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Tag: Speeches

  • Dan Neidle – 2023 Article on the Personal Tax Affairs of Nadhim Zahawi

    Dan Neidle – 2023 Article on the Personal Tax Affairs of Nadhim Zahawi

    A small section of the full article written by Dan Neidle at Tax Policy on 19 January 2023.

    I think I’ve proven that Zahawi has lied about the YouGov structure – that and everything else makes me reasonably certain that he has avoided around £3.7m in tax. But there’s been little media interest. Why? Partly Zahawi firing out libel threats. But I think mostly that we’ve been overwhelmed by politics, and scandal, and this just didn’t break through. All I can do is keep plugging away.

    I ask Zahawi, through his lawyers, why there are so many inconsistencies in his story. And specifically, why he told Kay Burley he doesn’t benefit from the trust, when we know he received £99,000 from it. They duck the question. But they tell me Zahawi’s taxes are “fully declared and paid in the UK”.

  • Andrew Bridgen – 2023 Speech at Vaccine Harms Rally

    Andrew Bridgen – 2023 Speech at Vaccine Harms Rally

    The speech made by Andrew Bridgen, the Independent MP for North West Leicestershire, on 22 January 2023.

    12 year ago, I was elected as a Member of Parliament. And as a Parliamentarian, I have been guided by one principle. Members of Parliament are servants of the people, not their masters.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I work for you.

    As a young man, I trained in science. And in science, we are taught one thing above all others. To pursue the truth, no matter where it might lead.

    And if I want to live by those principles, then I must ask the question no one in power or positions of authority want to answer.

    We were told 100% effective.

    That was a lie.

    We are told no onward transmission.

    That was a lie.

    We were told “safe”.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I have been sent email after email, letter after letter, and message after message. They all say the same thing.

    That it was a lie.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I made my choice. I will continue to ask the questions asked of me. From people who have been hurt. From people who have lost loved ones. From people threatened with their livelihoods if they did consent to a treatment that hadn’t even existed a year before.

    And if we wish to live by the light of science, then we must ask these questions courageously, and put them to people who think themselves your masters.

    They are not. We are not.

    We work for you.

    Orwell once said, that in an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. In that case, you are the revolutionaries. The people sending me those messages, day after day. They are the revolutionaries because they are telling the truth.

    Ladies and gentlemen,

    I am fed up with the threats.

    I am fed up with the smears.

    I am fed up with the lies.

    The truth will prevail.

  • Alex Cunningham – 2023 Speech on the Future of the Parole Board

    Alex Cunningham – 2023 Speech on the Future of the Parole Board

    The speech made by Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP for Stockton North, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons on 18 January 2023.

    It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Murray. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) on having secured this hugely important debate to highlight the urgent challenges facing the parole system. Much of my speech will reflect and build on his concerns.

    My hon. Friend mentioned the deeply distressing case of Andrew Barlow, formerly known as Andrew Longmire, and I echo his concerns. I, too, welcome the Lord Chancellor’s referral of the case back to the Parole Board for reconsideration that was announced yesterday; it is a testament to the hard work and campaigning of the victims. I also put on record my admiration for my hon. Friend and the vital work he has done, championing those victims’ cause in Parliament. As a former journalist, I also commend the role of the media in this particular case. However, it is totally unacceptable that the victims and their families did not receive the expected prior notification of Barlow’s planned release. Sadly, as highlighted by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), such failures are regularly repeated.

    I am aware that the head of the Parole Board has expressed regret at the fact that some of Barlow’s victims were not informed, but that is simply not good enough. I note that when Sonia Flynn, the chief probation officer, gave evidence to the Science and Technology Committee last year, she confirmed:

    “It is in statute that we must consult victims of serious crime on their view of release, and for them to also give our victim liaison officers a view regarding the protections that we need to put in place to reduce their concerns about that individual if the Parole Board does choose to release—particularly the obvious concern that they could bump into them in the street.”

    It is deeply worrying that, even with a case as serious as this one, mistakes have been made.

    I was horrified to learn that one of the victims, who still has nightmares three decades on as a result of the horror of Mr Barlow’s offending, only found out about his potential release, as we have heard, by reading the Manchester Evening News. We cannot allow our justice system to continue to treat victims as an afterthought. All of Andrew Barlow’s victims should have been signed up to the victim contact scheme and received communications from a victim liaison officer regarding how long he would be in prison, when he was up for parole and when he was likely to be released. They should have been told how to make a victim’s statement at the parole hearing. Such failings can retraumatise victims and seriously damage the public’s confidence in our justice system.

    The Parole Board’s statutory purpose is to ensure that people who are dangerous are not released back into the community. It is a system designed to ensure public safety and to protect victims of crime, but after 12 years of Tory incompetence and chaos, our justice system is on its knees. Before the Minister uses the P-word, let me say that it was chaotic before the pandemic. Public confidence in the system is already near breaking point and with each further failing it gets closer to collapse. The Sentencing Council’s 2022 research report tells us that 45% of those surveyed were not confident in the criminal justice system’s effectiveness and 44% were not confident in its fairness. Does the Minister share my shock at those statistics? Public trust, efficacy and fairness of criminal justice are vital, or we will see fewer victims coming forward to report crimes and even greater numbers withdrawing midway through the process.

    The 2019 Conservative manifesto promised to support all victims of crime and do right by victims, but the Government simply have not addressed these ongoing problems. How can year-long court delays and chronic staffing shortages from one end of the system to another contribute to a system that is doing right by victims? The Minister will not be surprised by my next question: when will the victims Bill come before the House?

    It is clear to us all that the Government have completely lost their grip on criminal justice. Labour is the only party that can be trusted to deliver on law and order. We know that careful parole decisions are essential to reducing reoffending and its costs to society. Reoffending costs our society an astonishing £18 billion each year according to the Government’s own figures. Changes to the parole system introduced by the Government in June last year prohibit probation officers from giving a view or making recommendations to the Parole Board on progression or release of prisoners, thus removing an important element of professional expert knowledge from the process. In his evidence to the Science and Technology Committee, Martin Jones—CEO of the Parole Board—emphasised this expertise by saying,

    “It is really important to make the point that we get evidence from prison and probation officers on whether a person is safe to be released or not, and work by the Ministry of Justice some years ago suggested that 90% of our decisions are in line with the evidence provided by report writers. That provides some evidence of consistency.”

    In July last year, the three recognised Probation Service unions—Napo, Unison and the GMB—penned a letter to the Secretary of State with warnings about the serious consequences of the decision to prevent probation staff from making recommendations in written reports and oral evidence to the Parole Board under any circumstance. The ability to do so has long been a vital and valued part of the parole process. The unions warned that the decision

    “severely endangers the ability of the Probation Service to protect victims of the most serious offences, and indeed the wider public, from the risk of serious harm posed by many individuals involved in the parole system.”

    It further de-professionalises this vital public service role, leading to staff demoralisation, and exacerbating the retention problems that the Probation Service already faces. Prison and probation officers work hard day in, day out to deliver justice, and yet again they have been dismissed, undervalued and let down by this Tory Government. Speaking to the Ministry of Justice last year, a senior probation official said:

    “It is extremely difficult and very disappointing that the Parole Board is the last to hear about important decisions which strike at the very heart of the difficult decisions we are asked to make. It makes our members’ already difficult job close to impossible.”

    In fact, Napo members raised concerns about having to supervise someone in the community who they would not have recommended for release. They talked about the extreme stress that could cause, as well as the increased risk of further serious offences.

    I am interested to hear from the Minister why removing probation recommendations was not included in the root-and-branch review of the Parole Board, and why there was no prior consultation with all stakeholders before the changes were implemented. Napo is concerned that removing professional recommendations in parole will lead to inappropriate releases and the non-release of those who otherwise may have been granted parole. Will the Minister share what impact assessment has been carried out on that particular issue, and confirm whether the Government sought the views of the Parole Board itself about having to make release decisions without expert witness recommendations?

    The changes allow for the Secretary of State to make recommendations. That happens only in the most serious of cases—around 150 of the 6,000 that the Parole Board deals with each year. The remaining cases will now have no recommendation given, which seems astonishing to me. I ask the Minister for further information on the so-called “critical few” cases that the Secretary of State will be involved in. Can the Minister share how many oral hearings have been attended by a Secretary of State’s representative in recent times? In how many of those oral hearings did the Secretary of State’s representative recommend no progression—either from closed or open conditions, to open conditions from closed conditions, or release on licence?

    Public hearings, the other major change introduced last year, were consulted on via the root-and-branch review. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackley and Broughton mentioned that as well. Personally, I am in favour of increasing the transparency of such hearings. When done properly, they could help to improve public confidence in the system. I know there have been only a few public hearings since their introduction, but could the Minister provide an update on how they are running, and how much engagement there has been with them? I understand that a remote link has to be set up to allow viewing, so I assume the Government have some sense of how many people are attending.

    Finally, our probation service is still reeling from the reckless transforming rehabilitation programme, a failed experiment in privatisation. That disaster proceeded because the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), failed to listen to the warnings of those with the wealth of experience and expertise. I sincerely hope the current Secretary of State does not make the same mistake with parole.

  • Jim Shannon – 2023 Speech on the Future of the Parole Board

    Jim Shannon – 2023 Speech on the Future of the Parole Board

    The speech made by Jim Shannon, the DUP MP for Strangford, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons on 18 January 2023.

    It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mrs Murray. I thank the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer) for leading the debate, and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), who has had to go to another meeting, for her great knowledge of the subject. If she had been able to make a speech, that would have added to the debate, but her interventions certainly helped to steer it in a certain direction.

    The hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton is absolutely right. I will echo his concerns and give some examples from Northern Ireland, although the Minister here today does not have direct responsibility for all that happens in relation to the Parole Board or, as it is in Northern Ireland, the Parole Commissioners for Northern Ireland. I appreciate that the Parole Board is complex, and is limited mostly to England and Wales, and it is important to recognise that we have a separate entity in Northern Ireland.

