House of Commons

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

Thursday 4 July 2013

The House met at half-past Nine o’clock

Prayers

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker in the Chair]

Oral Answers to Questions

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

The Secretary of State was asked—

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

1. What assessment he has made of the effectiveness of measures to control the number of dogs being kept within a domestic property.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

While there are no measures that control the number of dogs kept on a single property, a number of laws regulate the effects of keeping animals, which include welfare, cruelty, safety and environmental effects. Furthermore, the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, with which the hon. Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) is very familiar, had its Commons Second Reading on 10 June and it provides further measures to help tackle irresponsible dog owners.

[Julie Hilling]

Following the tragic death of Jade Lomas Anderson, my constituents in Atherton and across Bolton West believe that more should be done to reduce the number of dogs in houses where they create a nuisance and create fear, because of their ferociousness. Will the Minister amend the current legislation so that there are specific clauses whereby owners can be made to reduce the number of dogs if they are causing fear and potential danger?

[Mr Heath]

I am aware that the hon. Lady has tabled amendments to the Bill exactly to that purpose, and they will be considered in Committee. I do not wish to pre-empt that discussion, but she will know that our view is that the antisocial behaviour orders available in the Bill, on which guidance will be available shortly following discussions with all the appropriate authorities, will deal with the very nuisances that she seeks to remedy.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Of course it is right that the legislation should protect postal workers and utility workers, and make provision against antisocial behaviour. But may I just tell my hon. Friend that there is actually High Court authority—a settled law—whereby if one has more than six dogs, one requires planning permission? We should not be too prescriptive here—if I want to own a number of pugs, it should not be for the state to tell me whether I should own two or four pugs, providing those pugs behave themselves properly.

[Mr Heath]

My hon. Friend has stated the position exactly. Irrespective of the number of pugs he has in his possession, the key thing is whether he is a responsible owner of those dogs, whether he has them under proper control and whether they represent a danger to himself and his neighbours.

[Mr Speaker]

It would be a bit worrying if the Second Church Estates Commissioner, of all people, were other than a responsible owner.

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

2. What assessment he has made of the effects of UK policy on the protection of endangered species worldwide.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)]

The UK is an influential leader in the protection of endangered species, through our own actions as well as our input to relevant global agreements. For example, we recently helped to secure additional protection for various marine and timber species through the convention on international trade in endangered species. The UK has contributed to various assessments of global biodiversity, but it is difficult to assess the effects of one country’s policies alone.

[John Mann]

We used to be a great leader on this issue, but now we do not even properly fund wildlife crime prevention in this country, despite the change to the law that I successfully moved under the previous Government. Why do we have almost silence from this Government on protecting endangered species and promoting the issue abroad?

[Richard Benyon]

The hon. Gentleman is entirely wrong. We have funded the wildlife crime unit, which does great work, both at home and abroad; we have been a leader in global forums on dealing with international crime—for example, we have co-funded Project Wisdom, through Interpol, to tackle the illegal trade in endangered species; we are involved in a variety of different operations in Africa and other range states to protect wildlife species; and the expertise we have at home is part of a fantastic partnership between the UK Border Agency, the police and various other agencies, which other countries come to look at.

[Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)]

My hon. Friend will be aware of the key role that Chester zoo is playing in the “If They’re Gone” campaign, whereby it is leading on orangutans and it has orangutan month in August. Will he tell us about the key role the campaign is playing in promoting awareness in the UK?

[Richard Benyon]

The “If They’re Gone” campaign is one of the highlights of what this country is doing in giving leadership. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has launched the rhino part of the campaign, and the elephant part highlights the importance of making people aware of the risks that ivory poaching poses to that species. The next phase is the orangutan phase. The orangutan is an endangered species and this country is determined, through our footprint abroad and in terms of the palm oil we all use—making sure we are responsible at home and abroad—to protect that very special species.

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

The Minister mentioned rhinos and elephants and recent reports have shown that terrorists are slaughtering those animals to raise revenue for terrorism. In making their assessment, will the UK Government link up with the experts in counter-terrorism in the Foreign Office to ensure that we make as big a contribution as possible to stopping that dreadful trade?

[Richard Benyon]

The Foreign Secretary recently convened a meeting of Ministers to do in this country precisely what is happening in the United States. There has been a realisation that this is not just an environmental problem—it is about security, too. In large parts of Africa, organisations such as al-Shabaab and the Lord’s Resistance Army are helping to finance the evil they do through this trade. There is a realisation that we need a cross-government approach and that was the basis of the event that the Prince of Wales hosted at Clarence house. We will formulate that approach in a meeting later this year to ensure that we are co-ordinating things across government while pooling resources with other Governments to ensure that we are doing precisely what the hon. Gentleman suggests.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

Of course, the largest area on the planet’s surface given over to the protection of endangered species is the Chagos marine protected area, which we established when we were last in government. The Pitcairn governing Council and the Bermudan Government are now asking the UK to designate marine protected areas in the south Pacific and the Sargasso sea. What technical assistance will the Minister’s Department give to ensure that those excellent proposals become a reality?

[Richard Benyon]

First, let me congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his appointment to the Front Bench; I am sure that he will adorn it with his skills. I think that he is the sixth shadow Minister in opposition to me, and he is very welcome.

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The scheme in the Chagos islands is exemplary and we want to see such schemes developed throughout the overseas territories. There are already plans to see proper marine protection around St Helena and a very exciting project in South Georgia. I want to see a necklace of marine protected areas that can be this country’s legacy from our imperial past to the future protection of marine zones.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

3. What assessment he has made of the effects of the final common agricultural policy settlement on the UK’s ability to achieve its environmental objectives and 2020 targets.

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

The new CAP framework through pillar two provides a good basis, with a range of tools to help us, to improve the environment and our biodiversity. Farmers and other land managers already provide a range of environmental benefits. The new arrangements will allow us to enhance the effectiveness of existing schemes and consider new approaches that contribute to our “Biodiversity 2020” quantified outcomes.

[Kerry McCarthy]

Will the Secretary of State now make good on his promise of public money for public good and ensure that the new CAP is implemented in the most effective way possible by maximising the transfer of funds from pillar one to pillar two, ensuring a central role for agri-environment schemes and implementing an ambitious approach to the greening of pillar one funding?

[Mr Paterson]

I am happy to confirm my long-standing belief that we should transfer 15% from pillar one to pillar two. Our pillar two schemes do real good for the environment and 70% of our arable land uses those schemes. We also need to develop new schemes, as 30% of the new pillar one will depend on greening. We also have a guarantee, which we drove through the negotiations, that 30% of the rural development funds will be spent on the environment.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

The settlement for farmers across Britain is a tough one and they need to compete in a single market with all their continental competitors. Can we ensure that we implement our part of the single farm payment in this country in the most sympathetic way possible so that we can have effective and competitive food production?

[Mr Paterson]

My hon. Friend is right to raise that point. I have said on many occasions—I frequently repeated myself during the negotiations—that we must ensure that the way in which we impose CAP reform is simple and easy to understand. We will not make the mistakes of the previous Government, who caught us up in a horribly complex system that cost us €590 million in what the EU calls disallowances but in what I would call a fine.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I urge the Secretary of State to be a champion of joined-up government? The G8 settlement on social impact investment was a breath of fresh air; can it link to anything in the CAP settlement, so we can get some serious social impact investment in the rural economy?

[Mr Paterson]

As I told the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), we intend to modulate 15% into pillar two, and there are real benefits for the rural economy, the rural environment and rural society from our rural development programme for England schemes.

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

Upland farms in the UK, particularly those in England, are good at delivering environmental objectives. What will the reformed CAP do to ensure that upland farms maintain their financial viability, so they can continue to deliver those public goods?

[Mr Paterson]

I confirm again my belief that because in parts of the UK, such as upland areas, it is tough to make a living purely from food production, there is a significant role for taxpayers’ money to be spent on environmental schemes supporting the valuable work upland farmers do to protect and improve the environment, upon which sits a tourism industry worth £33 billion.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The “State of Nature” report produced by 25 major UK conservation organisations found that 60% of UK species reliant on farmlands are in decline. Does the Secretary of State agree that there has been concern about a shortage of funding for high nature value farming areas? What steps will he take to support farmers so that they can continue to produce high-quality food in those areas and protect threatened species as well?

[Mr Paterson]

I think the hon. Lady knows that we get real value out of our existing higher level stewardship scheme. As I made clear in previous replies, I will endorse the transfer of money from pillar one to pillar two for environmental schemes, which will bring real benefits to our biodiversity and the species about which she is concerned.

[Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)]

The financial viability of smaller farmers in Warwickshire is of concern. What reassurance can the Secretary of State give my smaller farmers that transfers from pillar one to pillar two will not cause them hardship?

[Mr Paterson]

It is simple: the funds will be spent on projects related to agriculture and the rural environment and economy, and farmers both small and large will benefit from the transfer of the funds.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

5. What assessment he has made of trends in levels of food insecurity in the UK since 2010.

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

11. What assessment he has made of trends in levels of food insecurity in the UK since 2010.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

The UK food security assessment published in 2010 is a detailed analysis of the global and domestic factors affecting UK food security, including productivity, supply, affordability and safety. The Government continue to monitor trends, but overall the assessment concludes that the UK is well placed to deal with future challenges. In 2012, officials reassessed the report and concluded that it still represents a robust analysis of food security in the UK.

[Mr Bain]

This week, The Economist’s global food security index ranked the UK 20th this year, behind Germany, France and Spain. Can the Minister confirm that food prices in this country rose by more than 4% in the year to May? In the absence of a strong plan from the Government to boost lower-cost, home-grown food, is it not the poorest who bear the largest share of the burden?

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman is mixing up food security and affordability, and the two are not exactly the same. I answered his original question about food security, on which this country is in a pretty good position. However, rising food prices are a real problem for many families across the country. The factors that affect food prices, which include commodity and oil prices and currency changes, are largely out of the control of any single country. We need to make sure that, as he says, we boost UK production as much as possible and make affordable food available on our shelves, and that is exactly what the Government are doing.

[Andy Sawford]

The 700 children in food poverty in my constituency and their parents would find the Minister’s answer that we are in “a pretty good position” incredibly complacent. I have visited the food bank in Corby, and the people there attribute the massive rise in the number of people coming to them directly to this Government’s economic and social policies. Will the Minister visit the Mustard Seed food bank in his constituency to find out why demand is rising so quickly?

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman misunderstands the meaning of the term “food security”, which was the question I was asked and gave a response to. I have said clearly that there is an issue about rising food prices and about poverty across the country, and the fact that families sometimes find it difficult to buy the food that they need. If he thinks there is a direct correlation between the number of food banks and poverty, will he explain why the number of food banks increased by more than 10 times during the previous Administration? Was that the result of the same factors or not?

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

With world population set to rise to 9 billion, we need to nearly double world food production with half as much land, energy and water. Does the Minister agree that British agriculture science and research from GM to a range of other technologies has a major part to play in helping us feed the world?

[Mr Heath]

It is absolutely right that we have the know-how in this country to exploit a wide range of technologies which could make a real difference to being able to feed the rising population not just in this country, but across the world. I hope the agri-tech strategy that we are in the process of launching will make a real difference in getting research into the right areas, making that usable in terms of applicability, and then sharing that expertise with those people who can put it into effect on the ground.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I very much agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), who asked the last question. Does the Minister agree, in addition, that the use of otherwise productive land for biofuels in particular and for solar power is a waste of perfectly useful productive agricultural land, and that we ought to minimise those things and maximise the amount that we can produce in this country?

[Mr Heath]

We have to get the balance right between land that is used for energy, which we need—let us not get away from that—and land that is best used for food production. Those decisions are often best taken at local level. Nevertheless, I am conscious of the need to make full use of good agricultural land for food production.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

The Minister’s complacency and definitional hair-splitting on the issue of food insecurity, at a time when half a million people were fed in this country by food banks will go down very badly outside this place. This week, his ministerial colleague in the other place said it was difficult to make the causal connections between the benefits squeeze and the soaring use of food banks, yet the Trussell Trust says that 45% of the people who need the help of its 300 food banks have come because of benefit delays or benefit changes. Which of those statements is true?

