that people are still being treated as second-class citizens.
More widely, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are still at risk in unsafe housing. Work is still to be completed on 111 buildings that are over 18 metres tall and have exactly the type of aluminium composite material—ACM—cladding identified by the Grenfell inquiry as a leading cause of the 2017 atrocity. Some 640,000 people are still living in buildings with that exact type of cladding. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. Last week, after accessing Government figures, LBC reported that almost 10,000 buildings in England are unsafe due to dangerous cladding and other associated fire risks. Those shocking figures include at least 903 buildings over 18 metres tall with cladding systems that need to be removed. A study last year estimated that between 6,000 and 8,900 mid-rise residential buildings, between 11 metres and 18 metres in height, require remediation, partial remediation or mitigation works.
As well as the danger to their lives, as End Our Cladding Scandal has so well documented, there are the financial costs, with many living in unsafe homes that they cannot sell and facing bankruptcy because their house has plummeted in value. This is affecting their physical health and their mental health. Surely, five years on from Grenfell, one of its legacies should be an end to all unsafe homes.
I want to conclude with the words of the families in a statement made this week:
“We don’t want our 72 to be remembered for what happened, but for what changed.”
Those are their words. We need more than the apologies of politicians. We need more than an inquiry. We need to see justice properly done and we need real change to the practices, cultures and policies that led to so many people needlessly losing their lives five years ago.
The comments made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, on 7 March 2021.
The Tories are to make an extra 1.3 million low paid workers start paying income tax.
We need a progressive tax system that targets the super-rich & the corporations making super-profits out of this crisis – not the low paid.
This Tory attack on the low paid must be opposed.
The speech made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, in the House of Commons on 2 March 2021.
The idea behind statutory sick pay is as simple as it is important: workers who are ill are financially supported so that they can stay off work to recover. But during a rapidly spreading virus pandemic, it also helps to prevent the spread of infectious illnesses. The test of whether a system of sick pay is working is whether it achieves those simple aims.
Unfortunately, as has been shown time and again during this crisis, the UK’s statutory sick pay system is quite simply broken. In the middle of a global pandemic, it is failing to protect either workers who are ill or their wider community. This failure, like so many others of this Government—from Serco test and trace to the personal protective equipment debacle—has contributed to the virus having spiralled out of control and so many losing their lives unnecessarily.
From the very start of this crisis, I have been contacted by constituents who simply cannot get by on statutory sick pay. Before this debate, I invited my constituents to share their experiences of having to rely on statutory sick pay. The stories that people from my constituency sent to me were quite simply heartbreaking: workers forced to use up their annual leave to self-isolate because the sick pay they would get is not enough to keep them going; families who found that sick pay did not cover even a quarter of their bills; and people forced to use a food bank to feed their family and go into debt to pay their bills after just three weeks of relying on statutory sick pay.
I have described just a glimpse of the horrific social harm inflicted on people in this country by this Government’s refusal to provide proper financial support during this crisis. People are being forced to choose between putting food on the table and self-isolating to protect their community and their colleagues. This is happening in every constituency of every Member across the country. MPs in this House know it is, and those who refuse to call for better sick pay have to take responsibility for the consequences.
The two biggest problems with sick pay have been clear from the very start: the level that it is paid at is far too low and, even then, huge numbers of workers are excluded from actually getting it. At £95.85 a week, statutory sick pay is an 80% cut in income for an average worker. Many workers simply cannot afford the immediate loss of income. And who can live off £14 per day? The TUC found that two fifths of workers would have to go into debt or miss paying bills if they had to take statutory sick pay.
Of course, the terrible consequences of this unacceptably low level of support are not felt equally. Many of the workers hardest hit by it are the same workers on the frontline fighting this pandemic. Let us look at social care. The GMB trade union has revealed that the majority of the UK’s social care workers are entitled only to statutory minimum sick pay, with no additional sick pay from their employer. When the GMB consulted its members who work in social care about what they would do if they had to rely on statutory sick pay, a full 81% said that they would be forced in to work. The Office for National Statistics found that care homes where staff got contractual sick pay above the level of statutory sick pay were less likely to have covid cases than those where staff were forced to rely on the statutory minimum. It is hard to imagine a more fatally self-defeating system during a pandemic than one that leaves care workers forced to go in to work when they should be self-isolating. How many people died in care homes because of this Government’s refusal to properly support workers financially when they are unwell?