    The 2018-19 parole reforms were crucial for the safety of victims during the parole process. They were partly a response to the case of John Radford, a prolific rapist who committed over 100 assaults. None of his victims was informed when he was released on parole, when they should have been. The case resonated with me at the time in terms of the importance of supporting and defending the victims of crime.

    I remember a case in my constituency of Strangford in Northern Ireland. A lady was in the major supermarket in Newtownards one day, when she turned a corner to be met with the man who had murdered her son during the troubles. She had no idea that he had been released; she had never been consulted or told. That lady was shocked and traumatised when she turned the corner of the shelves and there he was—blatant, unrepentant and with almost a wink of his eye as he looked towards her. The impact on her was dramatic, and if it were not for the fact she had the trolley and the shelves to lean on, she would probably have collapsed there and then in the aisle of the shop.

    In that case, due diligence had clearly not been completed. We must support such measures for any future changes to the Parole Board or the Parole Commissioners for Northern Ireland. The traumatising of the public or retraumatising of the victim should be at the heart of the discussion. I have extreme concerns about that, as, I am sure, do many across the House. The hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton clearly and succinctly put that matter on record.

    There have been ongoing discussions about whether it is acceptable for the Parole Board to be an executive non-departmental public body or whether it is more appropriate for it to be a part of the court system. The Minister always takes our thoughts on board and tries to respond positively, so will he clarify that point?

    In my office, we often have phone calls about matters such as custody of children, family finance issues and marital support. Fortunately—or unfortunately, perhaps —as elected representatives we have no say in relation to legal matters. We have been told to leave such issues up to the courts, solicitors and tribunals. I always do that; I never advise on a legal matter, as I am not qualified to do so. I can give people information about where in the town they can seek legal advice. If it is a work issue, I will refer them to the Labour Relations Agency. The best legal advice comes from people who are qualified to respond.

    However, with the parole system, there are circumstances where the Secretary of State can have a say and apply to the Parole Board for reconsideration of a decision that has been made. I am ever mindful that in Northern Ireland, with the troubles we have had, the case for many who have lost loved ones is real. In a small Province like our own, in many cases those who have committed the most beastly, monstrous and terrible crimes walk the streets, so victims will always be paramount in my consideration.

    Victims of crimes can ask the Secretary of State for a reconsideration mechanism, but I believe the victims themselves should be able to take these matters forward, as ultimately it is their lives that will be turned upside down. Some victims I know carry the burden of a lost one to their very grave. I have personally known some of those people; I often think of the ones who lost their lives in the troubles. I particularly remember someone whose family member was murdered by the IRA, and he told me that he thought of them every morning when he woke up and every night when he went to bed. That is what it means for victims, and then they see the perpetrators of those crimes walking the streets—I will use the word “unrepentant,” because in many cases they are; there might be some who wish they had never done what they did, but there are many who do not have that attitude.

    The changes recommended by the 2022 root-and-branch review of the statutory test for release still must be implemented. The UK Government have argued that in the absence of parliamentary intervention, the application of the current test has drifted from its original intention. In the most serious cases, I believe that Parliament should have a role to intervene where the victim is comfortable and satisfied with Parliament and Government doing so. Again, that is my request to the Minister: is that something that the Government would consider? I think that should be done, and I am keen to hear the Minister’s response.

    A more precautionary approach must be taken, with more input from more representatives to ensure the very best outcome. Parole hearings need to take into account what are described as top-tier offences—for example, murder, rape, terrorism or terrorism-related offences, and allowing or causing the death of a child. I find it impossible to fathom, or to understand in its entirety, the pain of those who have lost loved ones for those reasons, and how that traumatises the family—that mum, dad, brother, sister, grandparent, uncle or aunt—forever. In many people’s humble opinion, those sorts of crimes do not warrant parole or release, as the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton said in his introduction. Those crimes are of such magnitude, ferocity and evilness that I probably would not support parole for them, on the grounds that the victims’ families should be paramount in any decision on release. In many people’s humble opinion, not just mine, those sorts of crimes do not warrant parole, or being released but under review. When such a decision is to be made, it must be referred to the Secretary of State and to central Government here.

    The onus of this discussion has always been on, and should always remain with, the victims of crimes. It is sometimes easy for behaviour to be assessed after years have passed, and sometimes people can change, but the hurt and torment never go away for those who are left to pick up the pieces. Victims deserve to have their opinions aired at public tribunals, and those opinions must be paramount in all that happens. They deserve to feel safe in the communities they live in; more importantly, they deserve to feel that our judicial system and our Government are working for them and only for them—for the victims, not the perpetrators, of those awful crimes and for the lives that have been changed forever. It is those for victims that I am here today, as is the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton.

  • Graham Stringer – 2023 Speech on the Future of the Parole Board

    Graham Stringer – 2023 Speech on the Future of the Parole Board

    The speech made by Graham Stringer, the Labour MP for Blackley and Broughton, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons, on 18 January 2023.

    I beg to move,

    That this House has considered the future of the Parole Board.

    It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mrs Murray. I come to this debate on the future of the Parole Board not as an expert in jurisprudence, or the theology of jurisprudence, but from my experience as a constituency MP and a member of the Science and Technology Committee. That Committee looks at, among other areas, how public bodies and Government Departments use evidence when coming to decisions. On 7 September 2022, the Science and Technology Committee had a really interesting session looking at the basis that the Parole Board had for making what are very difficult decisions, in many cases, about who to release on parole. I advise any interested person to read the transcript of that session.

    Unusually, I want to start by thanking the Secretary of State for Justice. At the last Justice questions, I brought up the case of Andrew Longmire, also known as Andrew Barlow and previously, I think, as Andrew Seamark, a man who was given many life sentences, the last one in 2017, for rape. I asked the Secretary of State whether he would look into the matter, and he released a statement yesterday saying that he was asking the Parole Board for a reconsideration of that case. I am grateful to him for doing that. I am sure that the victims and the families of victims of Andrew Barlow who have contacted me are also grateful.

    I would like to thank Neal Keeling, the Manchester Evening News journalist, who has written a number of stories about this case in that paper. Without those stories, I would not have known that Andrew Barlow was likely to be released, and neither would the families of victims and the victims themselves. I have had a large number of harrowing emails from people describing how their families and personal lives have been destroyed by this man and the multiple rapes he carried out over a period of time.

    One of the issues in this case, which I obviously will not go into a great deal of detail about, is that Andrew Barlow was given his first life sentences over 30 years ago, and the progress on DNA analysis meant that the police went back on cold cases and found that he had committed two further rapes, so he was given two further life sentences. Amazingly, he said that he did not remember them. That factor should be taken into account in any Parole Board hearing. If the Parole Board wants to know whether people are remorseful and have changed their view, that is an indication of callousness. As many of the victims and their families who have written to me say, the man is a threat to them and to their families and should remain behind bars. I hope that the reconsideration leads to that.

    Let me look at how the Parole Board operates and the decision taken by the Government immediately to change some of the process and carry out a full review, which was stimulated by the John Worboys case. There was a public outcry that he was going to be released. That case made many people think that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the Parole Board was working. Following judicial review, the Court came to the view that

    “the Parole Board didn’t do its job properly.”

    That is an understatement of what happened. The Parole Board did not look at all the evidence and it did not look at the court decision properly when deciding that Worboys was going to be released. He was a category A prisoner, which means the Secretary of State thought he was a threat to society, but the decision was taken that he could apply for parole.

    Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)

    I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining the debate, and I rise to speak as co-chair of the board of the Justice Unions parliamentary group. In raising the John Worboys case, does he share my concern that particular emphasis was placed on advice from a psychologist and that advice from probation officers no longer includes recommendations? Although their advice is received, the issue of probation officer recommendations is a particular concern for the union Napo. Perhaps the Government should revisit the decision not to receive specific recommendations from probation officers.

    Graham Stringer

    I thank the right hon. Lady for that intervention. I know the trade union believes that recommendations should be made. I have read a lot of the arguments both ways—from the trade union and from the Government, as well as from many of the professional advisers. The case against what the right hon. Lady says is that when there is a recommendation, there is a temptation, for any human being, not to look at the evidence directly. The Parole Board should make its decision based on the evidence before it and its consideration of that evidence, rather than a recommendation. I also see the other side—what people who know the prisoner think, and considering what the probation officers think and recommend, which is important. It is a moot point, but I would not criticise the decision completely to take out recommendations.

    Liz Saville Roberts

    I agree that there is a debate to be had on the effect of that. Specifically, I hope the Minister will respond with respect to impact assessments following the change in procedure and the removal of recommendations from probation officers, particularly regarding black, Asian and minority ethnic prisoners and IPP—imprisonment for public protection—prisoners.

    Graham Stringer

    I ask the Minister to respond to that. Let me make a further point about the right hon. Lady’s intervention. The Science and Technology Committee was told in evidence—I think by Professor Shute; I hope I have that right—that when recommendations were made, it was rare to the point of being zero that the Parole Board went against the recommendation. That might or might not indicate that the Parole Board was not reading the evidence as it had been presented to the board. It is easy just to take the recommendations.

    Let me turn to third parole case that, as a constituency MP, I spent a lot of time on a few years ago. Thirty years ago today, Suzanne Capper had a funeral and was buried after having been tortured for a week and murdered. I was not an MP 30 years ago, but it was in my constituency. She attended the school that I had attended many years before. It was a horrific case. Four people were convicted of her murder; three have been released, and one is up for parole. In the 1960s, the four people found guilty would have been hanged. I am against capital punishment, but I want the public to have confidence in the justice system. They were guilty of a crime every bit as horrific as the moors murders—Brady and Hindley were never released. Even though three of them have been released since I made representations to the Parole Board on behalf of Suzanne Capper’s mother, which were effectively ignored, I believe that one of the murderers should not be released.