[Mr Heath]

I am sorry that the hon. Lady fails to understand the terms that she obviously fed to her Back Benchers to ask me about. Food security is a well understood concept. We are talking about feeding the world. We are not talking about food prices in the UK, but food prices in the UK are a very serious issue and not, I think, a matter on which to try to score political points. I am grateful to the various charities which help those who find themselves in difficulties. It is important that we support that in every way we can. I notice that the hon. Lady, with some fanfare, issued a policy review last night, “Feeding the Nation”, which supports virtually all our policies. I give her just one word of advice. If you are going to mention one of our great British cheeses, get the name right: it is single Gloucester, not single Gloucestershire.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

6. What recent progress has been made on reform of the common agricultural policy.

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

At the Agriculture and Fisheries Council on 26 June political agreement was reached on the CAP reform regulations. Overall the CAP package does not represent a significant reform, but we substantially improved the Commission’s original proposals and fended off attempts by others to introduce a number of regressive measures. By agreeing to the regulations now, we are able to provide certainty to farmers and paying agencies.

[Mr Robertson]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that answer and congratulate him on his work at the council. Will he enlighten the House on what those regressive measures were, because my farmers remain very concerned that they will be worse off as a result of some of the changes compared with their continental competitors?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving me the opportunity to enlighten the House. It was extraordinary that at a very late stage in negotiations the European Parliament made moves to penalise the most efficient dairy processors and reward the least efficient. There were extraordinary moves as late as last Monday night to introduce coupled payments for tobacco, pigs, poultry and cotton. I think the UK played a part, working closely with our allies, and we saw off a number of other regressive measures, such as double funding. I hope that when the detail is worked out with the representatives of the farming unions, they will see that we stood by British farming and stopped a lot of really bad things coming through this reform.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I am keen to get through another half a dozen questions, if possible, so we need to speed up.

[Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)]

Does the Secretary of State agree that the best possible reform of the CAP would be to return agricultural policy to member states? Will the issue of agriculture be on the table when the Prime Minister renegotiates our relationship with Europe?

[Mr Paterson]

The hon. Gentleman knows that I am a strong supporter of being able to make more decisions on these matters in this House. It might reassure him to know that this reform means that a lot more decisions will be made locally, so there will be, in effect, an English CAP and each of the regions, which were very keen to be able to make decisions, will have power to decide on all four regulations.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

The key will be how the reform is implemented in this country. Will the Secretary of State assure the House that the active farmer will remain the main beneficiary, particularly those in the uplands, tenant farmers and commoners whose animals graze on common land?

[Mr Paterson]

Emphatically, yes: I am very happy to confirm to the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee that, as we work out the detail of the implementation of the reform in England, our drive will be to ensure that the agricultural sector gains from it. As I made clear in my comments on pillar two, we want to direct this towards rural areas in a way that benefits the rural environment and rural farmers.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

It is, of course, right that public money should be spent on public goods. At a time of severe austerity, what public good is there in spending hundreds of thousands of pounds—indeed, £1 million cheques—on large landowners who do not need the money?

[Mr Paterson]

I thank my hon. Friend for that question. The fact is that we are going from 7 billion to 9 billion people. There has been complacency in this country over recent years, because there was unlimited, safe and easily accessible food to be bought abroad. We want to make sure that we have an extremely efficient, high-tech agricultural sector producing food. I take food security extremely seriously and welcome large, efficient farmers.

[Sir Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

7. What progress his Department is making on the establishment of marine conservation zones.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)]

We are analysing all the responses and evidence submitted following the recent consultation before making final decisions on designating the first tranche of marine conservation zones later this year.

[Sir Andrew Stunell]

I thank the Minister for that reply. He will know that the Select Committee was getting a bit frustrated about this, and the Government’s response to the Committee did not improve the situation. Does the Minister understand that there is real frustration about the slow speed at which this is going and the apparently arbitrary way in which the Government have selected the zones? Will he reassure the House that they are serious about delivering the policy?

[Richard Benyon]

I assure my right hon. Friend that I share his frustration. I inherited a system that created huge expectations but which did not match the evidence required to make these zones work. We are now seeking to make sure that they are evidence-based, affordable, fit in with what happens locally in the seas and part of a coherent package.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

Vital marine habitats off Devon and Cornwall will be lost for ever because this Government are not implementing a fully ecologically coherent network of marine conservation zones or following the time scale laid down in the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009. Will the Minister please think again and tell the Chancellor that the costs of inaction in the long run will be far greater than the costs of protecting our marine environment now?

[Richard Benyon]

The right hon. Gentleman is looking at marine conservation zones as if they are the only show in town. We have 42 special areas of conservation and 37 special protection areas around the English coast. About a quarter of our inshore waters are protected and we have more than 300 sites of special scientific interest in the intertidal zone. What we are trying to do with marine conservation zones is part of a much bigger picture of marine protection. We will be one of the leading countries in the world for marine conversation and the right hon. Gentleman should feel proud about that.

[Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

8. What recent progress he has made on flood insurance; and if he will make a statement.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)]

Last week, we announced a headline agreement with industry to guarantee affordable flood insurance for people in high-risk areas. The Association of British Insurers has assured Ministers that implementing Flood Re will have minimal impact on customers’ bills. We will be seeking the necessary powers in the Water Bill. Tackling flood risk will help to keep insurance terms affordable in the long term. We have announced record levels of capital investment of more than £2.3 billion for 2015-16 to 2020-21.

[Mrs Spelman]

I congratulate the Minister on securing that new deal for universal and affordable flood insurance, which eluded the last Labour Government and me. Will he actively encourage people who live in flood-prone areas to take up the capped premiums and not risk being uninsured?

[Richard Benyon]

My right hon. Friend should take a large slice of the credit for the deal that we have achieved. She worked hard to set in train something that the previous Government did not even look at, which is a successor to the statement of principles. I assure her that the key part of the deal is ensuring that we cap premiums, particularly for the most vulnerable, and, importantly, that we cap excess charges.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

After the great flood, in the words of the old negro spiritual,

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign,

No more water but fire next time”.

Smethwick has certainly suffered from fire this week. Will the Minister, with other Departments, look urgently at banning sky lanterns and, with the Environment Agency, look at the licensing arrangements regarding storage at recycling sites that have large quantities of flammable material?

[Mr Speaker]

The right hon. Gentleman might wish to seek an Adjournment debate on the matter.

[Richard Benyon]

I have huge sympathy for the people of Smethwick, but this matter is nothing to do with floods or flood insurance. I assure the right hon. Gentleman that we are taking the question of Chinese lanterns very seriously indeed.

[Sheryll Murray (South East Cornwall) (Con)]

People in my constituency who have been flooded will welcome the news about flood insurance and the extension of the £50 off their water bills. Does he agree that that shows a commitment to the people of the south-west that was never shown by the previous Government?

[Richard Benyon]

I agree entirely. I am grateful to my hon. Friend for pointing out that we have addressed an intrinsic, long-term unfairness for people in the south-west. We have proved that we are doing that not just for today, but for the long term.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

We have a proposal from this Government, not a deal. The Secretary of State said that

“this announcement means that people no longer need to live in fear of being uninsurable”.

However, all band H properties are excluded, as are so-called “genuinely uninsurable” properties and all properties built after 2009. Given that it has taken the Minister three years to get to this point, will he now admit that his proposals do not provide universal access to cover?

[Richard Benyon]

What an uncharacteristically graceless question from the hon. Gentleman. When the deal was announced from the Dispatch Box last week, there was an audible sigh of relief, not only from Government Back Benchers, but from Opposition Back Benchers. The deal has been welcomed and I am sure that the hon. Gentleman knows in his heart that it is a good deal and one that will last for the long term.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

9. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on the roll-out of broadband in rural areas.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)]

The Secretary of State meets regularly with his counterpart at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to discuss the roll-out of the £530 million rural broadband programme. We are determined to deliver that quickly to provide 90% of premises with superfast broadband at 24 megabits a second and elsewhere with standard broadband of at least 2 megabits a second. Further discussions will focus on the £250 million of additional broadband funding that was announced as part of the spending review.

[Chi Onwurah]

It is clear that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has been briefing against Broadband Delivery UK in recent weeks. The Minister must acknowledge that it is his Government’s decision to abandon Labour’s pledge of good broadband for all by 2012 in favour of superfast broadband for some by 2015 that has left rural businesses and residents in the digital slow lane. How does he justify the devastating impact of that on the rural economy?

[Richard Benyon]

I am sorry, but I cannot accept that. One reason why the hon. Lady is sitting on the Opposition Benches is that her party lost the rural vote, partly because it left rural Britain in a digital no-go zone. We have set out a programme that, by 2015, will see the rural economy playing its part in the rest of the economy through the extension of superfast broadband, and I think she knows it.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

I would like to report that there is good progress in rolling out superfast broadband in Gloucestershire. Does the Minister agree that that is one of the core reasons why the private sector is able to create more and more jobs?

[Richard Benyon]

I am delighted that things are moving on in Gloucestershire. Of the 44 county projects, 27 are now contracted and the remainder will be by September. We will start to see fibre being laid in huge quantities around rural Britain, and it will be as easy to run a creative industry firm in a converted farm building in my hon. Friend’s constituency as it would be in the middle of Gloucester.

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

Has the Minister carried out any assessment of the impact of digital exclusion on deprived communities such as mine, particularly for young people, who increasingly need internet connections to complete schoolwork, apply for jobs and so on?

[Richard Benyon]

We have indeed. We know, for example, from the work that PricewaterhouseCoopers has done that there is an average benefit of £365 a year to families who have proper digital access, for precisely the reasons that the hon. Gentleman gives. I was at a remote location in Northumberland national park the other day seeing a satellite solution that was providing an extraordinary benefit to the eight houses at the end of a long valley, so I am well aware of the points that he makes.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

I very much welcome the moneys that the Minister’s Department has made available to extend broadband into the hardest-to-reach places, but identifying exactly which places those are and what it will take to achieve that is no trivial exercise. Will he reserve some of the funds for councils such as Wiltshire that have submitted an expression of interest but still need to conduct the detailed survey work required?

[Richard Benyon]

My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport is convening a meeting in the next few days with a number of community-led schemes that are concerned about the uncertainty over whether they will be among the final 10% hardest-to-reach areas. Over the next few weeks, we will have a much clearer view of where there are problems. We want to ensure that we iron out those problems so that people know that they are in that 10% and can then access money through the rural community broadband fund.

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

T1. If he will make a statement on his Departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr Owen Paterson)]

The Department’s priorities are growing the rural economy, improving the environment and safeguarding animal and plant health. Today, I have published a draft strategy for achieving official bovine TB-free status in England over 25 years, and a copy has been placed in the Library. The strategy draws on international experience demonstrating the need to bear down on the disease in cattle and wildlife. It sets out our determination to work in partnership with the industry to develop and deploy new technologies, and we will also explore new options for governance, delivery and funding. Tackling the disease will require long-term solutions and national resolve. Our cattle industry and countryside deserve no less.

[Hugh Bayley]

Ash is a huge and important part of woodland scenery in Yorkshire, especially in upland areas, and ash dieback is increasing at an alarming rate, with more than 500 cases having been identified. The Secretary of State has reduced the staffing of the Forestry Commission by more than 500. How will he deal with something that could be a catastrophe for our woodlands without shifting staff and closing other parts of the Department?

[Mr Paterson]

The hon. Gentleman is right that the potential damage of Chalara to our rural environment is absolutely devastating. We will make our dispositions of the resources within the Department in the autumn, but I assure him that I have made plant health an absolute priority, right up with animal health. I have been to Australia and New Zealand to see what they are doing on biosecurity, and the plant taskforce has made some important recommendations, such as the risk register, which we are already implementing.

The answer for ash is to find a genetic strain. There is sadly no magic potion that we can spray on ash trees yet, although we are testing 14 of them, so a genetic strain is the real answer. For that reason, we have put out 250,000 young ash trees to see which ones are resistant.

[Simon Wright (Norwich South) (LD)]

T3. The average household loses £700 of food each year to waste. The Government have improved the date labelling of food, but will the Minister help even further by supporting prominent labelling advice on how food can best be stored at home to prolong its freshness?