As if the paltry level of sick pay was not enough of a problem, nearly 2 million of the lowest paid workers do not even qualify for sick pay because they do not earn enough. The lower earnings limit means that those earning less than £120 a week are prohibited from accessing sick pay—a discriminatory measure, given that 70% of the workers excluded by that limit are women. Millions of self-employed workers are also excluded. That is the stark reality of working conditions in this country in the 21st century: millions of workers—disproportionately women, black and minority ethnic workers, and those on zero-hours contracts—excluded from even the most basic and limited support by the Government.
From the start of the pandemic, Labour has called for urgent action to remove the barriers to sick pay that have left the lowest paid workers without support. Throughout the pandemic, trade unions such as Unite the union have made consistent demands on the Government to increase statutory sick pay to the level of the real living wage, and to remove the minimum income requirement so that every worker who needs to self-isolate is supported to do so. The Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union has also called for the Government to legislate for full rights to contractual sick pay for all workers from day one, paid at 100% of wages. Outside the Conservative party, there is even widespread support in Parliament, with MPs from seven parties signing up to support my motion calling for sick pay at a real living wage level.
I am sure that the Minister’s response will include reference to the Government’s £500 self-isolation support scheme. It is true that, six months into the pandemic, the Government introduced a scheme to give a one-off payment to some people on low incomes who have to self-isolate. Unfortunately, the scheme is woefully inadequate. Only one in eight workers qualify automatically for the main payment; the rest have had to apply for a discretionary payment, and figures suggest that 70% of applications for support from that scheme were rejected.
Back in November, I asked the Government how many people had applied for that payment. It took more than 100 days to get an answer, and when it finally came, it was that the Government still did not have the figures. No one could honestly look at the scheme and claim that it is an adequate alternative to providing proper sick pay at real living wage levels.
We know that covid is increasingly a disease of the poor. Those living in the most deprived neighbourhoods have been more than twice as likely to die from covid as those in the least deprived. People in some of the lowest-paid manual jobs are three times more likely to die of covid-19 than those in higher-paid, white-collar jobs. Covid is still circulating at higher levels in the poorest neighbourhoods than in the wealthiest. Proper levels of statutory sick pay would disproportionately help those in poorer areas and in manual occupations, and that is what needs to happen. When we look at why the Government have never acted on increasing sick pay as a priority, perhaps that is the real answer.
Sick pay was already broken before the pandemic struck, yet even in a global health crisis, the Government have chosen not to fix it, helping the virus spread out of control. The Government cannot claim not to have been warned in advance of the scale of this problem, because just months before the covid crisis struck, their own consultation on sick pay said that the system of statutory sick pay
“does not reflect modern working practices, such as flexible working,”
and looked at
“widening eligibility for SSP to extend protection to those on the lowest incomes”.
I, along with many in the labour and trade union movements, have been demanding better sick pay for workers for almost a year. In fact, it was a year ago tomorrow—when the UK had a total of just three deaths from covid—that the TUC published a report warning the Government to urgently make our sick pay system fit for purpose. The report called on the Government immediately to raise sick pay to the level of the real living wage and make it accessible to all workers, including the lowest paid. Those recommendations were ignored. It was also last March that the Health Secretary himself said that he could not afford to live off statutory sick pay, but, 12 months on, his Government have done nothing to raise it. If only the Health Secretary were as generous with the payments to working people as he appears to be with his friends when handing out Government contracts.
The Government’s refusal to act decisively has meant that the virus has spread more than it would have done, and people have lost their lives who otherwise would be with us still. The Government knew about this problem from day one but chose not to address it. The decision not to raise sick pay to a level that workers can actually live on is a deliberate political calculation from this Government. They feared that if sick pay was improved during this crisis, they would never be able to lower it again in the future; it would be a permanent gain for working people. This Conservative Government cannot allow that because it would go against the grain of the constant undermining of our welfare state. Fundamentally, the Conservative party sees the social security system as a means to punish—be that by setting universal credit deliberately low or the cruel bedroom tax— rather than it being there to support people when they need help.