    When people learn that three of the murderers, and potentially a fourth, will be walking the streets of this country after that terrible murder, they will not think that justice has been done. I would like an assessment not just of how the Parole Board operates but of who is considered for parole. I do not think those murderers should have been. Although one cannot just use the general view that they should not be, I think there is a sense, when people such as that are walking the streets of this country, that justice has been undermined and has not been done.

    Those three cases have brought me, as a constituency MP and as somebody who has been watching what has happened to the Parole Board, to consider that the Parole Board should be reformed in many ways. When the Science and Technology Committee took evidence, virtually all the witnesses said that the Parole Board previously operated in private—in secret. Sometimes it made decisions just on the papers in front of it, sometimes it listened to the criminal, and sometimes statements from the victims were read out. We all accept in court cases that justice must not only be done but should be seen to be done, but that has not been the case with the arguments the Parole Board considers. There may be a case for keeping some privacy, because victims and their families may be mentioned, but when a decision is taken to release back into the community somebody who has done appalling things, the public are entitled to know what the basis for that was and what the arguments and evidence were.

    Liz Saville Roberts

    I apologise for not making a speech today, but I am meeting Rhianon Bragg, whose case I raised in Justice questions. She has now received a letter of apology from the Secretary of State for Justice. Her medical, mental health details were given in a dossier to her abuser. She had previously applied to the Parole Board for his release hearing to be held in public, and that has been refused.

    This mistreatment of a victim by the criminal justice system in itself warrants a public Parole Board hearing, because the public need to know why that happened. She has now been advised to apply to attend the Parole Board hearing in private but, frankly, this case is an example of it being in the public interest of justice for there to be an appeal procedure for the Parole Board. Far more Parole Board hearings should be in public, as the hon. Gentleman is calling for.

    Graham Stringer

    I agree with the right hon. Lady, and thank her for her intervention.

    We do not only want transparency; there needs to be an examination of the statistics. We were told on the Science and Technology Committee that the percentage of prisoners applying for parole and getting it had gradually increased over the last 25 years from 10% to 30%—that is a huge change. My suspicion is that, even though it will not be down in writing, there is tremendous pressure on the number of people in prison. There is tremendous pressure on the costs; it costs a lot of money to keep somebody in prison. Somewhere in the background, without it being stated explicitly, there is pressure to get more people out, and that—probably—means that some people are being released into the community who are a risk to it.

    The statistics on reoffending appear to be small. We were told on the Committee that in recent times 12 people have been released who have committed murder, and there have been a number of other serious crimes. As percentages, those are very low, but obviously those crimes are an absolute catastrophe for every family who has lost somebody to a murderer, and for the person who was murdered, and an indication that something has gone seriously wrong.

    The Parole Board keeps for three years statistics on offences by people released on parole. When we questioned the chief executive of the Parole Board, we were told, “Well, after three years there is not a lot to learn, because Parole Board members may have changed and the process may be slightly different.” I do not accept that. Many of these prisoners are in for life, and the statistics that are kept should be kept for the whole of their lives, until they die of natural causes or go back to prison, so that we really know what is happening.

    There was also a serious conflict of evidence between the Parole Board and some of the academic witnesses about how likely repeat offending was. According to the notes we had as Committee members, and what was said, there was a 25% reoffending rate for sexual offences against children who were non-family members. I have to say that the Parole Board did not accept that figure, but the academics were clear.

    The other dispute over the evidence was that, in looking at the three-year period, many of the academics said that there is a curve showing that offending for certain offences was more likely the longer the period. Again, the Parole Board disputed that. If there are good records, these things can be verified factually; we should know what the answer is.

    When it comes to the process of deciding whether somebody should be released, the Parole Board has limited tools. Psychiatrists and psychologists give reports. I say as a scientist, as well as a member of the Select Committee on Science and Technology, that sciences such as astronomy and many other branches of physics are predictive: we know where Saturn or Mars will be in 10 months, 10 years or 100 years.

    Psychiatry and psychology are not predictive. The evidence before the Science and Technology Committee was that the psychiatric and psychological methods used for assessment were 20 years out of date, and that there were better ways to do it. Even with the better ways, there is no certainty around the risk of a prisoner reoffending. Even though the tools used at present are better, they are limited.

    The second point is that statistically, given a series of factors, prediction is more accurate. On a statistical basis, it can be said that, given those factors, 2% of prisoners will reoffend, but we do not know which 2%. It is important to know the risk, but none of that gives a guarantee that a person will not reoffend. It is worth considering that against the background of the large increase in the number of people being released back into the community.

    I have tried to stay with the factual basis of what the science says, what the science can and cannot do, and the practical mistakes made by the Parole Board. We heard very concerning evidence that a sex offender treatment programme increased rather than reduced the chance of reoffending. That programme should be looked at. There should be a clear definition of what is meant by public protection and how it is measured. In addition to that sex offender programme, there should be a proper assessment of all rehabilitation programmes and where they take place.

    I have already mentioned that Worboys was a category A prisoner when a decision was taken to consider him for parole. We were told that he was not on his own. We were also told that it was almost unheard of 25 years ago for category C prisoners to be considered for parole, let alone categories B and A. That seems to be one reason for the increase in prisoners being released. The previous process of rehabilitation programmes in prison, with people moving down the category list into open prisons, is less common, although it has not been abandoned. There are certainly many exceptions to that rule. We did not hear any reasons why those exceptions had been made.

    I have talked for quite a long time. These issues are important—I know our constituents consider them to be important—and very difficult ones. I refer people who think that the Parole Board can be objective to what I think is not a nice but a rather brilliant film by Stanley Kubrick, “A Clockwork Orange”. It has a different ending, incidentally, from that in Anthony Burgess’s book. Had he been alive, Burgess would have been at one time a constituent of mine; he was born and brought up in my constituency.

    Alex DeLarge, the villain of the piece—a hooligan and rapist—goes through all sorts of psychological brainwashing processes to turn him into a model citizen. At the end of the film, when the establishment says, “This has worked; we have now turned Alex into a decent human being”, he turns round and winks at the camera. In a rather unpleasant way, that is a celebration of how the human spirit cannot be brainwashed and he, one guesses, is still the nasty person he was at the beginning of the film.

    The Parole Board has a difficult job in assessing cases. It is a necessary job, but it has gone away from the standards of evidence and from being able to tell us that it has been thorough with the procedures. In two of the cases that I have brought up, the Parole Board has failed to tell the victims and families, and that should be an impediment to somebody leaving. The probation service wrote to me and said that it is difficult to find families 20 years later. It might be difficult, but if it uses the local press and tells people and is transparent, it might be a great deal easier to find members of families who have moved and changed their telephone numbers.

    I am not saying that the Parole Board’s job is easy—it is difficult—but it has not been done as thoroughly and well as it could have been. People have been put at risk and potentially put at risk. The Government need to change the policy on the basis of the evidence and make sure that the public are secure by not allowing some people to get parole and by making sure that they are as certain as they can be that some other people pose no risk to the public.

  • Richard Murphy – 2023 Comments on NHS Funding and Sajid Javid’s Proposals

    Richard Murphy – 2023 Comments on NHS Funding and Sajid Javid’s Proposals

    The comments made by Richard Murphy, the Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University, on Twitter on 21 January 2023.

    Sajid Javid says we need to pay £20 for a GP appointment and £66 to go to A&E as a way to solve the NHS funding crisis. He’s wrong because there are so many better options in my new report on funding the NHS.

    There are 367 million GP appointments in the NHS each year. Assuming everyone had to pay (and I bet children and pensioners would not) at £20 a time that would raise £7.3bn in extra revenue.

    In England there are roughly 27 million A&E appointments a year, which at £66 each, assuming everyone paid, would raise £1.8 billion a year.

    So, Javid wants to raise £9.1 billion a year by imposing a sickness tax on those wanting to see a doctor. But that’s before exemptions and before the massive cost of actually collecting this money, which can’t be ignored. So, let’s guess it’s £6 billion after exemptions.

    In my new report on NHS funding out today I suggest the NHS needs £30 billion extra a year to function properly. So Javid is not proposing anything that will make any big difference to its fortunes. But he is going to hit the poorest hardest.

    I have suggested how to find the £30 billion required to pay for the NHS we need. Half would come from extra taxes paid simply as a result of spending the extra money on the NHS or by making people well enough to work again. In the real world that’s what happens.

    But that stills leaves £15 billion to find. That could come from halving the tax reliefs given to the wealthiest 10% in the UK on their pension and ISA accounts which cost a staggering £30 billion a year in total. Wouldn’t that be better than charging the sick?

    Or we could double the rate of capital gains tax and collect maybe £15bn a year. It is absurd that right now this tax, paid almost entirely by the wealthiest, is charged at half the rate of income tax. Wouldn’t that be better than charging the sick?

    Alternatively, we could invest £1 billion in HM Revenue & Customs to tackle tax abuse. It is reckoned they collect £18 for every £1 spent. So that could also raise the money needed. Again, wouldn’t that be better than charging the sick?

    And there are other tax options as well on top of which the government could simply run a deficit to pay for this or do QE to fund the NHS as the Tories did for other crises.

    But what we do not need to do is charge the sick what is, in effect, a new tax when being sick is already a good indicator of being on lower than average income and Javid’s sole aim in doing this is to pave the way for NHS privatisation, and his scheme raises insignificant money.

    We need a debate on NHS funding but crass ideas from Sajid Javid and his like on NHS charging need to be dismissed out of hand when vastly better options from taxing the best off more fairly or from borrowing are available.

    My report is at https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/01/21/the-nhs-funding-crisis-and-how-to-solve-it/.

  • Sajid Javid – 2023 Article on Charging for NHS Treatment

    Sajid Javid – 2023 Article on Charging for NHS Treatment

    A section of the article published in The Times, written by Sajid Javid, the former Health Secretary and the Conservative MP for Bromsgrove on 21 January 2023.