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

My hon. Friend is right, and through the recently announced third phase of the Courtauld commitment, the Government are working with retailers and manufacturers to design products in ways that help households reduce food waste and save money, including improved storage instructions. The Waste and Resources Action programme—WRAP—is working directly with consumers through the Love Food Hate Waste programme, to help people know how best to store different foods.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

The Government spent £25,000 on a consultation into sky lanterns which concluded that the fire risk is significant, and that they pose a risk to planes and a significant risk to the operation of coastal rescue services. With an estimated £6 million damage caused by a single sky lantern at Smethwick, and a fire that needed 200 firefighters and left only one spare fire tender to cover the whole of the west midlands, are the Government still seriously saying they will do absolutely nothing?

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Gentleman knows all about doing absolutely nothing on sky lanterns. I asked questions about sky lanterns year after year from the Opposition Benches, and within a month of taking office I commissioned a report into the potential harm they cause to farm animals. The report concluded that it was not possible to quantify the damage to animal welfare in ways that would justify a ban, but it indicated that there was a significant danger of fire. I have communicated that to my colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government, and I plan to meet them to discuss further action.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

T7. I know that the Secretary of State takes a close interest in EU affairs and how they interfere with businesses in rural areas. What steps is he taking to ease that situation?

[Mr Paterson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that question because it pertains to every business in the countryside. Through the red tape challenge, DEFRA will have reviewed all its regulations that emanate from the EU by the end of the year, and as a result there will be 12,000 fewer dairy inspections per year. Since 2011, for every £1 of compliance cost, we have removed £13.

[Mrs Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

T2. News of a national pollinator strategy is welcome, but will the Minister confirm whether other relevant Departments as well as DEFRA will be involved in its development?

[Mr Heath]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for recognising the importance of the national pollinator strategy, which we hope to have in time for consultation at the end of this year. A wide range of other pollinator-friendly policies and initiatives are in place, but there are gaps we want to fill, particularly in research. That will give us the opportunity to look across Government and work with non-governmental organisations to review everything we are doing and establish our commitment to the future security of pollinators.

[Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)]

T9. The single-use plastic bag tax has proven successful in Wales. It is being adopted in Ireland and will soon also be adopted in Scotland. Will the Minister update the House on the Government’s current plans regarding the introduction of a similar tax in the rest of the country?

[Mr Heath]

As my hon. Friend knows, the Government have been looking at this issue for some time and we believe there is a need to bear down on the use of plastic bags, particularly those that are non-recyclable. We are looking carefully at evidence from Wales and note the decision in Scotland. We hope to come forward with plans in due course regarding what is appropriate for the English market.

[Mr Stephen Hepburn (Jarrow) (Lab)]

T4. Now that the Government of millionaires for millionaires have waged war against the poor people of this country by driving down their incomes and pushing up the cost of fuel through the roof, what will the Minister do about food prices, which are increasing three times faster than the pay packet of the average worker?

[Mr Heath]

It will come as some surprise to my wife to learn that I am a millionaire. The hon. Gentleman mentioned fuel prices, but it was this Government who abolished the fuel price escalator, and the Labour party which put it in place.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Given the importance of the common agricultural policy to the EU, does the Minister share my frustration at the lack of Europe-wide food labelling? We heard yesterday from the all-party group for European reform that this was down to language problems, but food labelling can be done with symbols and pictures. Will he pursue this to make sure that we can trade more of our food across Europe?

[Mr Heath]

The most important thing about food labelling is to have systems that are readily understood by the consumer. One of the difficulties is that there is a huge weight of information that could be put on a packet, but putting everything on a packet does not necessarily make it more intelligible and useable for the consumer. We have to get the balance right, and talk to other member states in the EU about it as it is a European competence, but we are absolutely determined to provide proper understandable information that allows consumers to make informed choices.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

T5. Blackrod town council recently passed its second resolution to ban Chinese lanterns because of the risk to animals and the danger of fire. The Minister says that he is taking the issue seriously and that he raised it in opposition. Three years on, when will we see legislation to do something about this problem?

[Mr Heath]

The hon. Lady raises an important point that has been raised before. I am clear about the potential danger but we must act proportionately. We have done a study as far as our departmental responsibilities are concerned, which are to do with animal welfare. Other issues—for instance fire—fall into the areas of responsibility of other Departments, and I must now talk to my counterparts to take their views on it and on how we take the matter forward. But I have to say that we have done more in the past 12 months than was done in the previous 13 years.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

The Minister is familiar with the concerns of my constituent Andrew St Joseph about the lack of involvement of landowners in decisions taken about flood defences and maintenance. Will he look into it and give me an assurance that this will no longer happen and that landowners will be consulted on the maintenance of defences?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Richard Benyon)]

I have huge respect for Mr St Joseph and his Essex Coast Organisation. If he feels that he is not being consulted, I want to make sure we address that. My understanding from the regional director and others is that they have regular meetings with him and with the Essex Coast Organisation. If my hon. Friend has other information, I will want to work closely with her to ensure we correct that.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

T6. Following the horsemeat scandals, there are still serious concerns about meat in the supply chain. When will we get a full report? In Leicester there are still concerns about halal food. What discussion has the Minister had with the Food Standards Agency on this?

[Mr Heath]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, we have commissioned a major review of food safety as it relates to contents, led by Professor Chris Elliot, which will be made available to the House and discussed. On halal food, we have held discussions with the faith organisations because it is a critical issue for them; not necessarily a Government issue, but certainly something that matters to them.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

Farmers in the Kettering constituency told me recently that their greatest concern was rural crime and the theft of farm equipment. What work is the Department doing with the Home Department to address this problem?

[Richard Benyon]

Rural crime is a real concern and needs to be resolved locally, which is one reason why we have directly elected police and crime commissioners who can now be held accountable to their local electorate. But there is also a firm role for Members of this House to make sure that local police forces are making this a priority.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

T8. The Government’s rural broadband roll-out is such a disaster that I have farmers in my constituency who are expected to upload data both to the Rural Payments Agency and to HMRC online when they have no possibility of getting a connection. Will the Minister stop this demand?

[Richard Benyon]

One of the absurdities under the last Government was that they wanted things done online but farmers did not have the ability to do so. That is one reason why we have made roll-out of rural broadband so important. The hon. Lady knows that it is on the verge of being rolled out in her area, which will be of great benefit to some remote communities.

[Charles Hendry (Wealden) (Con)]

What proportion of those living in rural areas have not just slow broadband, but no affordably priced commercial broadband at all, such as the village of Isfield in my constituency? Will the Minister liaise with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to ensure that these “not spots” are given priority in the roll-out of superfast broadband?

[Richard Benyon]

Beyond 2015, the intention, with the extra money that has been allocated, is to get superfast broadband to 99% of properties. I have seen technology that gets good quality broadband to very remote communities, so I hope my hon. Friend’s constituents will soon be online and able to compete in the global economy.

The hon. Member for Banbury, representing the Church Commissioners, was asked—

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

1. What recent assessment the Church Commissioners have made of the effects of bats in churches; and if he will make a statement.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

A small number of bats living in a church can be manageable, but parish churches are finding an increasing number of bats taking up residence in large roosts. There are significant costs in financial and human terms to those who worship in these churches, and to the wider community. The present situation is simply unsustainable.

[Mr Nuttall]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that reply. As a church warden, I know that many members of parochial church councils live in fear of bats taking up residence in their church buildings, because of the damage bats cause and the difficulty they have in removing them because of EU rules. Will my hon. Friend give the House some idea of what costs can be incurred by churches that have to remove a colony of bats?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Parish churches have to raise the money for bat litigation at considerable cost to their community, and that can prevent their own mission and ministry. The sums of money can be large. For example, the church of St Hilda’s in Ellerburn in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) has spent a total of £29,000 so far, which is a significant sum for a small congregation to finance. As yet, there is no resolution in sight, but I was grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) for indicating in a recent debate in Westminster Hall that there might be a prospect of St Hilda’s, Ellerburn at last receiving a licence from Natural England to resolve this issue.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

I must say that I rise with some trepidation on this topic, given the explosive response from the Second Church Estates Commissioner to my gentle question in a Westminster Hall debate last week. Since then, I have been told that the Bat Conservation Trust and the Church Buildings Council were having productive conversations on the bats, churches and communities pilot project funded by Natural England until February this year when they stalled. Will the hon. Gentleman use his good offices to bring the two together to continue those conversations?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

My concern with the hon. Lady’s approach and the Bat Conservation Trust is that they seem to think that this is an issue that can somehow just be managed. I have to keep on saying to her that this is not an issue that can be managed. Large numbers of churches are being made unusable by large numbers of bats roosting in them. Churches are not field barns; they are places of worship. Following my debate in Westminster Hall, I had a number of letters from clergy up and down the country saying how distressing it was for them, before they could celebrate communion on Sunday, to have to clear bat faeces and bat urine off the altar and the communion table. That is not acceptable.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

May I take this opportunity to thank my hon. Friend the Second Church Estates Commissioner and the Under-Secretary for helping St Hilda’s, Ellerburn? It is a matter of urgency that the congregation can reclaim their church from the bats.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes an important point. [Laughter.] This is not a joking matter. This is serious and people have to understand that. I am grateful for the attention paid to this issue by the Under-Secretary. We are making real progress, but we need to ensure that places such as St Hilda’s, Ellerburn can continue to be places of worship and are not closed as a consequence of bat faeces and bat urine.

[Mr Ben Bradshaw (Exeter) (Lab)]

2. What guidance the Church of England plans to issue to parishes and Church schools on pastoral care for same sex couples and their children.

[The Second Church Estates Commissioner (Sir Tony Baldry)]

The House of Bishops issued a pastoral statement before the Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force in 2005. I expect that the House of Bishops will want to issue a further statement before the legislation on same-sex marriage comes into force. The House of Bishops is due to consider this December a report on sexuality, chaired by former permanent secretary Sir Joseph Pilling. The work of that group will assist the House of Bishops in its deliberations.

[Mr Bradshaw]

I am grateful for that reply, because I recently came across a case of a Christian couple in a same-sex relationship and with children in the local Church primary school to whom it was made clear by the local conservative evangelical church that they would not be welcome to worship in it. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that such intolerance and bigotry have no place whatever in the Church of England? When the Church issues guidance, it is very important that that is made quite clear to both parishes and Church schools.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Of course I agree with the right hon. Gentleman about that. If he would like to give me the details of that case, I will most certainly take it up with the diocesan education officer. Children in Church schools come from a wide variety of family backgrounds, and teachers offer the same compassion and care for all. Each child is valued as a child of God and deserving of the very best that schools can offer. I would not expect any Church school to discriminate against any child, whatever their personal or family circumstances. If any right hon. or hon. Member comes across any instance where he feels that a Church school is in any way falling short of the standards that this House would expect, I hope they will get in touch with me.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

Notwithstanding any differences we may have over the same-sex marriage legislation, does my hon. Friend agree that one immediate contribution that the Church of England could make towards improving pastoral care for same-sex couples and their children would be to recognise blessings for civil partnerships in churches?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Those are all matters that I suspect the House of Bishops will give thought to in its considerations following the Pilling report.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Further to the important question asked by my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), is the Second Church Estates Commissioner aware that one of the weaknesses of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill is that the rights given to children of same-sex couples are not planned to be the same as those for children of traditional couples? Will he have a word with his colleagues on the Front Bench about rectifying that?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The hon. Lady makes an important point. Perhaps she would like to talk to me about it in greater detail afterwards. If this is an issue that needs to be resolved, it will have to be resolved in the other place, where the Bill currently lies.

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

3. What the policy of the Church Commissioners is on finding alternative uses for churches which are closed.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Under the Mission and Pastoral Measure 2011, the Church Commissioners are responsible for settling the future of closed church buildings. For most, we are able to secure suitable alternative uses in partnership with a local diocese, but I should stress that the Church of England is not in the business of closing churches unless absolutely necessary.