The Chancellor has a chance finally to sort this issue out tomorrow at the Budget. If he does not, once again he will have shown which side this Government are on, and it is not on the side of working people and their families.
The comments made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, on 19 November 2020.
Keir stood to be Party Leader promising unity in our movement.
But yesterday’s unjust decision has created wider divisions in our Party. The Tories are no doubt delighted.
There’s an easy and just way to sort this: the Hearing has ruled so now restore the whip to Jeremy Corbyn.
Below is the text of the speech made by Richard Burgon, the Labour MP for Leeds East, in the House of Commons on 18 May 2020.
Today, with this Bill, the Government are seeking to grant themselves powers to reshape our immigration system, with little scrutiny and with little regard for the rights of people who, sadly, they dismiss as low-skilled simply because they do not earn a high salary. These Government plans are built on the right-wing neo-liberal myth that people’s salary determines their skills and their value. Well, the coronavirus crisis has shown all of us whose work actually is essential to keeping our society running, and many of those workers earn far less than the Government’s proposed salary threshold of £25,600. Let us be clear: workers earning under the threshold are not low-skilled; they are low-paid. All of us have a moral responsibility to recognise their contribution, and not to introduce rules that restrict the rights of low-paid workers even further, because it will be our communities, and often the most vulnerable members of our communities, who will pay the price for this.
Our care system is facing an unprecedented crisis, and our Government, shamefully, are seeking to make it harder for careworkers to come to this country to contribute. The founder of our national health service, Aneurin Bevan, once remarked that we could manage without stockbrokers, but we would find it harder to do without miners, steelworkers and those who cultivate the land. The 21st-century equivalent is that our society could cope a lot longer without hedge fund managers, fat-cat landlords and billionaire tax avoiders and tax evaders than we could without bus drivers, bin collectors, supermarket workers, carers and other low-paid workers who under these rules will face tougher restrictions than the top earners.
Our approach to the Bill today cannot be divorced from the record of this Government over the past decade. This Government, with their hostile environment, have used their narrative on immigration as a way to scapegoat one part of the working class for problems the working-class as a whole face due to austerity, cuts and free-market fundamentalism. This Government are wilfully scapegoating migrants to let off the hook those who are really responsible for the economic failings of the past decade.
Just the other week, an NHS physician in my constituency who came here from Egypt wrote to me distraught because, as he put it to me, if he were to die in service of our NHS due to coronavirus, his dependent family would be booted out of this country. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, the Government have shifted on this, but they should not have had to be asked in the first place—and why can they not extend that change in position to careworkers?
How can we trust a Government who oversaw the hostile environment? How can we hand over powers to the Government to create a new immigration system with far less scrutiny than previously? How can we trust that there will not be a second Windrush crisis affecting many thousands of EU citizens who came to make their life here but have not yet been granted settled status? How can we trust that, under political pressure, the Home Secretary and this Government will not make immigration policy that is designed not to serve the interests of working-class communities or diversity, but to chase headlines in the right-wing newspapers?
I was one of the sponsors of a reasoned amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). It was not selected, but I nevertheless want to reiterate demands made in it. I want the Government to think again about this immigration Bill. We need the Government to think again and to protect the rights of British citizens to live, work and study in other EEA member states. We need the Government to think again and grant EEA citizens currently living here in the UK automatic permanent settled status. We need the Government to reflect long and hard on the history of the Windrush scandal and of “Go Home” vans touring estates, making a hostile environment for people in our communities. The Government need to reflect on that. They need to reflect on who really contributes to our society.
The Government also need to reflect on the need to end the scandal of indefinite detention, which makes us, in a very shameful way, stick out like a sore thumb in Europe—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
Order. The hon. Gentleman has exceeded his five minutes. We now go to Dr Jamie Wallis in Bridgend.
Below is the text of the speech made by Richard Burgon, the Shadow Lord Chancellor, in the House of Commons on 25 June 2019.