    Too often we hear doctors and nurses frustrated at people making unnecessary trips to frontline services, which takes time from other patients. Would the same level of demand exist here if this Irish model were adopted? This extends to GP appointments. In Norway and Sweden a visit to the GP comes with a contribution of about £20. For some people, just like my parents, that is a noticeable part of the weekly budget. But as demonstrated by so many other countries, it is possible to means-test this provision. Even a tiny fraction of patients reconsidering their visit to the GP (and perhaps visiting a community pharmacist instead), would save thousands of clinical hours.

    Co-payments are not the only alternative. Germany’s social health insurance model gives the structural benefit of a greater choice of providers, including non-profit community hospitals, and therefore less pressure on the public system. In the UK, more and more people are moving towards private healthcare (including within NHS Trusts). But provision is limited in comparison. Other systems with a contributory principle have seen a range of providers emerge. Patients in the UK are all directed towards the front door of the NHS, which only worsens the queueing.

    For patients, this is not cost free. More waiting can mean an increased risk of illness and discomfort. And for NHS staff, it also means a constant tide of pressure (and sometimes abuse). We have already instilled an element of contribution into the NHS: we ask people who can afford it to pay towards the cost of prescriptions, and dental and optical care. Labour and Conservative governments have had a role in this. We should look, on a cross-party basis, at extending the contributory principle.

  • Simon Thompson – 2023 Parliamentary Committee Hearing with Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee

    Simon Thompson – 2023 Parliamentary Committee Hearing with Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee

    The text of  Simon Thompson’s evidence to the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee in the House of Commons on 17 January 2023.

    Members present:

    Darren Jones (Chair); Alan Brown; Ruth Edwards; Jane Hunt; Mark Jenkinson; Andy McDonald; Charlotte Nichols; Mark Pawsey.

    Questions 23 – 88

    Witnesses:

    Simon Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, Royal Mail.

    Q23            Chair: I welcome Simon Thompson, who is the chief executive of Royal Mail. Good morning, Mr Thompson. I understand from your record that you were appointed in 2021. Is that right?

    Simon Thompson: Yes, that is correct.

    Q24            Chair: Is this the first time you have been a CEO of a business?

    Simon Thompson: It is as a CEO, but I have had extensive experience around the world in many different categories.

    Q25            Chair: Why has your predecessor criticised you in public for not having enough experience and mishandling the situation?

    Simon Thompson: I really believe in Royal Mail. I believe in the brand. I believe in the opportunity to grow the business. We have an absolutely wonderful opportunity ahead of us. When the board appointed me, it was around understanding the customer, understanding the digitisation of the business and getting the changes that we need to win.

    I was listening to the debate just before. It is important to home in on the changes we need. I and the team around me are making sure we can compete in the parcels market. The reality we face is that we did 20 billion letters a year back in 2003-04; they are now about 8 billion.

    In our core business, as we had it before, we used to deliver two letters per day per household. We are now down to about one letter per day for every other household. That business has really gone through a massive decline. During that time, the number of houses we have delivered to has increased by around 4 million from around 31 million. The reality is that we are going to 10% more places and yet our business is down 60%.

    What I am focused on and what the business is focused on is growing in the parcels market. We have spent £900 million investing to be able to compete in the parcels market. We have our great superhubs; we have increased our automation. We have made some great progress, but what we really need is a change in working practices so we can turn that investment into competing in, as has been said here at the Committee, a hyper-competitive market.

    Q26            Chair: You did not answer my question. I asked why your predecessor criticised you in public for not having enough experience and for not handling the situation well.

    Simon Thompson: During this dispute, an awful lot of things have been said that are very personal. It is not necessary; it is not nice. It does not change the fact that what we need to do is change the business and compete in the parcels market. That is what I and my team are definitely focused on.

    Q27            Chair: Just now, you said to the Committee that you were appointed as CEO because you understand your customers and digital solutions. You did not say “workers”. Do you understand your workers?

    Simon Thompson: Yes, absolutely. One of the things I have dedicated my time to since I have been CEO is going out and about to be with the workforce. I am out and about on a frequent basis, generally every week.

    I also put in place Workplace, which I know was referenced earlier. Around 50,000 of our team are on Workplace. It is great that they now have a voice. We put on that platform really key information about the changes we need. It is always good to get their reaction.

    I will always explain the changes that we need. I understand that is not always welcome, but it is really important that we have an open dialogue with the workforce.

    Q28            Chair: Why were you given a bonus of £140,000 last year?

    Simon Thompson: The bonus that was paid to me last year was based on the business performance last year and based on the criteria set by the remuneration committee at that point in time.

    Q29            Chair: When I looked at the long‑term investment plan parameters for the calculation of your bonus, I noted that the board had changed the way they measured your performance. Traditionally, it would be looking at revenue, profit and service level delivery. I understand that it has been changed to just shareholder value.

    Is that why you dished out so many millions of pounds last year instead of investing it into the business—because it creates the opportunity for you to get a larger bonus?

    Simon Thompson: No, not at all. In fairness, my bonuses are based on improving the business constitution, changing the revenue, growing profitability and improving in areas such as CO2. I would come back to what I said.

    Q30            Chair: Can I just check? If I have misunderstood, I will apologise. I had read that for 2022-23 the long‑term investment programme for bonuses for you and your colleagues on the board had been changed. According to the organisation, it could not accurately measure your performance on revenue and profits because of the state of affairs at Royal Mail. Therefore, it only looked at shareholder value. Is that not right?

    Simon Thompson: My incentives are based on making sure we deliver good quality to the customer and that we grow the business.

    Chair: So there was not that change.

    Simon Thompson: No, there was that change. I understand the point you are making. What I am focused on every day is making sure we can give the best jobs in town and long‑term job security for the team. We really do need that change. I am not making change for change’s sake. It is change based on the changing needs of the customers and the reality that surrounds us.

    Q31            Chair: The point I am trying to get to is that you are incentivised, as the CEO of Royal Mail, purely by delivering value for shareholders. It does not really matter how you get that. Ideally, you would get shareholder value because you run a profitable, happy and successful business. If you cut costs, cut investments, cut the workforce and still deliver a large dividend, you do well out of that too, do you not?

    Simon Thompson: What I am focused on, as I said before, is changing the business so we can compete in the parcels market. We have invested that £900 million. I am pleased to say that our superhub in Warrington has come on stream and that is working very well. The other investment we are making in the midlands with the superhub is also coming on well. We have grown our parcels automation from some 20% to over 70%. What we need are the ways of working so we can really compete in the market.

    During my time here as CEO, we have led the initiative around low CO2 for parcels, which is the next battleground that is out there. It is great to be able to report that, because of our feet-on-the-street model and our investment in electric vehicles, we are really leading in this initiative. That is something that will be good for the future of the business as well as society.

    Q32            Chair: I congratulate you on that, but if you do not have any workers, I am not sure it is going to go very well. In terms of your transformation plan, which external advisers are advising you on the transformation of Royal Mail?

    Simon Thompson: We have a number of advisers. When I came in from a CEO perspective I changed an awful lot of the executive team.

    Chair: I was asking about external advisers.

    Simon Thompson: I understand.

    Chair: That was my question, if you could answer it, please.

    Simon Thompson: We do have some external advisers, like all large organisations.

    Chair: Which ones?

    Simon Thompson: The point I would like to make—

    Chair: My question was, “Which external advisers?” I am not asking you to make a different point. I am asking you to answer my question.

    Simon Thompson: We have an awful lot of external advisers who do advise us. A lot of those agreements are confidential.

    Q33            Chair: Which advisers are advising you on the transformation of Royal Mail?

    Simon Thompson: If the Committee would like some more information on that, we will certainly—

    Q34            Chair: That is why I am asking you the question. What is the answer, please?

    Simon Thompson: We can certainly write to you and give you that information.

    Q35            Chair: Why can you not tell me now?

    Simon Thompson: Some of the agreements we have with external organisations have an element of confidentiality. I do not want to make a mistake here and get that wrong. We can certainly write to you.

    Q36            Chair: I would encourage you, Mr Thompson. You are covered by parliamentary privilege, so no one can sue you. That is why you can give us honest answers.

    The reason I am asking this question is that, if you look at the wider industry, a certain set of external consultants and advisers are advising all businesses to invest in technology and automated devices, to reduce headcount for workers, to use self-employed drivers and to cut costs—all of the things we are seeing at Royal Mail.

    You might see that at Amazon, Evri or other types of companies, where this Committee has heard testimony of working conditions being entirely unacceptable for those people. You are just following a similar track, are you not, because you are being advised by probably those same consultants?

    Simon Thompson: I do not agree with that. That is not the case at all here. We are very proud that 97% of our team are full‑time employees. We are very proud of the fact that we give the best terms and conditions in town. Those are things we are determined to maintain.

    Q37            Chair: What does “PVA” stand for?

    Simon Thompson: I do not know. I apologise. I do not know what that stands for.

    Q38            Chair: I was told about this by one of your employees. I do not know what “PVA” stands for, but it sounds similar to what Amazon uses. They gave testimony to us about this a few weeks ago. Apparently, it is a bit of technology that tracks how quickly your staff are processing packages and letters, and getting them out of the door. You are using technology to decide on the length of routes and the speed at which they should go.

    I have been told by some of your workers that they are having to run from door to door because the technology is telling them they need to be quicker. Do you have that technology in place?

    Simon Thompson: No. I am not aware of technology we have in place that tells people to work more quickly. I am not aware of that at all.

    Q39            Chair: You have not used technology and automation to decide the size of routes.

    Simon Thompson: We do have a revisions exercise in place, where we have a look at the volumes that are required on routes. This is normal standard business practice and something we have done for many years to make sure the workload for each individual route is equal across the team.

    When I go out, I often get asked, “Why is it that some walks might be two hours long and some walks might also be four hours long?” We do a regular revision exercise to make sure those walks are equal.

    Q40            Chair: You are telling the Committee that your members of staff do not carry bits of technology, whatever that might be, that track how quickly they are doing their job.

    Simon Thompson: They do have a PDA, and that PDA—

    Q41            Chair: It was a PDA, not a PVA. Did I mishear on the phone when someone called me? You do know what a PDA is, do you?

    Simon Thompson: Yes, I do.