[Andrew Stephenson]

Although I hope that churches will always remain principally used for worship, it was great to visit the grassroots family centre at St Philip’s church in Nelson recently and see the job club IT courses and other programmes now being run from the building by the Blackburn diocese. That stands in stark contrast to St Mary’s in the same town, for which the Church Commissioners have not had responsibility for over 20 years and which has remained boarded up since it was deconsecrated back in 1987. Does my hon. Friend agree that the St Philip’s family centre is a great example of an alternative use for a church building?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

What has happened at St Philip’s in Nelson is outstanding. I pay tribute to all who have made it happen. St Philip’s now homes a Sure Start project, a drug rehabilitation project and an Early Break project. I hope that churches and church buildings can always be at the centre of the community for wider community use.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

It is also important to prevent churches used by other denominations from closing. Will the hon. Gentleman look at the situation facing St John’s, an historic building in Burslem? A different denomination wishes to continue worshipping there, but urgent action is needed to ensure that all the community groups can continue to use the church as well.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I have sufficient difficulties sorting out the problems of the Church of England. I do not have responsibility for how other denominations open or close their churches. That will be, if anything, a matter for the local planning authority.

[Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)]

4. What assessment he has made of the financial performance of the Church Commissioners in 2012; and if he will make a statement.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

For the financial year 2011-12, the commissioners achieved a total return of 9.7%. Over the last 20 years the commissioners have returned an average of 9.9%, which outstrips our personal aim of meeting the challenging target of retail prices index inflation plus 5%.

[Fiona Bruce]

Can my hon. Friend update the House on the current ethical investment policies of the Church Commissioners?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The Church of England has very tough ethical investment policies, and we can demonstrate that the Church Commissioners have significantly outperformed the market while investing ethically, and that it is possible to invest ethically and get a genuinely good return on those investments.

[Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)]

5. What support the Church Commissioners plan to give to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s initiative to promote credit unions; and if he will make a statement.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Archbishop Justin wants to see a more flourishing community finance sector, and he has asked those responsible at Church House to explore how the Church of England can support the credit union movement. The Church Commissioners have agreed to provide support for that initiative.

[Simon Hughes]

Following the welcome summit called by the Government on payday loan companies, and given the view of many in this House that there should be a cap on the interest that such companies can charge, will my hon. Friend suggest that an all-party group goes to see Ministers in the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to encourage support for the Church’s credit union initiative and to persuade the Government that we need to cap the interest on payday loans?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. The Anglican Mutual credit union is raising capital from a number of sources to increase its capacity. I have been checking, and I think that practically every book in the Old and New Testaments exhorts against usury. In the other place, the Archbishop of Canterbury wisely stated:

“The Financial Services Act provides for a study of the consequences of a cap to be looked at and then for the cap to be brought in at an appropriate level. Caps are needed at a sensible level that does not choke off supply and send people into the hands of loan sharks…Caps are there to prevent usurious lending…We need to…cut out legal usury from our high streets.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 June 2013; Vol. 746, c. 485.]

I entirely agree that we need to work out how we can prevent legal usury from continuing in this country.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I press the hon. Gentleman on this matter? Surely what was said at the G8 about social impact investment is manna from heaven for the Church of England, because it can be used to provide an alternative for social enterprises at the heart of the community. This is not just about payday loans; fixed-odds betting is the curse of our urban communities.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I am not entirely sure where the hon. Gentleman seeks to differ from me on this. I certainly think that we need to sort out legal usury, and I hope that my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) and I will form part of an all-party delegation to discuss with Ministers how we can cap those rates of interest that seem somewhat usurious.

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

6. What recent discussions have taken place between the Church Commissioners and the Association of English Cathedrals.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Recent discussions between the Church and the Association of English Cathedrals have covered such topics as promoting the impact of cathedrals on their locality and on national tourism, and determining how best to fund fabric repairs and maintenance.

[Hugh Bayley]

English cathedrals are among the cornerstones of English culture, of our music, of our art, of our sculpture, of our writing in the English language and even of our engineering innovation. Unlike our museums and art galleries, however, they get no regular Government funding. I know that the Under-Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, the hon. Member for Wantage (Mr Vaizey) has agreed to meet representatives of the Association of English Cathedrals. Will the hon. Gentleman tell us when that meeting will take place?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

York Minster is one of the glories of England. Maintaining our cathedrals is a huge responsibility. The hon. Gentleman was present when the Under-Secretary met cathedral deans recently. That meeting raised a number of issues, and my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary agreed to meet representatives of the association. I hope that the meeting will take place shortly, and I will try to ensure that the hon. Gentleman can attend.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

8. What he learned from visiting the Kettering street pastors on 8 June 2013.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

I was greatly impressed by my visit to the street pastors in my hon. Friend’s constituency; they do outstanding work.

[Mr Hollobone]

I thank Sir Tony for his late-night visit to the Kettering street pastors. Does he agree that their work is making Kettering town centre a better place, and that the country would be a better place were it to follow Kettering’s example?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

No greater luck hath an hon. Member than to spend a Saturday night with my hon. Friends the Members for Kettering (Mr Hollobone) and for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) and their street pastors. The work that the street pastors do is genuinely impressive. Large numbers of volunteers from all denominations are concerned to ensure that those who are enjoying the night economy are well looked after and that they get home safe and sound. I pay tribute to both my hon. Friends for the support that they are giving to those initiatives.

[Mr Speaker]

I do not want to delay for long, but before the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone) explodes, we must hear from him.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

The secondary reason why my hon. Friend came to the two constituencies was to judge the night life. Will he please tell us whether Wellingborough or Kettering had the better night life?

[Sir Tony Baldry]

Well, I fear that however I answer this question, I am likely to receive invitations from right hon. and hon. Members of all parties to go and sample the night life in their constituencies. I thought the way in which the night economies were managed by the police, by the street pastors and by everyone in Wellingborough and Kettering made them both attractive destinations for people to go and visit.

[Mr Speaker]

That was a diplomatic answer of the kind that one would expect from a former Minister at the Foreign Office. We are grateful to the hon. Gentleman.

Business of the House

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

22:35

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

Notwithstanding the night life in Kettering, will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)]

The business for next week will be:

Monday 8 July—Remaining stages of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill (Day 1).

Tuesday 9 July—Conclusion of the remaining stages of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill, followed by consideration in Committee of the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill.

Wednesday 10 July—Opposition Day [5th allotted day] (1st part). There will be a debate entitled “The Effect of Government Policies on Disabled People” on an Opposition motion, followed by motion to approve a statutory instrument relating to terrorism, and the Chairman of Ways and Means has named opposed private business for consideration.

Thursday 11 July—Debate on a motion relating to parliamentary consent to arming of anti-Government forces in Syria, followed by a general debate to mark the 25th anniversary of the Piper Alpha disaster.

The subjects for both debates have been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 12 July—Private Members’ Bills.

The provisional business for the week commencing 15 July will include:

Monday 15 July—Second Reading of the Defence Reform Bill.

I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 11 July and 5 September will be:

Thursday 11 July—Debate on social care reform for working age disabled people, followed by debate on large scale solar arrays.

Thursday 5 September—Debate on the sixth report of the Communities and Local Government Committee on councillors on the front line.

[Ms Eagle]

I thank the Leader of the House for announcing next week’s business. We have all been watching with concern as events in Egypt unfold. There are many British nationals in the country, so will the Leader of the House ensure that Members are regularly updated on this fast-moving situation?

The Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill returns to this place on Monday, as the right hon. Gentleman has announced. The hon. Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) and I asked him last week whether he would provide extra time to ensure consideration of all the necessary amendments stemming from the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. I thus thank the right hon. Gentleman for responding by granting an extra half day, which will allow some extra time for this important Bill? Will he confirm that he will protect the additional time he has allocated so that we do not lose it to Government statements and find ourselves back where we started?

This Government have a woeful record on telling the media what is happening before they tell this House—in breach of the ministerial code. Yesterday, we reached a new low with the Defence Secretary’s spectacular failure to provide Members with crucial documents relating to his statement on Army reserves. You, Mr Speaker, have rightly admonished the Defence Secretary in the strongest possible terms, and today’s Order Paper says that there will be a clarification statement, but by the time I rose to speak, we had still not received it. Surely the Defence Secretary should now have the guts to come back and subject himself to the scrutiny of Members, who will finally have adequate information in front of them.

I pointed out a few weeks ago that the Education Secretary is at the bottom of the Government’s correspondence class, with a damning report from the Procedure Committee showing that eight out of 10 of his responses to MPs are answered late. This week, we have discovered why: he has been so busy composing an edict on the content of his departmental letters that he is not doing the day job. Apparently, he has demanded prose worthy of Jane Austen, George Orwell and, rather oddly, Matthew Parris. Does the Leader of the House agree that if the Education Secretary spent less time telling everyone else how to do their jobs and more time doing his, we would not have a shortage of a quarter of a million primary school places? Does he also agree that this is further proof that with this Government it is all about spin and never about substance?

The Back-Bench Bill to be presented by the hon. Member for Stockton South (James Wharton) is becoming a classic parliamentary farce. I hear that in order to keep Members here for the big day, the Prime Minister has been forced to invite his mutinous colleagues round for a barbecue tonight. While millionaire donors get kitchen suppers at No. 10, the poor Back Benchers are shoved out into the garden.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

It will not be a pyjama party.

[Ms Eagle]

If it is a pyjama party, perhaps Rebekah Brooks should be there.

I am told that the Prime Minister will be flipping the “posh burgers”, while the Cabinet will be dishing them out. That may sound like a rare treat, but there will be trouble if members of the Cabinet do their burgers the same as they do their policy: reconstituted, undercooked and over-garnished. I certainly would not relish them.

I note that the Tory Taliban continue to fire on all cylinders. Tomorrow they will debate the introduction of a Margaret Thatcher day, and next Friday they will debate the abolition of any protection against sexual harassment in the workplace. Their alternative Queen’s Speech is so off the wall that I cannot help wondering what they will come up with next. A Bill to disfranchise all but the landed gentry, perhaps? The repeal of the Factory Acts? A Bill to confirm that the earth is indeed flat?

It is not just the Prime Minister’s Back Benchers who are out of touch. On Tuesday, Tory welfare Minister Lord Freud denied that there was any link between the rise of food banks and the Government’s benefit chaos. Since the Government’s benefit changes, there has been a sevenfold increase in visits to food banks in Wirral. They were visited by 9,000 people this year, and in most cases the reason was the benefit changes. This is a Government who have given a tax cut to their millionaire donors while plunging a third of a million more children into poverty. May we have a debate on what they can possibly mean by their increasingly ludicrous phrase “We’re all in this together”?

This week, in an attempt to seem like a man of the people, the Prime Minister told a group of Kazakh students that he aspired to be the most high-profile member of an élite club at an élite school: Harry Potter. That outraged Potter fans everywhere, and inspired The Daily Telegraph to organise a poll which concluded that he was actually more like Draco Malfoy. The Defence Secretary cannot make a statement to the House, the Education Secretary cannot answer questions, and the Chancellor cannot organise a burger stunt. Is not the reality that the Prime Minister is presiding over a Cabinet of muggles?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her response to the business statement. Let me begin by saying that I think all Members continue to be very disturbed by the turn of events in Cairo, and in Egypt generally. As we know, this is a very fast-moving and fluid situation. The Foreign Office has increased our consular presence in Egypt. I join my colleagues in advising British citizens to avoid non-essential travel to the country, apart from the Red Sea resorts, and to monitor, as necessary, the travel advice that is available on the Foreign Office website.

Like the Foreign Secretary and, I think, all Members on both sides of the House, I hope for restraint and calm and an end to the violence—especially given the very disturbing accounts of sexual violence—but I also believe that this provides us with a salutary lesson about the nature of democracy. What is necessary in a democracy is for people to resolve their conflicts peacefully, and to do so by means of democratic processes. I think we all agree that while that should not include military intervention, which we deplore, we expect those who are elected to govern in a constitutional framework that respects the rights of minorities and enables all people who live in a democracy to feel that they are fully represented. To answer the hon. Lady’s question directly, I know that the Foreign Secretary and other colleagues in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office will take every step to ensure that the House is kept fully informed.