I welcome the Bill. Labour supports the introduction of a no-fault divorce procedure, which we committed to in our 2017 general election manifesto, and we are pleased that the Government have acted, especially in the light of the troubling case of Owens v. Owens. We will therefore vote to support the Bill if a vote is called at this stage. We will use our time in Committee to amend the Bill, if need be, to ensure that it is the best law possible for those who are already going through a difficult time in their lives.
The existing procedure and law managing divorce and the dissolution of civil partnerships is not fit for purpose and is in clear need of updating. A fundamental problem with the existing law, which is set out for divorcing couples in the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 and for the dissolution of civil partnerships in the Civil Partnership Act 2004, is that it requires people who seek a divorce to prove that the marriage has broken down, either by establishing fault on the part of one partner, or by showing that the couple have lived separate lives for a number of years. In reality, for those who cannot afford to live in two separate households for years in order to prove that their marriage has broken down, the only option currently available is to establish fault on the part of their partner. That is one way in which the current divorce law discriminates against women, particularly those on a low income, by reducing the options available to them to a fault-based divorce.
Establishing of one of the three faults—adultery, unreasonable behaviour or desertion—can be difficult, and often heightens tensions at an already stressful time. We know the hurt that such heightened tension can all too often cause. There are widespread concerns about the increased risk of domestic violence faced by women who go through this fractious process. Surveys of people who have gone through the divorce procedure show that in excess of one in four people who go through a divorce have cited a fault that is not in fact true, simply because it is their only way to secure a divorce. This is plainly an unacceptable state of affairs, and it is right that the Government are now acting to address it.
A conflictual process is deeply damaging to children’s life chances. Children will of course be better served by parents who co-operate, and if their parents have a constructive relationship. The law is a real barrier to that.
Mr Ivan Lewis
I reiterate the point I made earlier to the Secretary of State, who rightly talked about the impact on children of an acrimonious divorce. We need to protect children from the risk of abuse—everybody would accept that—but if a resident parent turns a child against a non-resident parent, that can cause massive long-term damage to that child. The current legal framework does nothing satisfactory to tackle that particular problem. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that now is the time to look again at what can be done differently in respect of the whole question of alienation and the impact on children?
Richard Burgon
My hon. Friend raises an important wider point. Further assistance and early intervention, which was mentioned by the Secretary of State, is required to protect all concerned.
Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)
There are very often issues with how the family courts go about these custody matters. I get lots of cases like this, as I am sure my hon. Friend does. It is an area that needs to be looked at. Equally, some lawyers—not all—can exacerbate the situation in the way they handle the case. I get lots of complaints about family courts, particularly with regard to who is right and who is wrong, and there is a lot of antagonism. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis) said, this can be very damaging to children.
Richard Burgon
That is why we are very supportive of mediation in family cases in general, and why we have made announcements in relation to legal aid and early family law advice. I hear my hon. Friend’s point about the role of solicitors not always being helpful, but there can also be problems when people end up being advocates for themselves.
The need to apportion blame and ratchet up the acrimony is one of the main reasons that so many of us want to see an end to this fault-based law—not least because of the impact on children. For example, the present divorce ground of unreasonable behaviour requires allegations that are hardly ever challenged and can sometimes be exaggerated by one spouse against the other, which can exacerbate tensions between them. It also makes it more difficult to agree arrangements for children. Indeed, one of the most urgent reasons for these reforms is to alleviate the harm caused to children, including to their mental health, by acrimonious separations. For a child of a divorcing couple, the divorce can be one of the most difficult times in their life. As the Secretary of State has indicated, the introduction of a no-fault procedure should mean that the whole process can be quicker and less stressful for them. At an emotionally traumatic time, such as a divorce or separation, parents want and need support in order to put the best interests of their children first.
This change to the law has public support and the support of family law experts. Margaret Heathcote— the chair of Resolution, which represents more than 6,000 family law practitioners and is a strong supporter of this change—said:
“Every day, our members are helping people through separation, taking a constructive, non-confrontational approach in line with our code of practice. However, because of our outdated divorce laws, they’ve been working with one arm tied behind their backs.”