    Q42            Chair: What is that?

    Simon Thompson: A PDA is a device our workers will have that helps them in terms of knowing where to go on their route. It might also be scanning items at the doorstep.

    Q43            Chair: You are doing exactly the same as other employers such as Amazon and using technology in this way.

    Simon Thompson: We do use technology. It is the normal course of our business that we do. To the point you are making about this device telling people to go more quickly, that is not something we do.

    Q44            Chair: Why are you tracking the speed at which employees are doing their work, if you are not using that for any purpose?

    Simon Thompson: From a customer’s perspective, what a customer wants is something called an estimated delivery window. What we need to do with that technology is make sure, based on the needs of the customer, the customer has an idea of the window in which that product is actually going to arrive. We do not use that technology when someone returns back to the office in any form of penal way. That is not what we do.

    Q45            Chair: Mr Thompson, you are quite good at evading my questions. The points I wanted to make today are that your bonus package has been changed in order to focus purely on shareholder value; that you are using external consultants to do what is happening in the rest of the industry; and that you are using technology in a way that adds an enormous amount of stress on to your workforce.

    In the long run, the answers to all of those questions have been yes. I would politely suggest to you that, when we have talked to other businesses doing that, it does not really go in the interests of the business and their customers. It is not the best way to go.

    I will ask you one more time. For all the criticism that has been levelled at you for mishandling this situation and the state of affairs at Royal Mail, do you not have any humility to recognise that it has really not been going very well since you were appointed CEO?

    Simon Thompson: Clearly, there are some things that have not gone as well as we would have wanted. I totally understand that. As the CEO of any business—

    Q46            Chair: You said “we would have wanted”. Is it not your responsibility?

    Simon Thompson: Of course I am accountable for the business. No one would have wanted the disruption we have had for our customers over the last nine months. That is absolutely clear.

    Q47            Ruth Edwards: Mr Thompson, can you explain the cyber incident that happened at Royal Mail on 11 January, which stopped letters and parcels being delivered overseas?

    Simon Thompson: Yes. I would first like to apologise to our customers who have been disrupted by this particular incident. Secondly, I would like to give a thank you to the national security agencies that have been supporting us in this particular incident as well. The other thing is, just to make it clear for the Committee, that I have been told that to discuss any fine details or any additional details on this particular topic at this point in time would be detrimental.

    The situation we have is that we are no longer able to provide a service for export parcels and letters through our postal services. Our domestic reality is that nothing has changed. All of those services are working well. From an import perspective as well, everything is working exactly as we need.

    That is the situation we are in. Within a day of realising what it is that had gone on with this cyber incident—of course, we had to validate that it was not other things—we asked our customers not to send us any letters and parcels at this point in time for postal export in that situation, and our advice remains the same today.

    Q48            Ruth Edwards: Do I take it from your comments that the incident is still ongoing? It has not been resolved.

    Simon Thompson: The incident is still ongoing. The investigations are ongoing in terms of the impact of it. The team has been working on workarounds so we can get the service up and running again. In the very near future, we will have some more news to share.

    Q49            Ruth Edwards: You say “the very near future”. It has already been down for a number of days. When will you get it up and running again?

    Simon Thompson: As I said, in the very near future we believe we will be able to give some more information to customers about the workarounds we have implemented.

    Q50            Ruth Edwards: Okay, so you do not know. If you are working with the national security agencies, we can safely say you have experienced a cyber-attack.

    Simon Thompson: Yes, that is right. We have confirmed we have had a cyber-attack, yes.

    Q51            Ruth Edwards: Has there been any breach of personal customer data as a result of this cyber-attack?

    Simon Thompson: Based on our investigations so far, we believe there has been no compromise of any form of customer personal information. As a precaution, we did let the ICO know straightaway. If that situation should change, we will of course let the customers and the authorities know immediately.

    Q52            Ian Lavery: I just want to say that Mr Thompson is being absolutely disingenuous when he mentions the tagging. That is what it is. Posties are tagged. If they are on their routes and there is a bit of a gap in delivery, they are hauled into the office and asked for explanations. Would you deny that?

    Simon Thompson: That is not my understanding. That is not something I am aware of, no.

    Q53            Ian Lavery: You say it is not happening.

    Simon Thompson: Not to my awareness, no.

    Q54            Ian Lavery: That is astonishing, coming from the chief executive. You are not understanding that the posties of today are basically tagged during the time of their employment from the morning until the end of their delivery.

    Simon Thompson: No, that is not the case. We have technology in place to assist people in terms of the routes and where they go. It is very helpful for people who are new starters as well. I cannot remember the words you used, but I am not aware of any form of penal system, as you have described, that would say at the end of a walk that somebody would be—

    Ian Lavery: They are hauled into the office.

    Simon Thompson: Being hauled into the office is not our standard practice. That is for sure.

    Q55            Ian Lavery: I just want to refer to the financial viability of Royal Mail. It is of massive concern, particularly under your watch. Up to March 2022, the company made £758 million profit and £567 million was given to shareholders immediately. There was no consideration whatsoever, in the halcyon days of £758 million, of rewarding the people who provided the service and provided that profit. You immediately doled it out to shareholders in dividends. That is extraordinary.

    Within days—days might be an exaggeration; certainly weeks—Royal Mail then announced a loss of £1 million per day. That is absolutely incredible, I have to say. At the same time, under your watch, under the watch of Mr Thompson, chief executive of Royal Mail, you announced tens of thousands of redundancies. You want to introduce agency workers on insecure contracts.

    Every single performance target in the last two years was missed by your company under your stewardship. As has already been explained, a former Royal Mail chief executive said recently that you were extremely inexperienced and labelled the leadership of Royal Mail as toxic and confrontational. Do you really think you are a fit and proper person to run this national infrastructure company?

    Simon Thompson: I want to roll back to some of the information you mentioned there. If we go back to the point of privatisation, between our group of Royal Mail and GLS, Royal Mail in the UK represented 83% of the turnover in the business. From a profitability perspective, it was about 73%. Where we are at today is that Royal Mail in the UK, from a turnover perspective, is about 60%, but from a profitability perspective it is zero. As you have quite rightly identified, we are losing £1 million a day.

    In terms of the dividend you mentioned there, back in 2018 we started to cut the dividend payment based on how Royal Mail in the UK was performing. During Covid no dividend was paid. The dividend that was paid that you referred to there was paid by GLS, the organisation that is now very profitable. It is GLS that paid all of that dividend.

    From an investment perspective, since privatisation we have invested about £2 billion. We have invested £700 million in the last three years and, under my watch, have invested £441 million in our future, including our superhubs, our electric vehicles and automation. We have really invested in the organisation to make sure we can grow. During the time of Covid as well, when the shareholders did not get a dividend, we also paid a 2.7% pay increase to our workers as well.

    Q56            Ian Lavery: Do you accept, as the former chief executive said, that your style of leadership is toxic and confrontational?

    Simon Thompson: No, I do not think we are toxic and confrontational at all. I would say is we are really focused on making sure we can meet the needs of the customer and we can grow this business, which we all want. I heard Dave talk about it as well, and I am totally aligned with that. We want to grow the business and give our team the long-term job security they deserve. We will only do that through changing and growing the business and by maintaining the best conditions in town. That is what we want to do.

    Q57            Ian Lavery: The posties have done a fantastic job. In many ways, they are looking to advance the company more than the management themselves. Do you understand their anxiety? Mr Thompson, the chief executive, is on 23 times their average earnings. As the Chair said, you got a bonus of £140,000 at a time when—I have already said this; I am not going back over old ground—Royal Mail had basically failed as a company. It had £750 million profit, and days after it was making a loss of £1 million a day. Are you really worth that amount of money, Mr Thompson?

    Simon Thompson: The £758 million that you mentioned was made at a group level. Royal Mail in the UK made £416 million of that £758 million.

    In terms of the pay ratio you mention, my pay versus the posties’ pay is 23:1. Our average postie takes home £25,700 a year, which is between 18% and 40% more than the market norm. From a personal perspective and a CEO perspective, it is very positive that these pay ratios have to be reported. I know it is something the remuneration committee chair keeps a very close eye on.

    Q58            Ian Lavery: It is very kind of you to say it is good that that is reported. That really was not the question. I asked whether you were worth it, given the obvious financial failure of Royal Mail. You have already said it has faced extreme difficulties under your watch. How do you get a bonus for that?

    Simon Thompson: Last year is different to this year. This year we are losing £1 million a day. The situation is a very serious situation, which is why we are very focused on the change that we need to meet the needs of the customer.

    As I said before, we have done the investment in the infrastructure, the £900 million over the last three years. What we now need is the change in ways of working to go with it from the team so we can turn that into a real growing business. The only other thing to add is that a lot of the changes we are requesting from our delivery staff are already well embedded in our organisation, in processing and other parts of the business as well.

    Q59            Ian Lavery: Can I ask you another question? It has been suggested in the press that Royal Mail executives have been boasting about this war chest of £1.7 billion. It has been suggested that this is perhaps a union-busting fund. Would you like to comment on that?

    Simon Thompson: The £1.7 billion that was referenced was not a war chest. What was referenced was that it was liquidity or access to money that the organisation could have. Like any access to money, whether it be a loan or a mortgage that you have yourself, you have to pay it back. What we need to do is turn around Royal Mail in the UK and get it back to a profitable trajectory. Then, yes, there is access to money so we can continue to invest and grow the business.

    On the union busting side of things, I want to make it really clear that there is more than one union at Royal Mail. We also have Unite, a union we partner with. What we had with Unite this year is one of the largest organisational changes we have ever had in our history. In fact, it is the first time we changed our frontline management structure for 35 years.

    Some of the agreements there were over 40 years old. I am pleased to say that, working alongside Unite, we delivered that change very successfully. That makes us fit for the future. We also agreed a pay deal with Unite as well, which was aligned with what we have offered the CWU. That was agreed within three weeks. We absolutely can work with unions very well and have shown that to be the case.