I am grateful for the hon. Lady’s welcoming the additional time for the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill. Never let it be said that we are not a listening set of business managers. I do not think that my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) is here, but I am grateful for his representations. We are moving towards the end of term before the summer recess. As the House knows, inevitably, a range of issues will require to be announced before the recess, but we will take steps to ensure that the time that is available for that debate is protected, so that it happens as planned.

The hon. Lady asked about yesterday’s statement by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence. Mr Speaker, you will have received a letter from him apologising for the Ministry of Defence’s failure to deliver documents relating to the statement. As the hon. Lady rightly said, the House will see a written ministerial statement from my right hon. Friend. I have the text of the written ministerial statement—

[Ms Angela Eagle]

We don’t.

[Mr Lansley]

I understand that the hon. Lady does not have the text. I will not read it all out now as it would take too long, but I will gladly share it with Members and it will be available in the Vote Office shortly.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

We needed it earlier.

[Mr Lansley]

I will read the text out if the hon. Gentleman wishes me to. Rightly, we said that we would clarify the answers given, and that is what the text does: it clarifies the issues relating to Kilmarnock, the Vale of Glamorgan and the Scottish and Northern Irish Yeomanry headquarters. Therefore, that will be available for Members. I regret that we did not share the documents in advance, provide the documents referred to on time, or give the House all the information necessary to respond to the statement. We owe the right hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) and other colleagues an apology for that, and on behalf of the Government I give that apology. We will endeavour to ensure that it does not happen again.

The hon. Lady asked about responses to parliamentary questions. As she knows, I am proud of the fact that, during my time as Secretary of State, the Department of Health, a busy Department that is asked many questions, responded to questions on time in 99% or sometimes 100% of cases, a record that it has maintained following my departure. I know that the Secretary of State for Education and the permanent secretary at the Department are acutely aware of the need to raise their performance. I share with the Secretary of State the desire to ensure that, in doing so, good prose is used. My personal preference is for colleagues, when composing answers, to pay more attention to Sir Ernest Gowers than to Jane Austen, but that is just a matter of taste.

Barbeques in Downing street is not really a matter for business questions, but the hon. Lady does not seem to realise that we are united while Labour is run by Unite. That is the difference. We would love to see her at the barbeque. Perhaps she would like to come. If she does so, we can use the opportunity to see what her position is on a referendum on the future of this country in Europe. We are determined to give the people of this country that choice and to secure the best interests of this country through a negotiation of its relationship with the rest of Europe. Looking at the business before the summer recess, I hope that there will be a further opportunity for a debate in Opposition time. She might like to use that to go beyond the debate that the Opposition had on lobbying and to consider third party influence in the political system. We will bring forward a Bill relating to that issue, but the Labour party, before it deals with any motes in anyone else’s eye, must take the beam out of its own eye, which is that it is run by the trade unions. It is a party where third-party influence is rife. It is a party where 81% of its funding comes from the trade unions, and that does not just buy influence; it apparently buys the opportunity to select Labour party parliamentary candidates. That is an outrage. The legislation we introduce will not change that situation, but it is in the gift of the Labour party to do it, and the fact that it has not and that the Leader of the Opposition does not do it is a demonstration of how weak he is in his own party, as he would be in any other situation.

[Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)]

May we have a debate on transparency in local government in the modern digital age, to raise in particular the concerns that council senior officers and monitoring officers, notably those in the London borough of Tower Hamlets and others, have sought deliberately to undermine recent guidance by the Secretary of State to encourage more widely available filming and broadcasting of council meetings by local residents and journalists?

[Mr Lansley]

I am interested in what my hon. Friend says, and I will certainly raise it with my hon. Friends at the Department for Communities and Local Government who, he will know, feel very strongly about the importance of such openness and transparency. Previous issues in relation to the desire of some councils—only a very few, we hope—to try to control the media in their area is in part what has led to the Local Audit and Accountability Bill that is currently in another place, but my hon. Friend raises a further important point.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

Further to what my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) said about food banks, the Trussell Trust estimates that almost 350,000 people are using them, and that figure has tripled since 2012. As the Department for Work and Pensions does not record or measure these referrals, how can the Government be sure there is no link between food bank usage and welfare cuts? May we have an urgent debate on this issue?

[Mr Lansley]

I cannot give the hon. Lady a debate on this subject, but she will have heard the answer given repeatedly at this Dispatch Box both by me at business questions and by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister. The use of food banks increased tenfold under the last Government. One of the critical changes that have taken place is that before the election the Trussell Trust had been looking for food bank access to be advertised in jobcentres, but whereas that was not given by the last Government, it has been given under this Government. There is therefore greater access to food banks, which is important for people who are in need.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Last week it was my pleasure to open the East Midlands airport academy, which is working with young unemployed people to give them the skills and confidence they need to take their place in the workplace. Despite youth unemployment being down 15% last year in my constituency, we must do much more. May we have a statement on what steps the Government are taking to help reduce the scourge of youth unemployment?

[Mr Lansley]

The whole House will be glad to hear of the East Midlands airport academy, and I am sure my hon. Friend is proud of the contribution it is making and of his constituency for the job creation that is helping to reduce youth unemployment, as he described. Fortunately, we are not remotely complacent. We have seen a reduction in youth unemployment in the latest data, which are for the last quarter, and since last year, but we continue to take further action. We have put £1 billion into the Youth Contract, more apprenticeships, more work experience places, and more incentives in relation to wages to encourage employers to take on young people, and over the last year youth unemployment fell faster in this country than it did in the United States, Germany, Canada, France or Italy.

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

In my constituency of Wansbeck, we have always had a healthy horse population, as they have been well looked after by careful owners, but recently we have seen an explosion in irresponsible horse ownership, with horses being tethered next to almost every available blade of grass. Will the Leader of the House grant a debate on this problem, because if it is not effectively and efficiently tackled by local authorities we will see loss of life and serious injuries to residents in Wansbeck and other parts of the country?

[Mr Lansley]

I am sure the House will agree with the hon. Gentleman that that is a most unsatisfactory situation, which might apply in other constituencies. I do not know whether he has had an opportunity to raise it with my hon. Friends at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but if he has not I will certainly draw it to their attention and ask them to respond. I know in my own constituency and elsewhere that there can be difficulties with people bringing horses on to land and then sometimes simply abandoning them, and the responsibilities of the landowners in those circumstances can be very onerous.

[Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

Accessing Government services using 0845 numbers can cost as much as 41p per minute via mobile phones. May we have a statement on what progress the Government have made on transferring this access to local-rate 0345 numbers to ensure that the Government do not directly profit from the delivery of their own services?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. The Government are aiming, as far as is possible, through the digital by default strategy, to give members of the public access to direct online channels of communication, so that they do not have to rely on telephony so much. Some departments, such as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, have made considerable progress in moving away from 0845 numbers; I am told that 95% of its personal tax callers now use an 03 or equivalent number. I know from my experience at the Department of Health that part of the principle behind the shift from NHS Direct to the 111 telephone system, which is in principle the right thing to do, is moving away from an 0845 number to a simple, easy to remember and free 111 telephone system.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

I wonder whether the Leader of the House has had an opportunity to look at early-day motion 337, which stands in my name and those of other hon. Members, on the 125th anniversary of the Bow match women’s strike.

[That this House welcomes the first Match Women’s Festival being held in London on 6 July 2013 to mark the 125 years since the 1888 strike by 1,400 mainly women workers at the Bryant and May factory in the Bow area of East London; notes modern research by the historian Louise Raw that proves that the strike was instigated, organised and led independently by the match women themselves and then supported by others, after many years of dangerous working conditions, poverty wages and bullying by the match women’s employers; further notes that the match women’s strike in 1888 led directly to the Great Dock Strike of 1889 in the same part of London and, therefore, set in train the historic events from which the Labour Party was created in 1900; and believes that the match women’s victory was also an inspiration to the Suffragette movement and for all those campaigning for equality today, especially on issues such as violence against women.]

May we have a debate that would allow hon. Members to tell the true story of what happened to those brave women, neglected by historians for many years, and how they changed the course of history by standing up for their rights at work?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her question. I had not had, but now have, an opportunity to see early-day motion 337. I will take an opportunity, as I know many hon. Members will, to read it and perhaps to read about it. I very much welcome what she has had to say; she rightly raises important issues that we need to commemorate and always reflect upon in current circumstances.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

May we have a debate on the anomalous situation of precipitous demolitions ahead of planning applications being considered? High Trees in Eastfield road, Peterborough, a striking Victorian house, previously occupied by the Family Care charity, faces the threat of demolition as a result of a speculative application for 90 student bedsits by a mystery developer. Will the Leader of the House persuade his colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government to look again at this issue, so that we can avoid precipitous demolitions ahead of planning application consideration and, thus, protect our heritage and built environment?

[Mr Lansley]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. I can imagine how he and his constituents might be alarmed by an experience of that kind. I will, of course, raise it with my colleagues at DCLG and encourage them to respond to him regarding what powers are available and how they are appropriately used. He might note that our DCLG colleagues will be here answering questions on Monday, which might give him an opportunity to raise the matter then.

[Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)]

The Leader of the House spoke about the need for a debate on third-party influence. Does he feel that should include consideration of the impact of large, multi-thousand-pound donations from individuals such as John Nash, a chairman of Care UK, to Government Members?

[Mr Lansley]

I was a director in Conservative central office 20 years ago, when the Conservative party made it absolutely clear that donations to the party would not secure influence—they would not come with strings attached. In those two decades the Labour party appears to have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. It continues to be a party dominated by its paymasters; 81% of the resources that the Labour party depends on comes from trade unions. In quarter four last year, one trade union, Unite, gave Labour £832,990 and that did not come without strings—it came with many strings attached.

[Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)]

Tourism in Cleethorpes has been badly hit in recent months following the closure of the main rail route out of the resort as a result of a landslip. The incident has highlighted the economic fragility of many seaside resorts, so will the Leader of the House find time for a debate on such matters?

[Mr Lansley]

I know that my hon. Friend has been assiduous in pursuing the issue and, in response to questions that he has asked before, I have raised it with my hon. Friends at the Department for Transport. I cannot promise a further immediate debate on rail matters—of course, some rail issues were open for discussion yesterday—but I will of course raise the issue with my hon. Friends once again on his behalf.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

When can we debate the office of police and crime commissioners, which is causing disruption, waste and unhappiness throughout the country? The concept of having two people in charge, one of whom has almost unlimited Henry VIII powers while the existing chief constables have their powers diminished and threatened, is a matter of great concern and a threat to the independence of our police.

[Mr Lansley]

I know that the hon. Gentleman has raised the issues relating to the police and crime commissioner in his part of the world with me and with the Prime Minister, and he will have heard the reply. I would say two things. First, democracy matters and, in this context, the accountability that comes with election is important in itself. I know that it is enabling people across the country to feel that to a greater extent than in the past their priorities can be directly reflected in the priority setting of police services for their area. Secondly, if he has specific issues about his constituency my hon. Friends from the Home Office will be available for questions on Monday 15 July.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

The Leader of the House will be aware of the Prime Minister’s written statement yesterday that the Department for Education has ceased to have responsibility for youth policy—ironically, at a time when the commission considering youth work, which I chair, has been inundated with evidence from academies and other schools about the importance of the links between classrooms and youth work. Given the disproportionate impact of local authority funding cuts on youth work, may we have a debate—I do not believe we have had such a debate in this place for some years—soon after the recess on the future of youth services in this country? We could then consider the progress on the Government’s Positive for Youth policy in the light of yesterday’s announcement.

[Mr Lansley]

I cannot immediately offer a debate and I know that my hon. Friend will understand that the ability to relate issues to do with young people across government and to give them a renewed focus was at the heart of the Prime Minister’s changes, as announced yesterday. I am glad that this week we had the announcement of a major extension of funding for youth sport, which will, I hope, form part of the Olympic and Paralympic legacy. That is very important. I shall raise the issues he mentions with my colleagues and as the opportunity for such a debate will probably not arise immediately in Government time, he might consider asking for such a thing in the context of priorities through the Backbench Business Committee.