In fact, the Secretary of State quoted her himself.
Professor Liz Trinder, who led the Nuffield Foundation’s 2017 research into divorce law, is also supportive of these reforms, saying that
“making people produce a ‘reason’ to obtain their divorce—as they are currently required to do—does not save marriages and instead just creates a meaningless charade that can create conflict, confusion and unfairness.”
And Christina Blacklaws, president of the Law Society, said:
“Making couples attribute fault…can escalate the differences between them in an already charged situation.”
The recent case of Owens v. Owens highlighted a particularly iniquitous aspect of our existing divorce laws: the possibility for one party to attempt to refuse a divorce by defending it.
Eddie Hughes
Does the hon. Gentleman think this change will in any way lessen the seriousness of the marriage contract? Will people entering into it feel that they can do so more lightly because, from a purely contractual point of view, escaping from it is made easier by this legislation?
Richard Burgon
I know that marriage is technically a contract, but it seems strange to think of it that way when it is such a personal and emotional thing. I do not believe that this change in the law, which is welcome, will lead to an overall increase in the number of divorces in the long run. However, I do think that it will reduce the unnecessary tension, conflict, distress and damage to children in those divorces, which would take place in any event.
In the case of Owens v. Owens, the family court judge refused to grant a divorce to Mrs Owens, who made the application for a divorce in 2015, despite finding that the marriage had in fact broken down. This was because she failed to prove, as required in the 1973 Act, that her husband’s behaviour was such that she could not reasonably be expected to live with him. Mrs Owens’s appeal was dismissed at both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, leaving her unable to divorce her husband until 2020—a clearly unacceptable case. The judges who heard the case at both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court expressed their dissatisfaction with the existing law, with Sir James Munby, the then president of the family division, suggesting that divorce law was based on a “lack of intellectual honesty”, and Lady Hale concluding that it was for Parliament to make any changes to the law. It is therefore right that Parliament is now able to take up this issue and make the reforms necessary to ensure that no one has to go through what Mrs Owens experienced in this case.
The new divorce laws that we are considering today should aim to secure a number of desirable outcomes. They should ensure that people can separate as amicably as possible, keeping conflict to a minimum, so that the chances of reaching agreement are maximised and the risk of domestic abuse is as low as possible. Where there are children, their interests must be paramount, and a safe, secure and sustainable outcome for them should be promoted wherever possible. Unlike the existing system, these new divorce laws should not discriminate against women, especially those on low incomes. The new divorce and dissolution laws must also protect vulnerable and marginalised groups throughout the divorce process. In particular, they must not weaken the hard-won rights of LGBT people.
One issue that has been raised by charities working to support victims of domestic abuse is that the Bill as drafted does not remove the bar on petitioning for a divorce in the first year of a marriage. This can leave women who are suffering domestic abuse trapped in the abusive marriage during that year. Will the Secretary of State address that issue during the passage of the Bill, and will he tell us whether he has met Women’s Aid and other charities to discuss these concerns?
Since 2013, legal aid for divorce cases in England and Wales has been withdrawn by the Government—in most cases as part of a wider attack on access to justice that has had a very detrimental impact on family law cases. Groups including Citizens Advice have highlighted how legal aid cuts add to strain on divorcees, and more widely it is lower income people and those with children who are more likely to be litigating in person than any other group. Resolution, which was mentioned earlier, has previously stated that providing legal aid for a single, initial meeting with a lawyer would provide separating couples with clear “signposts” about their legal options and encourage more people to use mediation as an alternative to courtroom confrontation.
Even with the welcome changes contained in the Bill, divorce will still be an often confusing legal process. There is a clear public interest in people being supported to achieve amicable resolutions to financial questions and arrangements for the care of children following a separation. Will the Government therefore commit to reintroducing legal aid for early legal advice for couples going through the divorce procedure?
In conclusion, bringing our divorce laws into the 21st century can form an essential part of the efforts to protect women from domestic abuse, limit the damaging impacts that fractious separations can have on children and encourage amicable separations wherever possible. For those reasons, I am pleased to support these overdue reforms.