    Q60            Ian Lavery: I have a final question on the universal service obligation. We had the Secretary of State here a couple of weeks ago, and he was asked whether the company, Royal Mail, had written asking for six-day delivery to be reduced to five days. He said there was no way the Government would accept that and he had said that to Royal Mail. When are you going to stop trying to get rid of the USO?

    Simon Thompson: The first thing to say is that we are very proud to be the provider of the USO.

    Q61            Ian Lavery: Why are you trying to dilute the USO if you are very proud of what it achieves?

    Simon Thompson: We want to make sure of two things. When the company was privatised, there were two conditions around that from a USO perspective. The first one was that the USO would be viable. The viability measure that was set on the USO was that Royal Mail would make between 5% and 10% return. We have done that in two years since privatisation, so there is a viability question.

    The other side of things is what the customer wants. We have talked about the changes in letter volumes during this period of time as well. There was an Ofcom user needs review done a few years ago, and what the Ofcom user needs review said was very clear: a five-day service was something that would meet the needs of 97% of people. Again, if you looked across different locations in the country and different demographics, the feedback was exactly the same.

    When we did our research, what the customer also said to us is they want a seven-day parcel service that goes everywhere for the same price, to and from their doorstep, with low CO2, with deliveries by the trusted postie who everyone loves. Dave mentioned trust at the doorstep earlier, and I am totally aligned on that as well.

    What we want is a viable USO and one that also meets the needs of the customers. From everything we have seen, that means that five days would be fine. When I spend time out and about with our posties, they also recognise that maybe five days would be fine.

    Q62            Andy McDonald: Am I right in saying that we have declared that you have a bonus of £140,000? What is your base salary?

    Simon Thompson: It is £540,000.

    Q63            Andy McDonald: Then there is £140,000 on top of that. Despite the job losses that Royal Mail has announced, it has introduced owner‑drivers into the business. They are on approximately 20% less pay and with insecure contracts, and you have retained and recruited thousands of agency staff. Postal workers are going to lose their jobs while casualised workers replace them. That is fire and replace, is it not?

    Simon Thompson: No, there is no fire and rehire. I think that is the phrase.

    Q64            Andy McDonald: No, I did not say “fire and rehire”; I said “fire and replace”. Those people are gone. They are out the door. They are bulleted. You are getting people back on casualised labour. Is that the way to run a cherished national asset such as Royal Mail?

    Simon Thompson: I apologise; I had misunderstood there. No, that is not what we are doing at all. As I said before, we have 97% full-time employment, which is something that we want. In terms of the agency workers, we had 18 days of industrial action and had to make sure that we kept our service running. That meant that we had to increase our level of agency workers to make sure we could keep the service running during industrial action days as well.

    Something that Dave and I discussed was that we would reduce those agency workers, which I am pleased to report we have rapidly done. We are back in talks now. We are very pleased that we are back in talks now, and it would be good to get an agreement as soon as we can.

    Q65            Andy McDonald: It is pleasing to hear that you are talking. One of the reasons that you cited for the operating loss of between £350 million and £450 million in the 2022 half‑year results was as a direct result of the industrial action. What is stopping you from reaching an agreement with the CWU to end the dispute?

    Simon Thompson: We would love to get an agreement, and I am delighted that we are back in talks. Dave called me just before the new year. We had a conversation on New Year’s Eve, actually, and I am delighted that that has led to where we are.

    In terms of where we have got to, we have now made 12 concessions, including an increased pay offer and items such as voluntary working on a Sunday. I do not want to prejudice where we are with those talks, but we have some more days to go and we should keep our efforts to try to get an agreement. What we really need here is everybody pointing in the same direction so that we can reinvent Royal Mail for the next generations, which means we can compete in that parcels market.

    As I have said before, we have the infrastructure in place. It is there, ready. It is coming on stream. We are making progress with it, but we must have the ways of working. It is an urgent situation, because as everyone here on the committee will understand £1 million lost a day is not sustainable forever.

    Q66            Andy McDonald: If you have those losses, why did you distribute £567 million to shareholders in 2021-22? If Royal Mail is financially unstable, how on earth is that possible?

    Simon Thompson: That was paid out of GLS’s profits, as I referenced earlier.

    Q67            Andy McDonald: So you carved the business up to justify those costs. What about the sick pay that you are going to be giving? You have announced that you want to reduce sick pay for postal workers. Do you not acknowledge that by cutting sick pay you endanger them and their family, as well as creating extra pressure on the NHS? It is the Royal Mail. You have duties beyond any other business. You are not any other business; you are the Royal Mail. How can you take such a step against your own workers? My colleagues talked about your £1.3 billion war chest. Is this a really fit and proper way to run such an important business as Royal Mail?

    Simon Thompson: We do not have the war chest, as I mentioned earlier. That was access to liquidity.

    Q68            Andy McDonald: The Telegraph described it as a war chest and it was Royal Mail stating to its own investors that it had that money. Are you saying that the Telegraph is lying or has been misinformed?

    Simon Thompson: A correction was made on that particular article. Picking up your point around sick pay, our current sickness level that we have in the organisation is about three times the norm, if you look at ONS results. If we have a look at the vast majority of our team—and it is a magnificent team—they take around one and a half days’ worth of sick absence per year. Our sickness policy is significantly better any of the competition. In fact, in some of the competition, if you do not turn in when you are sick, you get no pay at all.

    What we have is that over the first six months you can get full pay. For the following six months you can get half pay. Those things do not change. For the first three days of absence in any year, again, you would get full pay, but what we recognise is that an enormous amount of our sickness is actually in a small proportion of the team. We are currently discussing a change in the sickness scheme to encourage people to come back to work. We should touch on what we talked about earlier. We need everyone, or as many people as possible, back to work, as long as they are fit and healthy, because that is how we make sure we can deliver a quality of service.

    Q69            Andy McDonald: You are not going to cut sick pay at all. You are not going to make any changes that would reduce workers’ sick pay while they are absent due to ill health—not a penny.

    Simon Thompson: Our overall sickness policy is much better than competition.

    Andy McDonald: No, I asked you the question, “Are you going to make any cuts to sick pay?” It is either a yes or a no.

    Simon Thompson: We are in discussions about how it is that we can make some adjustments that would only impact a small proportion of the team to encourage them back to work.

    Andy McDonald: That sounds to me like a yes—you are going to cut the sick pay for those workers.

    Simon Thompson: We are discussing how it is that our sick policies can encourage as many people back to work as possible. It is also worth understanding that we spend about £250 million a year on sickness, and our sickness level is three times the industry norm.

    Q70            Andy McDonald: You are giving evasive and avoiding answers. You played fast and loose with the Chair’s questions about the technology and about the acronym that was used. Should you not have come in and said “No, actually what we have is X”, or whatever it is? If you are not forthright and candid with us, are we going to be able to trust you? At the moment, these sorts of responses where you do not give straight answers to very simple questions are really causing us some considerable difficulty. Do you not see that?

    Simon Thompson: I can understand that the situation is tense. I would always like to answer as best I can. I hope that I am answering the questions in a way that is acceptable to the Committee.

    Andy McDonald: It is not to me.

    Q71            Chair: Forgive me just for asking a simple question, but when was the decision taken to separate the international parcels business from the USO obligations?

    Simon Thompson: I am not sure of the question. I am sorry.

    Q72            Chair: From your evidence today, as I understand it, you have a profitable parcels business. You called it GLS. You then have the letters business, the USO, which you have been trying to reduce your obligations under with the Government. When was the decision taken to separate the two?

    Simon Thompson: They have been two separate organisations for some time.

    Q73            Chair: Is that since privatisation?

    Simon Thompson: Yes. They have always been run as separate businesses. The GLS business has a chief executive and Royal Mail has a chief executive, which is me.

    Q74            Chair: What you have been saying is that the GLS bit is profitable and viable, but you said earlier that there are viability concerns about the Royal Mail bits.

    Simon Thompson: That is right, but we presented a turnaround plan for Royal Mail in the UK to the market back in November. It can be a very profitable business that flourishes, but we just need the changes that are based on the customers’ needs to make it that way.

    Q75            Chair: It just reminds me a bit of the buses. When buses were privatised, the bus company CEOs said, “Oh, we have a profitable route here but we cannot cross‑subsidise to the routes over here that are not profitable”, so you cut the routes that are not profitable. Then local communities—often low-income local communities—have no bus, and then the CEOs come to Government and the taxpayer and say, “Oh, we cannot cross-subsidise the profitable routes. We can take the profits, but we cannot cross-subsidise. Can you give us some taxpayers’ money to pay for the buses for people over here who need it?” It feels like a very similar conversation. You are probably going to be wanting to ask the Government for more money, a reduction in the USO or something to make viable the bit that you have described as being potentially unviable, are you not?

    Simon Thompson: No, that is not the case. I have been clear on our position on the USO from six days to five days on the basis of viability and customer need. That is something that we have asked for, but there is a great future for Royal Mail. The reason I took the job is that I believe in the business and that it can compete and flourish in the market.

    We do have some great advantages. We go everywhere, as Dave mentioned earlier. That is a massive advantage, and we have great infrastructure as well. We have also innovated in some really great services. We are uniquely positioned to implement Parcel Collect. Dave talked about the fact that we want a bigger role for postal workers. I agree with him. Parcel Collect—being able to pick something up at the doorstep instead of someone having to drive and park to hand over a parcel—is a magical thing, and something that is uniquely ours. We have also appointed a managing director of Royal Mail Medical, so we are looking to build some new businesses as well on the basis that we go everywhere and have that trusted relationship.

    Q76            Jane Hunt: I have a couple of questions, if I may, on service performance. First of all, the Q2 performance figures in 2022 were not great, from what I can gather, and targets were missed. However, Mr Ward, the general secretary of the CWU, said in his submission earlier that reform plans were torn up in September and that there was a power struggle. Talk me through that. What is going on in Q2, what is happening about these torn‑up plans, and what is happening in terms of a power struggle?