[Clive Efford (Eltham) (Lab)]

May we have a debate on the demands for a public inquiry into the allegations that the Metropolitan police sought to undermine the Macpherson inquiry? There are revelations today that a report has been referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission that a senior officer sought to gather information on someone who was about to give evidence to the inquiry and did so with the intention of undermining that individual. If that proves to be true, it seriously calls into question the way that senior officers across the country approached the Macpherson inquiry and further undermines the process of the police investigating the police. Only an independent inquiry with the right to summon people and to have them give evidence under oath will satisfy the public that the matter is truly being looked into.

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman will recall that the Home Secretary made it very clear in the House that she has confidence that a number of inquiries that are being undertaken into the issues surrounding Stephen Lawrence’s murder continue to be independent, but that she has not taken off the table any further steps that might be needed to ensure that there is the rigour and independence required. She continues to keep the issue under review.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

Back in 2008, Bradford & Bingley was expropriated by the Labour Government in a horrid and flawed decision taken by the then Prime Minister and Chancellor. Nearly 1 million shareholders and bondholders still do not know how and why their company was confiscated. Surely the Leader of the House agrees that it is time the Government and the Financial Conduct Authority made it abundantly clear what decisions were taken in the run-up to the confiscation. Will he arrange for the Chancellor to make a statement laying out exactly what decisions were taken, so we can find out once and for all why Bradford & Bingley was treated so unfairly compared with other banks in a similar situation?

[Mr Lansley]

On behalf of my hon. Friend and other Members who share his views, I will raise the matter with my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. My hon. Friend will be aware that our right hon. Friend will not himself have direct access to the papers of the previous Administration, but I will ask him what steps, not least in the context of the continuing inquiry into banking standards, it is appropriate to take to find out more about the circumstances.

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the Leader of the House consider having a debate as soon as possible on how we restore and achieve a renaissance of the great towns and cities, such as Huddersfield, Leeds and Manchester, in the north and midlands of our country? Does he believe that if there were a £50 billion pot to invest in those cities—a wonderful opportunity—the city leaders would spend it on fast rail to Manchester instead?

[Mr Lansley]

I am surprised that the hon. Gentleman did not acknowledge not only what has already been achieved in some of our great cities, but the importance of the city deals. To take the example of Manchester, the city deal reached there is visionary and far reaching, and if the earn-back scheme does what it is intended to do, it will provide enormous investment in the infrastructure of the city. Other cities across the country—I think Huddersfield is one of them—are bidding for a city deal. This is their opportunity to come forward with a vision for their city—it should be not top-down, but led locally—and the Government are looking to give support to those city deals.

[Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)]

Supporters of Coventry City football club, including myself, are dismayed that the club’s owners are applying to the Football League to move the club to Northampton for the next three years. The board of the Football League has to sanction the move, which I strongly urge it to oppose. Will my right hon. Friend ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport to make an urgent statement on this important matter?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend raises an issue that I can imagine is of significant concern to his constituents and others in the area. Although it is not an immediate responsibility of the Government, this is something that I know my hon. Friends at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport dealing with the governance of football take seriously and I shall of course raise it with them. I know that they will respond to my hon. Friend, so that he can keep his constituents informed of what the circumstances are and what the Government’s view may be.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle) for giving me some leeway to raise this issue.

I have now seen a copy of the written ministerial statement, which the Library received at 10.43, although it is actually a draft, so perhaps we should not be too confident about it. The WMS contains no details of the number of personnel who will lose their job or have to move, or what the requirements are for each of the bases; it does not provide any moving dates; it does not say which constituencies personnel are going to; it does not state if they are moving locally; it does not give the base locations in any of the cities; and it does not explain how Kilmarnock ended up, in handwriting, on the list. May we have a proper statement from the Ministry of Defence at the earliest opportunity—perhaps even on Monday?

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman knows that many of the matters he raises would not have formed part of the original circulation of documents. I have made very clear our regret that the information that should have been available when the Secretary of State sat down at the end of his statement was not available at that time. The information, in so far as it was incorrect at the time it was given to him, is being corrected in the written ministerial statement, but as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, there are further questions to which he wishes to have answers. I will of course ensure that my hon. Friends at the Ministry of Defence take note of those questions and respond to him as soon as they can.

[Mr Speaker]

I should, perhaps, mention to the House that, as the Leader of the House indicated earlier, I have myself received a gracious letter of apology from the Secretary of State for Defence, a copy of which I am content to place in the Library of the House.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

Will the Leader of the House raise with the Chancellor of the Exchequer the inequitable and unjust situation whereby a banker who wishes to sell a derivative or hedging product, such as interest rate swap agreements, has to be registered, authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, but the directors of many thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, who are classified under the FCA’s test as sophisticated enough to take responsibility for signing such an agreement, are not registered, authorised and regulated by the FCA and therefore are ineligible for the FCA’s redress scheme?

[Mr Speaker]

This is a matter of notable interest and possibly no little complexity. It is not immediately obvious to me, which may be the result of my own stupidity, that it represents a business question, but the ingenuity of the Leader of the House is legendary and I shall leave it to his interpretation.

[Mr Lansley]

I think that what my hon. Friend is looking for is a response from Ministers at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and I will try to secure that. She may find that it is none the less in order to raise some of the issues that she describes in the context of the discussion on the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill, as they are clearly relevant to that. I am pleased to say that we have now allocated a day and a half to enable such issues to be raised.

[Alison Seabeck (Plymouth, Moor View) (Lab)]

I am sorry to have to come back to the debacle that was yesterday’s defence statement, but we still do not have clarity. I find it astonishing that a Secretary of State, whether that is the Secretary of State for Defence or for Education—there is a similar problem there—can come to the House and give a statement with incorrect or inadequate information for Members in all parts of the House to peruse. I ask respectfully why the Leader of the House, having seen the statement this morning, even though it appears to be only a partial statement, did not make it available prior to today’s business questions. Surely that would at least have shown some willingness on the part of the Government to try to keep Members informed on this very complex matter.

[Mr Lansley]

I will continue to ensure that we make the information that is provided to the House available as quickly as we can. As I say, I had the language of the written ministerial statement shortly before I stood up, but I did not have it in a form that I could distribute to Members and I was not confident that it was in the Vote Office at that point.

[Thomas Docherty]

It was not.

[Mr Lansley]

That is why I was not confident that it was there. I am very clear that we did not meet the standard that we were looking to meet yesterday. We are determined to ensure that we make this information available, and make it available when the House has a need for it.

[Alun Cairns (Vale of Glamorgan) (Con)]

May we have a debate on the need for a change of culture in the BBC? I would have hoped that scandals over recent years and even in recent weeks would allow the BBC to be more transparent and open with its viewers and the licence fee payers. I recently tabled a freedom of information request to ask how many journalists and staff travelled with the British Lions to follow them in Australia, and the BBC refused to answer it because it falls outside the Freedom of Information Act. Is this not a bad example of how the BBC works?

[Mr Lansley]

Many Members in the House will have sympathy with what my hon. Friend says. Many Members will also remember the long struggle that took place to secure access to the BBC for the National Audit Office. When one sees, for example, the report that the NAO published recently in relation to severance agreements at the BBC, that entirely justifies the openness that resulted from its access. I am sure Members will be looking to the Public Accounts Committee’s hearings with the chairman of the BBC Trust and looking to the BBC Trust which, as regulator of the BBC, must take responsibility now for ensuring that the cultural changes that are required in the BBC are seen through.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

It cost £73,000 to help prepare three NHS chiefs for a recent Public Accounts Committee hearing. May we have a Government statement on how and why consultants were hired for 52 days in advance of a two-hour PAC hearing, and who will be called to account for this gross misuse of taxpayers’ money?

[Mr Lansley]

As far as I am aware, that should not have happened and it was an excessive use of resources for that purpose. I am sure my hon. Friends at the Department of Health and in particular its permanent secretary will want to examine precisely why that happened. [Interruption.] I think it happened after I was Health Secretary. Rather than rehearse or receive training, civil servants and others who give evidence to Select Committees would be well advised simply to think through what their responsibilities are and how they discharge them. That is the most important thing they can do and the proper preparation they should undertake.

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

Aldi, Morrisons and Tesco want to build big stores in my constituency; some people are against and some are in favour. Yorkshire Water, meanwhile, wants to rip up the listed Victorian reservoir spillway at Butterley in Marsden, and nearly everybody is against that. May we have a debate on how communities can be involved, how the process can be a lot more transparent and how local views can be heard on such major planning issues?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend raises important issues with which the House has become familiar, not least through his robust advocacy of the heritage represented by the Butterley spillway. I reiterate that my colleagues from the Department for Communities and Local Government will be available to answer questions on Monday, which my hon. Friend might find helpful. In addition, the Government are focused on securing local decision making, not least through neighbourhood plans, which, if used to their fullest extent by local communities, give some of the protection that he rightly is looking for.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I have just benefited from a period of paternity leave following the birth of my first child, Ruby Erin—8 lb 7 oz and both mother and daughter are doing well, since you ask, Mr Speaker—as a result of a right that was extended by the previous Labour Government. Could time be made available to discuss the extension of employment rights to parents, including those who find themselves in the impossibly sad situation of losing a child immediately after birth?

[Mr Speaker]

My profuse apologies to the hon. Gentleman; I should have been listening to what he was saying.

[Mr Lansley]

I think the House will join me in congratulating the hon. Gentleman and wishing his daughter Ruby and her mother the very best in the future.

We take very seriously the availability of paternity leave and, indeed, flexible leave, which is why we included additional relevant provisions in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. There are issues concerning bereavement and sadly we have not legislated for additional rights in that regard, but there is a responsibility on employers to consider and look sympathetically at requests for leave in circumstances of family stress, and I hope that they will do so.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. May I just point out to the House that there are still about 20 colleagues seeking to contribute? I would like to accommodate them all, as I almost invariably do, but there is a statement to follow and then two debates under the auspices of the Backbench Business Committee, so there is intense pressure on time necessitating exemplary parliamentary brevity, which will now be shown by Mr Peter Bone.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

May we have an urgent statement from the Leader of the House about tomorrow’s business? There will be a very important debate and I praise the Government’s Chief Whip for using his power to ensure that Conservative Members will be present, but I understand that the other parties are trying to persuade their Members not to attend. What advice does the Leader of the House have so that Members can come here tomorrow and vote for Margaret Thatcher day?

[Mr Lansley]

I say to all Members, and Opposition Members in particular, that they should not come here because their Whips tell them to or absent themselves because their Whips advise them not to be here. On the contrary, the reason they should be here is to explain to their constituents whether they are in favour or not of giving the people of this country a say over our relationship with Europe.

[Valerie Vaz (Walsall South) (Lab)]

May we have an urgent debate about who is in charge of the Department of Health? They are like Laurel and Hardy. The Secretary of State appears to be more interested in—I am sorry, I have completely forgotten the rest of my question.

[Mr Lansley]

Suffice it to say that the Secretary of State is in charge of the Department of Health.

[Mr Lee Scott (Ilford North) (Con)]

I regret to have to again ask for a debate on the plight of the young Tamil children who, at the end of the conflict a number of years ago, disappeared. They have never been found and their parents and relatives have never been told what happened to them, even though we fear that we know what happened to them. May we please have an urgent debate on that matter?

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend’s concern is entirely understandable. Ministers at the Foreign Office continue to take a close interest in Sri Lanka and to make representations to its Government on the human rights abuses of the past and, in so far as is needed, improvements in human rights now. I will ask them to respond to him with what they know about the possibility of resolving those unhappy issues.

[Grahame M. Morris (Easington) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House use his good offices to ask the Home Secretary whether we may have a debate or, at the least, an oral statement on gun controls and firearms licensing? That is a hotly debated topic and there are issues of public safety. Ministers have indicated that they are consulting on changing the guidance. It might be opportune to have such a debate at an early opportunity.

[Mr Lansley]

I will talk to my right hon. and hon. Friends at the Home Office. I cannot promise an immediate debate or a statement, but I will see what they can do to respond to the hon. Gentleman. As I said earlier, they will be available for questions on Monday 15 July.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

Last week, a man died when he was hit by a train close to Rugby station. That was one of an increasing number of such incidents. There have been 238 in the past year, leading to distress for families, psychologically scarred train drivers and disruption for travellers. Network Rail is about to install new fencing along the west coast main line and is working with the Samaritans on suicide prevention. May we have a debate to consider what further steps may be taken on this important matter?

[Mr Lansley]

Members will know that fatalities at level crossings and on railway lines are intensely distressing. My hon. Friend may like to know that the number of trespass fatalities in 2012-13 fell below the average level of the past 10 years. Through its community safety campaigns, Network Rail is educating young people about the dangers of the railways, particularly for trespassers, and it is working with the Samaritans on initiatives to reduce the incidence of railway suicide. I will ask Ministers at the Department for Transport whether they can add to my response.

[Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)]

Will the Leader of the House arrange for the Home Secretary to come to the House and issue a clarification on the apparent proposal to introduce £3,000 visa bonds for visitors to this country from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. That proposal has caused much dismay in Leicester and threatens to put a strain on our economic ties with those nations.

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman might have heard the Prime Minister make it clear on Tuesday—I think in response to a Member from Leicester—that we are working towards a pilot scheme of that kind. The Home Secretary will announce the details of that pilot scheme in due course.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

There is unprecedented interest in the 100th Tour de France, which is currently taking place. I am sure that all Members would salute Mark Cavendish’s fifth stage victory. There is huge excitement in Yorkshire about the 101st Tour de France, which will start in Leeds and go around Yorkshire, through Sheffield and on to Cambridge and London. May we have a statement from the Government, who are working hard to make sure that it is a success, to ensure that we make the most of this thrilling opportunity next year?

[Mr Lansley]

Yes, there is great excitement, not least in my own constituency, which, as my hon. Friend says, the Tour de France will reach after the grand départ in Yorkshire. The Cabinet was briefed about it some months ago, and I thought it was an interesting and exciting proposal. I am pleased that the Government are backing it. I cannot promise a statement, but I urge my hon. Friend to be here when Ministers from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport answer questions on 5 September. That may be a timely moment to talk about further support for the Tour de France.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Earlier, in Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions, I raised the lessons of the Smethwick fire for Chinese lanterns and waste storage. During that fire, the West Midlands fire service and its firefighters performed magnificently, but the service was stretched to breaking point. Indeed, I am informed that during the first night only one West Midlands fire engine was left to cover the rest of the west midlands. May we have a debate to give a Minister from the Department for Communities and Local Government the opportunity to reconsider the severe cuts to the West Midlands fire service and the other metropolitan authorities?

[Mr Lansley]

I am sure the House will share the hon. Gentleman’s recognition of the strain that that dreadful fire put on the local fire services and the magnificent way in which they responded to it. I will raise the issue that he mentions, but rather than wait for a debate, it might be better for him to be in his place on Monday when DCLG Ministers are here, so that he can raise the issue with them. I hope they will be able to give him some reassurance.

[Kris Hopkins (Keighley) (Con)]

Will the Health Secretary come to the House and give a statement on the opportunity to expand on his health tourism consultation to include an examination of the cost to the taxpayer of visitors securing repeat prescriptions that are then posted back to their home country for friends or relatives? I believe that is becoming more prevalent.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend raises an important point. I cannot promise an immediate statement, not least because my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health has published a consultation this week and will no doubt wish to take account of the responses before announcing further measures. I hope that my hon. Friend and anybody else who has evidence of abuse of our NHS will bring it forward, because it is right that we respond to such abuse and take measures against it.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

I declare an interest as a patron of Gate-Safe, an unpaid position that I took up following the tragic death of two children, including one of my constituents, Karolina Golabek. There have been numerous other accidental deaths and serious injuries caused by automatic electronic gates. May we have a debate on the need to review their design and installation, and on the need for regular maintenance by properly trained and authorised manufacturers of manual and automatic gates, to prevent future such deaths?

[Mr Lansley]

Many Members listening to what the hon. Lady says will be interested to learn more. If I may, I will contact my colleagues at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in the first instance to see how they might respond to the issue that she rightly raises.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

Following the Chancellor’s announcement in last week’s comprehensive spending review that the Government will use the LIBOR fines to fund charities such as Combat Stress, and yesterday’s announcement that the Ministry of Defence will make greater use of reservists in defending our country, may we have a debate on mental health, especially for reservists but also for regulars?

[Mr Lansley]

I cannot promise an immediate debate, but I hope that the mental health services that we provide through the NHS and in support of the armed services are not only comprehensive and effective but continually improving. We are continually seeking to improve them. My hon. Friend will recall that my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), who is now the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, produced the “Fighting Fit” report. In implementing it, we have put in place a number of measures that will deliver additional support to any service personnel or veterans who have mental health problems. I hope we will follow through on that as fully as we can.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

We expected the publication of the Foreign Office’s business and human rights strategy towards the end of last year. It has still not been published, but rumour has it that it will be before the summer recess. Will the Leader of the House ensure that it is not slipped out at the last moment, and that the House has a proper opportunity to debate it and question the Foreign Secretary on its contents?

[Mr Lansley]

I am not aware of a planned publication date, but I will inquire with my hon. Friends about what opportunities there may be to ask questions about it subsequently.

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

Shortly before the last election, the Leader of the House went with me to Rowley Regis hospital, which at the time had just lost its last two in-patient wards. While he was Secretary of State for Health, the hospital opened a new in-patient reablement unit, and it has just announced that another ward will reopen in autumn. As we celebrate the NHS’s 65th birthday, may we have a debate on the steps taken by the Government to ensure that local health services are driven by doctors in partnership with local patients?

[Mr Lansley]

I cannot promise an immediate debate, but it is timely to recognise the work done in the NHS. I remember visiting Rowley Regis hospital—if I recall correctly it is part of the Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, which was at the forefront of clinicians taking greater ownership of the services they provide. Tomorrow is the 65th anniversary of the NHS, and universal access to comprehensive health care for all at the point of need is one of this country’s greatest assets, of which we are rightly proud.

I want personally to say to the one and a third million people who work in the NHS that we thank them and value what they do. I know, not least from personal experience on many occasions, that they want to achieve the best care for patients. That is why I put clinical leadership, with accountability for quality and excellence in outcomes and care for patients, at the heart of our NHS reforms. To be true to its mission, we need an NHS that is envied for its excellence, not just its availability. That is why the shift from a top-down target culture that covers up failure to one that is open and accountable in its outcomes will be a validation of the NHS, not a condemnation.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

On Tuesday, the Select Committee on Home Affairs heard evidence from the police and crime commissioner for Gwent. At that meeting, my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) asked a number of extremely perceptive questions. I was therefore surprised to read a tweet after the meeting by the Gwent PCC, who said that my hon. Friend was there as a “plant” for Gwent MPs. Such a remark is a huge discourtesy to Gwent MPs, to my superb hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd, and to a Select Committee of this House. May we have a debate on this?

[Mr Lansley]

If I may, I will just say that I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman. I know as a matter of simple fact that Members of this House do not go to Select Committees as a plant for anybody else; they ask questions on their own account and on behalf of the House. We should respect them for that, as should witnesses to the Committees.

[Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)]

Today, the Select Committee on Education will publish its report on school governors and governance. It is a timely report, as Education Ministers are also thinking about that subject. May the House have the opportunity to consider school governance, not least to salute what is done by our governors, and also to update their role?

[Mr Lansley]

I hope that an opportunity will arise for such a debate although I cannot immediately promise that. I share with my hon. Friend the sense that giving greater freedoms and responsibility to schools to govern themselves through academy status and free schools depends not only on the professional leadership of the school, but on the support it receives from the governing body. Members of those governing bodies are to be congratulated on the support they give.

[Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)]

May I press the Leader of the House further on the statement made yesterday by the Defence Secretary? Based on what we heard this morning, the draft statement leaves many questions unanswered. For instance, I do not know why Widnes TA barracks is being closed, or the consequences of that. Clearly I am opposed to that, and it is important that the Leader of the House speaks to the Secretary of State about coming to the House to answer further questions.

[Mr Lansley]

I think it would be fair for the hon. Gentleman to recognise that in addition to the White Paper yesterday, there was a written ministerial statement—albeit that it came later than it should done—that set out the order of battle, as it were, for reserve forces, which are re-shaping because of their extended role and increased numbers. There is a complex relationship between those things, and the Secretary of State could hardly attempt to explain that in detail in relation to individual locations in his statement yesterday. All Members should accept that that could not have been achieved that day in any case, and the issue needs to be examined afterwards. If Members want further detail on particular locations, they should correspond with Ministers at the Ministry of Defence to hear more about that.

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

The Prime Minister’s request in February for Professor Bruce Keogh to review the quality of care provided by NHS trusts with above average mortality rates has put 14 hospital trusts, including East Lancashire Hospitals NHS trust, under the spotlight. Following the announcement, I wrote to Sir Bruce to ask him to look specifically at the impact of the downgrading of Burnley General’s accident and emergency department in 2007 under the previous Government. The findings of the review will not be made available until 19 July, I believe—the day after the House has risen for the summer recess. May we have an early debate once the House returns to discuss the outcome of the review?

[Mr Lansley]

I must confess that I was not aware of the date on which Bruce Keogh was planning to publish his review of mortality rates at 14 hospitals, but I will of course inquire of my colleagues as to what is planned. Clearly I cannot anticipate the conclusions of the review. I remember visiting Burnley with my hon. Friend and I am very pleased that we were able subsequently to secure additional investment into Burnley to support services. It was transparent to all of us that the previous changes had left many people in Burnley and related districts very unclear as to what services were available to them, or ought to be available to them. I hope that what has been done subsequently has significantly remedied that.

[Andy Sawford (Corby) (Lab/Co-op)]

Twenty three-year-old Tafadzwa Sarupinda and 15-year-old Tapiwanashe Sarupinda came to the UK in 2000 with their aunt, who now has British citizenship. The children do not. My predecessor wrote to the Home Secretary two years ago asking for this to be resolved. Tafadzwa says:

“I pray and cry as each year passes. My life is on hold.”

Will the Leader of the House assist me and prevail upon the Home Secretary to try to intervene and resolve this case?

[Mr Lansley]

As I hope I am able to do for all MPs, I will endeavour to secure a response to the hon. Gentleman in relation to his continuing problem with his constituent.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

This week we have learned that, over the past three years, the BBC has spent £25 million on severance packages for 150 senior executives, a quarter of whom received more than they were entitled to, while in Whitehall a permanent secretary has accepted a severance package of almost half a million pounds, £200,000 of which was in the form of a discretionary payment. My constituents in Kettering are outraged at this public sector largesse. May we have statements from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport about the abuse of licence fee-payers’ money and from the Cabinet Office about what it will do to stop mandarins getting excessive compensation payments?

[Mr Lansley]

If I may, I will not repeat myself; I am sure my hon. Friend will have heard what I said earlier about the BBC and about what the role of the Public Accounts Committee might be. I shall raise the other issue with the Minister for the Cabinet Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Mr Maude), or the Chief Secretary, both of whom are very concerned about the issue.

[Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)]

May we have a debate on the Government’s latest plans to reform civil legal aid? Last Thursday we had an excellent debate in the Chamber on the reforms, but the issue of civil legal aid was largely missed, particularly with regard to judicial review and the Lord Chancellor’s barmy idea not to allow prisoners to access legal advice unless and only if they are opposing a parole decision.

[Mr Lansley]

The hon. Gentleman must recognise the requirement to reform legal aid; there are issues of fairness, of quantum and of the resources expended on legal aid, and there is also the need to secure savings. My right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor rightly has made it clear that those savings had to be achieved, but has listened to the representations made in the consultation. The Law Society was very clear that it was able to accommodate additional choice while understanding that the need for savings had to be met. It was very fair on the part of the Lord Chancellor to respond positively to that.

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

Please may we have a debate on tomorrow’s 65th birthday of the NHS? As the NHS changes from a target-based culture to a more open culture, and when various historic failures are coming to light, some of the achievements of the NHS, such as the removal of mixed-sex wards, improved cancer and stroke care, and the sheer hard work of those who work in it, are all in danger of being missed. If we were to have a birthday debate, we would be able to take a more rounded and celebratory view.