    Simon Thompson: Yes, it is true. We can see that, if we have a look at our quality of service in Q1, in first class it was 85% and in second class it was 96%, very close to the target we have set. I would also say to the Committee and everyone else that it is always a disappointment to me. Achieving those targets is something we are very committed to, however stretching they can be.

    What happened in Q2 was that our performance was lower. It was 71% for first class and, from memory, it was about 92% for second class. That was disrupted by industrial action at the end. I think that is the case. If we have a look in December, for instance, we had seven days of industrial action out of the 23 days up until Christmas. During that period of time we will deliver about 30 million to 40 million letters a day, so any form of disruption is going to be a major issue for the quality of service reality.

    I am also pleased to say that during the industrial action phases we totally changed the way that we did our sortation and automation in our machines to make sure we prioritised NHS letters and the likes. We delivered about 34.5 million of those critical letters during that industrial action period by prioritising them.

    Q77            Jane Hunt: Thank you very much for doing that with the NHS letters, actually. I was aware of that and I feel sure it made a huge difference. My second question follows on quite well from that, actually. I did not appreciate that you had made a deal with Unite within three weeks, and yet CWU is yet to come to an agreement here. What is the impact of the CWU strikes on the future performance and development of the business, and indeed the competitiveness of the whole company?

    Simon Thompson: It was referenced earlier. I spend an awful lot of time with our retailer customers as well, asking them what it is that they want. What they really need is a quality service, regularity and confidence that things can be delivered. It is true to say that during industrial action, at the press of a button, they will make a decision to protect their business and their customers, and that business has gone elsewhere.

    The other thing they tell me, on a very regular basis, is that what we are building in terms of our infrastructure—the ability to take an e-commerce order at midnight and deliver it the next day, with low CO2 and with a postie that they trust—is a magical thing. The reality from the retailers is that they are having to make choices that I do not think they would like to make. The choice that they would prefer to make is to put their business with Royal Mail, because what we are building is exactly what they want.

    Q78            Ruth Edwards: Mr Thompson, you have focused a lot in this session on parcels and the profitability of parcels. Would it be fair to say then that reports in the media and from constituents that postal workers have been told to prioritise parcels over letters are accurate? Is that now official Royal Mail policy?

    Simon Thompson: No, that is absolutely not true. We have been very clear that there is no difference between the two. We have written to our teams on a regular basis. In my first year I actually wrote a letter to every postal worker reminding them of the importance of letters, but we have to recognise one thing, particularly after days of industrial action. For anyone who has been to one of our delivery offices, you will all remember the frames. Within the frames we are 100% optimised for letters; there is somewhere to store letters, but we are not at all optimised for parcels. We have occasions at a local level where for health and safety reasons there might be a situation where parcels need to be delivered so that the postal workers can actually get to the frames, but that is not our policy at all. Our policy is very clear that letters and parcels are equal.

    Q79            Ruth Edwards: It is interesting, though, because this situation arose in Rushcliffe and I commented in the local media about it. As a result I was contacted by postal workers from across the country who said the opposite, and who said that they have been specifically told to prioritise parcels. Why do you think it is that so many of them have been told something different to what is official Royal Mail policy?

    Simon Thompson: I do not know the answer to that question. All I will say is that our policy is very clear that parcels and letters are as important. As I said earlier, we are very proud to deliver the USO service, and we understand that quality is important for letters and for parcels.

    Q80            Ruth Edwards: Citizens Advice has submitted evidence to the Committee ahead of this session, and its data has found that customers are far more likely to experience delays to letters than they are to parcels. Does that bear out in your internal data?

    Simon Thompson: No, I do not believe it does, but if the Committee would like any more information on that topic we can certainly write to you. I did see that information from Citizens Advice as well, and it was actually thanks to the Citizens Advice recommendations some years ago that we changed our service update page to make sure that, if there are any issues at any delivery offices, we are very proactive and we let people know.

    Q81            Ruth Edwards: The Committee would like to see that information in terms of delays to letters as opposed to parcels. We need to put this issue to bed once and for all, in a way. What will Royal Mail be doing, given that there is this confusion as to whether parcels are to be prioritised over letters? What will you be doing to set the record straight and to make sure that everybody knows that that is not the case?

    Simon Thompson: We have always been very clear. It is very clear in our policies.

    Q82            Ruth Edwards: How can you have been very clear if so many people have the wrong end of the stick?

    Simon Thompson: It might be time to recommunicate again, but we have always been very clear that that is the situation. That is our policy through our managers and also with our people. We have been very clear about that.

    Q83            Ruth Edwards: Can I take it from what you are saying then that there will be a new communication now from Royal Mail to make it very clear that parcels should not be being prioritised over letters? Obviously people missing letters are missing incredibly important information about NHS appointments, paying bills and all sorts of things.

    Simon Thompson: We are very happy to recommunicate our policy that we have recommunicated several times. That is perfectly fine.

    Q84            Chair: Mr Thompson, I am a bit confused. A whistleblower wrote to me only last week once we had advertised that this session was happening to tell me that you do in fact prioritise parcels over letters. In fact, he sent me a picture of a poster that is on his rack in one of your offices. I will just read you what it says here. This is from last week. It says, “The future is parcels. Unless your manager directs you otherwise these are your priorities on delivery each day: number one, premium items and collections; number two, large parcels; number three, lapsing, including all parcels; number four, at least half of the delivery points on your frame, including letters”. Letters are ranked number four in the priority list, and only half of them. You are unilaterally only delivering on 50% of your USO, are you not?

    Simon Thompson: I am actually aware of that particular correspondence that was done in one delivery office. It was dealt with and it was a local action.

    Q85            Chair: Is this not true? Who wrote this poster?

    Simon Thompson: That is absolutely not our policy.

    Q86            Chair: It is on a Royal Mail poster that your workers are being asked to read when they go to work. If that is not Royal Mail policy, how else do you communicate Royal Mail policy?

    Simon Thompson: That is absolutely not our policy.

    Chair: I will remind you, Mr Thompson, that misleading Parliament is not something that we appreciate here on the Committee. If this is not the case, you are going to need to write to us with sufficient details afterwards to prove that that has changed.

    Q87            Mark Pawsey: Mr Thompson, we have heard about the dynamic marketplace you are operating in. You have a workforce that has been with you for some time, in many cases. When I visited my sorting office, they told me that a postie stayed for either six months or their entire working career, and many of them do choose to stay there for a long time. Do you think that the workforce understands the changes in the market and the need to put the customer first?

    Simon Thompson: Our average tenure of service is around 17 years, which is something we are really proud about. That helps us massively with the trust at the doorstep and the relationships as well. We are very happy about that reality, but we also need to recognise that, if you have done a job in a certain way for a period of time, change can actually be quite difficult.

    What we have also done—and we have worked with the CWU on this particular topic—is to make Sunday working voluntary, for instance, so we are making sure that any changes we are proposing are things that people can work with and adjust to over time. The realities of a parcel market are very different to a letters market.

    I will give you a very practical example. The latest posting time for a letter could be 5 pm or 6 pm. That would be our traditional reality. The reality is now in the parcels e-commerce market those deliveries are at midnight, and of course we have to get those items to everybody the next day. That is a six-hour difference. What we are discussing is how we can get later start times—sometimes up to an hour, maybe two hours, maybe three hours—so that we can make sure that those parcels, which is now 60% of our revenue, can get to the customer in the right way for the right day, because that is what they need.

    Q88            Mark Pawsey: My question is whether you think that the workforce and their representatives recognise the nature of that change, or is that part of the obstacle to finding a way through the present problems?

    Simon Thompson: It is an obstacle and it is something that is going to need more explanation. When I am out and about in the operation the posties will quite often say to me that, when they are home in the afternoon and they look out of their windows, they can see their competitors delivering. Those competitors are delivering business that we could be doing and we want to do.

    Chair: Mr Thompson, if I might politely say so, I have not been very pleased with your answers today. I know this is a difficult job for you, but it is really important that you answer questions clearly and, might I say, as honestly as possible. Your performance gives us grave concern, really, about the narrative that you have provided on many of my questions today, including when there is clear evidence to the contrary. You have suggested that what we have been told and what the evidence suggests is not true. Something has to be true, and I am not sure what that is. I wish you the best in resolving this dispute. I hope that you take our concerns and questions seriously, and if this dispute and these issues are not resolved in a timely fashion, we may have to call you back to answer further questions and update. Thank you.

  • Huw Merriman – 2023 Speech on Train Services in South Gloucestershire

    Huw Merriman – 2023 Speech on Train Services in South Gloucestershire

    The speech made by Huw Merriman, the Minister of State at the Department for Transport, in the House of Commons on 18 January 2023.

    I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall) on securing this important debate on train services in South Gloucestershire and on his informative and impassioned speech. I recognise his hard work in campaigning to get South Gloucestershire moving and improve transport infrastructure for his constituents.

    The Government fully recognise the vital role our railways play in connecting communities and supporting the economy. Taxpayers across the country contributed £31 billion to the railways over the course of the pandemic, demonstrating our commitment to their continued operation. The Government have acted with the biggest intervention in their history to ensure rail fare increases for 2023 are capped at 5.9%, some 6.4 percentage points lower than the retail prices index figure on which they are historically based. This is a fair balance between the passengers who use our trains and the taxpayers who help pay for them.

    My hon. Friend talked in the latter part of his speech about the need to get more staffing and therefore more resilience into the railways. While the Government strongly support the recovery of the railway and the increase in passenger numbers, there remains an urgent need for continued modernisation and significant efficiency improvements to bear down on the cost of operating the railway. Part of this modernisation is to improve the speed and efficiency of staff recruitment, and we are exploring options to reduce the amount of time training takes in an innovative way using technology, while maintaining the exacting standards of safety currently in place on our railway.

    The Rail Delivery Group’s latest offer to ASLEF—the drivers’ union—opens the door to a more diverse workforce by introducing part-time contracts and more flexible scheduling arrangements. It looks to address inefficient and arcane practices that have long since been phased out of modern workforces. I am sure my hon. Friend agrees that that would be a huge step forward for the rail industry and build upon the progress made in recent years.

    Moving to my hon. Friend’s specific concerns, South Gloucestershire already benefits from a wide array of train services to areas including Gloucester, Cheltenham, Bristol, London, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, and the cities in Scotland—I could go on. Users of train services in South Gloucestershire have already benefited from the introduction of through train services between Cardiff and Penzance as part of the December 2021 timetable and the reintroduction of through services between Bristol and Manchester.

    Now for the news my hon. Friend has been waiting for: I am happy to confirm that, subject to the provision of the necessary funding by the West of England Combined Authority, services between Bristol and Gloucester will be doubled to two trains per hour from the May 2023 timetable change as part of the wider MetroWest scheme. I thank my hon. Friend for helping make this happen and the West of England Combined Authority, which has worked in partnership with officials in my Department and the operator, Great Western Railway, to make this possible. GWR has identified all the rolling stock that it will need for the extra trains and is confident that it will have all the staff training completed in time to introduce the additional services from May. I hope that that provides the assurance my hon. Friend was looking for, but as always—and in answer to his request—I am happy to meet him to understand any further concerns, and to help him make this happen.

    Luke Hall

    I hugely welcome the announcement that the Minister has just made, confirming that, subject to agreements at the combined authority level, we are ready to go ahead with doubling services in May. It is fantastic news. I thank him for his work and support on that as well as for the reassurance that the announcement will have provided to the whole community.

    Huw Merriman

    My hon. Friend is kind. The thanks should go to him; I am sure that his constituents will recognise that. He is a dogged campaigner, and I know that he will ensure that my feet are held to the fire in delivering the service. I assure him that I will work with him to that end. I understand the disappointment that services were not introduced in May 2022. Staff training was severely disrupted during the pandemic, which is one of the reasons it has taken a while. I am also delighted to hear that South Gloucestershire Council is developing plans for a new railway station in Charfield to help people to travel more sustainably. It has recently submitted a planning application jointly with Network Rail. I wish all involved the best of luck with that proposal.

    Another exciting potential development for residents of South Gloucestershire is the plan to develop the site of the old Filton airfield, as highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti), who is at the forefront of the campaign. That could unlock a significant volume of new housing and include two new stations at North Filton and Henbury, which would form part of the Henbury line. A new hourly train service would run between Bristol Temple Meads and Henbury calling at Ashley Down and North Filton and serve the new proposed YTL arena. I understand that the next stage is for a planning application to receive consent from South Gloucestershire Council to build the scheme. My officials stand ready to offer any necessary support to the scheme’s promoters.

    Although this is not in South Gloucestershire, significant improvement work continues to be planned for Gloucester station. That will please my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), who is not in his place but has had a word with me.

    I conclude by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate once again on securing the debate and this additional service for his constituents. I hope that I have reassured him of our commitment to improving rail services to his constituency.

  • Luke Hall – 2023 Speech on Train Services in South Gloucestershire

    Luke Hall – 2023 Speech on Train Services in South Gloucestershire

    The speech made by Luke Hall, the Conservative MP for Thornbury and Yate, in the House of Commons on 18 January 2023.

    I am grateful to have secured this debate. The ability to move around for work, to travel to see friends and family or to have access to local services such as schools and hospitals is vital. For many people in South Gloucestershire, public transport is fundamental to the way we live our lives. That is why I have campaigned relentlessly to get South Gloucestershire moving and improve local transport infrastructure. We have had some fantastic successes in this respect: we opened the park and ride in Yate this year; we scrapped the Severn bridge tolls; we reopened the right-hand turn from Heron Way on to Kennedy Way; we reinstated bus services to Southmead Hospital, and so much more. However, there are some areas where progress simply has not been quick enough. I have called this debate to highlight the difficulties that South Gloucestershire residents continue to face with local transport, particularly over train services.

    For a number of years, I have been campaigning to increase the frequency of train services from Yate to Bristol and Gloucester from hourly, as they are now, to every half hour. At the moment, these trains are often only two carriages long and at peak times they are already full, with passengers travelling between major urban centres such as Bristol, Yate and Gloucester. People living in Yate, Chipping Sodbury or any of the surrounding areas are often restricted from using train travel because the services just are not frequent enough to be viable or because of overcrowding on the services.

    It is clear there is substantial local demand for this increase in frequency, with recently released figures showing passenger numbers have doubled on the Yate to Bristol line from 68,500 to more than 177,000 a year. South Gloucestershire generally is seeing high levels of housing growth, with more residents in the community, more cars on the road and more people moving and travelling for work. Yate itself has become a hub for inward investment around the west of England. It is a thriving place for people to live, work and raise a family. It is home to major employers, with staff travelling from right across the region to the town. It is vital that the transport infrastructure is in place, connecting residents and commuters to local jobs and allowing residents of the communities in and surrounding Yate to travel to South Gloucestershire and the surrounding areas. I would like to put on the record my thanks to Toby Savage, the leader of South Gloucestershire Council, who has done a great job in pushing for some of these extra services, supporting them through his good officers on the council, and putting his all into this campaign.

    Increasing the frequency of these services from hourly to half hourly would make a huge difference to the community, and has widespread support from everyone involved. I conducted transport surveys across South Gloucestershire, where there is significant support for making this change. One of the barriers we have faced to increasing the frequency to half hourly is the need for track works to be carried out at the Bristol East junction at Bristol Temple Meads, as I raised frequently with the previous Secretary of State. I have been grateful for the support of the Department for Transport and the Minister’s predecessor, and for the £132 million plus that was invested to make that change happen and get the project to where it is today, allowing local decision makers to increase the frequency if they can. Increasing the frequency to half hourly is a key part of phase 2 of the MetroWest project, run by the West of England Combined Authority with the DfT, and is fundamental in connecting the areas surrounding Yate.

    Network Rail and the local operator, Great Western Railway, have stated that they are keen to expand their timetable to accommodate these extra services. However, despite being such a critical part of the vision for the region, we have had serious delays in implementation. There were initially plans for half-hourly services to be delivered from December 2021—clearly, it is now early 2023 and they are still not in place.

    In November, we had confirmation of the new timetables up to May, but we still do not have the half-hourly services. I have raised that time and again with Great Western Railway, which has explained that due to the backlog that built up during the pandemic and high sickness levels, it has not had the crew ready to operate the additional services that we all want to be delivered. Clearly, it has now been nearly a year since all covid measures expired in law, and even longer since the social distancing guidance expired, but the substantial training backlog is restricting the roll-out of services that are fundamental to accommodate growth across South Gloucestershire.

    GWR has also confirmed the positive news that it has now submitted the timetable bid for the extra MetroWest services that it will run from Bristol to Gloucester, which includes the Yate station, in May 2023. That is currently with Network Rail’s timetable team as part of the validation process that it has to go through. The last thing that anyone wants now is a situation where, in May 2023 at the next set of timetable reviews, staffing levels are still not where they need to be so the service is stopped from being delivered again.

    I have been offered assurances from GWR’s managing director, who has been clear that his team have identified the rolling stock required for the extra trains and that the training will be in place for May. There are also provisional plans for the service to be funded by the West of England Combined Authority for three years after it is operational, as part of an agreement with GWR.

    Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)

    I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate and on his fantastic campaign to get South Gloucestershire moving. Does he agree that the proposed new Brabazon station on the Filton airfield site will help connectivity across South Gloucestershire by serving that new town as part of phase 2 of MetroWest? If we can work with the West of England Combined Authority and South Gloucestershire Council to get that expedited and built quickly, it will help residents across South Gloucestershire.

    Luke Hall

    I thank my hon. Friend for that clear point, on which I completely agree. Connecting areas such as Cribbs Causeway with Yate is also hugely beneficial for the many people in Yate and the surrounding area who work in the Filton and Bradley Stoke constituency and in the wider South Gloucestershire area. He is right to champion that and I completely support him in that quest.

    The total proposed funding commitment for this project so far from the West of England Combined Authority is almost £3.9 million, which is hugely welcome. I understand that that is planned to be submitted to the combined authority committee and the joint committee on 27 January as part of the MetroWest phase 2 funding request. As we await the outcome of that, I thank all the local authority leaders across the west of England who have supported the new service in principle, and the West of England Metro Mayor Dan Norris for his support and helping us get to this stage in Yate.

    I ask the Minister: what efforts are being made centrally to drive recruitment in the rail industry? Staffing shortages are beginning to hold up essential improvements to services such as the Yate half-hourly train service. My understanding is that the extra services have now also been submitted as part of GWR’s annual business plan to the DfT; I would be grateful for any update that he can provide on the process for signing that off at his end.

    It is important that the rail industry should not be cutting costs at the expense of already approved timetable improvements in the south-west—many hon. Members feel strongly about that—so I would be grateful if the Minister could outline his thoughts on that. Will he meet me, Network Rail and GWR to discuss the support that the DfT can offer to ensure that the proposed half-hourly services can go ahead in May, which would mean that the Government could secure that vital return on their investment in the Bristol East junction?

    Getting half-hourly service patterns in place is critical to enabling the opening of Charfield railway station, which is a separate project but is equally important for unlocking some of the roads and for connecting towns across South Gloucestershire with the wider region. It was opened in 1844 and was a vital hub prior to its closure in 1965. Plans are advanced to rebuild and reopen a new Charfield station in the heart of the village and there was a 12-week consultation that closed last year. It will be a hugely important development if it goes ahead; the application is currently with the local council. The importance of getting the Yate services must not be understated in terms of the wider impact on the surrounding railway network and helping us reduce congestion.

    Yate is continuing to grow, but the current train services are too infrequent, with too few carriages. Delivering on the pledge to introduce half-hourly train services between Yate and Bristol and Gloucester is vital. It will improve access to local public transport, take cars off the road, cut journey times, and reduce emissions. The demand is there, and we have the local support; I hope the Minister will assure residents in south Gloucestershire that these plans are firmly back on track.