[Mr Lansley]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I had the privilege of attending the 50th and 60th anniversary celebrations. At 65, the value that this country derives from having a national health service, with the principles that underpin it, is undiminished. As I said earlier, it is important that people in the NHS know full well that the NHS will carry that respect and valuation into the future only if it continues to put quality and outcomes at its heart. Building on recent announcements on publication of data and greater transparency on outcomes will enable clinicians and the NHS to demonstrate internationally not only that it is the most universally accessible service anywhere in the world, but that it can be among the most excellent, too.

Remploy

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

11:41

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)]

With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on Remploy.

Today’s announcement by Remploy means that jobs for approximately 70%—515—of the disabled employees in the remaining Remploy factories and CCTV sites could be saved through the commercial process. The sites and businesses are subject to final negotiations with preferred bidders looking to take over the businesses. Hon. Members will agree that our first concern must be Remploy employees, and they have been informed of the latest decisions by the Remploy board today. There are now 234 disabled people at risk of redundancy and they will take part in individual consultations with Remploy. All employees affected will be supported by the £8 million tailored package of support to help them move into mainstream work.

If I may remind the House, the Government announced in March 2012 that we would implement the recommendations of the Sayce review to withdraw funding from Remploy factories and redirect it to enable more disabled people to get jobs in the labour market. We have always made it clear that this is about supporting individuals in factories and disabled people across the country. As it stood, Remploy factories were losing £50 million—a sixth of the specialist disability employment budget. That money was not going to people but to failing factories, and that cannot be right. As announced in the spending review, the Government have confirmed £350 million to support disabled people to move into, remain in or progress in work.

On 6 December 2012, I tabled a written statement to inform the House that the Remploy board had commenced stage two of its commercial process. The aim was to transfer the remaining seven businesses in 18 factories and the 27 CCTV contracts, potentially affecting 1,016 employees. The Remploy board identified three businesses as potentially viable and appointed KPMG, as a professional agent, to manage the sale of the CCTV, furniture and automotive businesses. Of the 27 CCTV contracts, 17 are subject to the commercial process. KPMG, appointed by Remploy, is currently working through that process, which it hopes to complete shortly. I am pleased to be able to tell the House that eight of the remaining 10 contracts have either been taken back in-house by the local authorities or moved to alternative service providers. This means that approximately 50 employees will be, or have been, transferred to new employers. However, it is likely that the remaining two contracts will be terminated. I can also confirm that in addition to CCTV, the furniture businesses based in Port Talbot, Sheffield and Blackburn will remain in the commercial process.

I confirm that Remploy has received a number of good-quality innovative bids for its automotive business. In the next few weeks, KPMG will continue commercial discussions with a number of bidders who have expressed an interest in acquiring the whole business, which has 217 employees, including 179 disabled people based in the sites in Birmingham, Coventry and Derby. KPMG aims to have identified a preferred bidder in a matter of weeks. I will provide further written updates on progress when details become available. I can also confirm that offers have been received for the E-Cycle business, which has factories based at Porth and Heywood. I am pleased to say that the E-Cycle business will remain in the commercial process, as Remploy begins to work with the preferred bidder, with the aim of completing the business sale in mid-August.

Following independent and expert advice, Remploy has carefully considered best and final offers received for the three other businesses: Frontline textiles, Marine textiles and packaging. Remploy, together with an independent panel of experts including KPMG, has assessed the viability of these best and final offers against a series of published criteria, including the continued employment of disabled people, value for money and the sustainability of the businesses. Our priority throughout the process has been to safeguard jobs, which is why we have offered a wage subsidy of up to £6,400 for disabled employees to encourage interested parties to come forward.

Despite considerable interest in the Marine and Frontline textile businesses at Leven, Cowdenbeath, Stirling, Dundee and Clydebank, Remploy did not receive a best and final offer for these businesses as part of the commercial process. Additionally, there are no viable bids for the packaging businesses based at Norwich, Portsmouth, Burnley and Sunderland. These sites will now move to closure. In line with the Remploy redundancy procedures, all 284 employees at the packaging, Frontline and Marine textile businesses, including 234 disabled employees, will be invited to individual consultation meetings over the next 30 days to discuss the options and the support that will be available to them.

Our experience with stage 1 shows that businesses such as textiles that did not have commercial interest and closed afterwards reopened as social enterprises or new businesses. In fact, nine sites have been sold on that basis. This has resulted in employment opportunities for the original employees. For example, businesses have opened under new ownership in Bolton and Wigan, and at similar factories, which are looking to create 35 jobs for disabled people, including former Remploy employees. In addition, Remploy has already confirmed that it has received an asset bid from a social enterprise organisation for the purchase of assets of the textiles business. This may create potential job opportunities for those disabled people.

We have put in place a people help and support package for all disabled employees to provide a comprehensive range of support for all disabled individuals made redundant as a result of Remploy factory closures. This tailored support is available for individuals to access for up to 18 months after their factory closes and includes access to a personal caseworker and a personal budget to help individuals with future choices. I can confirm that the personal caseworkers have already begun engaging with employees on stage 2 Remploy sites. This has provided an important opportunity to give individuals currently at risk of redundancy the information they need about their opportunities moving forward. We will continue to do everything we can do in finding them work.

We have also built into the package a community support fund to provide grants to local voluntary sector and user-led organisations to run social job club projects to support disabled people and their families. Some 32 organisations have already been awarded funding, supporting 748 ex-Remploy employees locally. There has been welcome success during stage 1 in terms of the number of disabled former Remploy staff who have found alternative employment. We have every expectation that job outcomes from stage 2 will be similar. As at 28 June, 400 of the 1,103 disabled former Remploy workers who chose to work with us are currently in work and a further 328 are working with Work Choice to undertake other training activities.

In closing, let me confirm that the factories going forward in the commercial process are the CCTV contract, the furniture businesses in Port Talbot, Sheffield and Blackburn, the automotive sites in Birmingham, Coventry and Derby, and the E-Cycle business in Porth and Heywood. Those that will be closing are the Marine and Frontline textile businesses in Leven, Cowdenbeath, Stirling, Dundee and Clydebank, and the packaging businesses in Norwich, Portsmouth, Burnley and Sunderland. I have written to all affected MPs and parliamentarians, inviting them to a briefing session today at 4.30 pm in Room S, Portcullis House. I commend this statement to the House.

11:49

[Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)]

I thank the Minister for her statement, and for giving us advance warning of it just after 9 o’clock this morning. If there were a league table for the way in which Departments advise us of ministerial statements, hers would certainly be ahead of the Ministry of Defence.

Given the great interest in Remploy, will the Minister tell us what efforts were made to inform Members with a Remploy factory in their constituency that their factory was due to close? I understand that a letter went out at 11.40 this morning, just one minute before she stood up to make her statement—

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

What did you do when you closed Remploy factories—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order.

[Mrs McGuire]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I am sorry; I might have touched a nerve.

I also wonder, given the way in which the House works, whether the Minister had given Members advance warning of her briefing at 4.30 this afternoon.

I shall turn now to the substance of the review. The Minister often cites the Sayce review, as did her predecessor, as protection for her decisions. I would remind the House, however, that the Sayce review did not recommend the speedy closure of the Remploy factories in the way that the Government have progressed it. Indeed, it recommended a phased development of the process. Once again, however, the review has been brought into play. The Government’s aim has always been to get rid of the Remploy liability in this financial year, and no matter what else was said, this was always going to be the cut-off point. That has been confirmed this morning. Of course I welcome the fact that viable bids have been received for some of the factories and that 17 of the 27 CCTV businesses are in the commercial process. I also welcome the Minister’s comment that it appears that eight of the other 10 will continue in one form or another.

The textile division based in Scotland has a long and proud tradition of making security and chemical protection wear for the Ministry of Defence, and the disappearance of the skills built up over many years will be a great loss. The textile division recently lost a major MOD contract that it was eminently capable of carrying out, given the quality and timeliness of its work. Given that the factories are under pressure of closure, will the Minister tell us whether she or any of her officials had any engagement with MOD procurement officials to encourage them to use Remploy as a supplier, given that it had carried out the work successfully over many years? It has never been properly recognised that much of the kit worn by our service personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq was made in Remploy factories. Did the Minister use her good offices to encourage the MOD to award that contract to Remploy, if necessary using article 19?

Will the Minister also explain what she meant when she said that there was an asset bid from a social enterprise company for the textile section? What opportunities does she believe that that bid will open up? Many of us on the Opposition Benches see the words “asset bid” and worry that they might really mean asset stripping. We need to know exactly what is involved.

I also want to ask the Minister to define the word “success”, which she used in the closing paragraph of her statement. She mentioned that about 1,100 former Remploy workers were choosing to work with personal caseworkers to find other jobs. In other words, they are not currently in employment. Another 400 are in work and another 300 are in training, so by my calculation, significantly less than 50% of the former Remploy workers who have already been made redundant are currently in employment. I am wondering what the Minister’s benchmark for success is.

Given that the Work programme is performing three times worse than doing nothing for disabled people—

[The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Mr Iain Duncan Smith)]

Rubbish.

[Mrs McGuire]

The Secretary of State keeps saying “rubbish”, but he needs to listen—[Interruption.] I did not realise that the Minister had brought along—[Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I am sure that we need to hear both sides. I was happy to hear the Minister and will certainly be happy to hear and wish to hear the shadow Minister. Interruptions are not helpful.

[Mrs McGuire]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. If the Secretary of State wants to say something, he should make his own statements and not heckle.

Given that the Work programme—[Interruption.] This is ridiculous, Mr Deputy Speaker, frankly. Given that the Work programme is not performing for disabled people, can the Minister say how the former Remploy workers are going to be supported in their quest for employment?

Finally, if the Minister looks at the areas where the Remploy closures are happening, she will find that there are unemployment rates of 7.5%, 8.2%, 8.1%, 7.4% and 7.9%—nearly double the national average—in the majority of cases. Does she really think that the closure of these factories today is an indication that she is really there to support disabled workers?

[Esther McVey]

I am led to believe that the etiquette of the House is to come here first to give a statement, which is entirely what I did. I believe, too, that this is a working parliamentary day—a full working day—so all the processes we undertook were carried out to the best possible standard. People were informed through a correct process and in the correct way. I am glad that we can put that on the record.

Moving forward, what this was all about was supporting disabled people. We had a situation in which £50 million—a sixth of the entire budget—was not supporting individuals, but going into failing factories. We cannot allow that to be case. We have therefore made sure that we support those individuals. There are 8,500 disabled people in the constituency of the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire), but only 29 of them, along with two non-disabled people, were employed at Remploy, making a total of 31 people. The Remploy factory in her constituency turned over £71,000 a year, but actually lost £439,000 a year.

I have faith in Remploy employment services to be able to find those people jobs. Since 2010, Remploy employment services have found a job for 109 people with the same disabilities. That is 109 in two years, while there are only 29 disabled people at this factory. Those are the statistics for the right hon. Lady’s constituency, and they are the same for many others.

I did indeed look into the MOD contracts. There are various criteria, which have to be adhered to—the cost to taxpayers, for example, and various others—and I also looked at article 19. It was put in place, which meant that Remploy factories could be considered, but article 19 also says that offers have to be viable and value for money, which was not the case.

On the asset bid, I said that no best and final offer came forward, although there were expressions of interest in the Marine and Frontline textiles businesses. An asset bid, however, has now come forward from a social enterprise, so we have faith that this can move forward. Our criteria for the bid involve, first of all, the employment of disabled people.

Let me add, to put the right hon. Lady’s mind at rest, that following the submission of assets bids during stage 1, the factories in Wigan, Wrexham, Oldham, north London, Motherwell, Bridgend, Bolton and Birkenhead have reopened.

I described as a success, and warmly welcomed, the process during stage 1 which led to 400 people obtaining jobs and 328 being involved in some form of training, because that has happened at a faster rate than has been the case following any other regular redundancy. Furthermore, nine factories have reopened.

I have read the written statement made by the right hon. Lady in November 2007, and the report of the oral statement made during the same month by the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain). At that time, everyone was looking for a way of making the factories work. The Labour Government put in more than half a billion for modernisation, but that did not work. They looked into whether an increase in public sector procurement was possible, but it proved not to be, following an overestimate of 130%.

The right hon. Lady also forgot to mention that she had closed 29 factories in 2008. In that instance, 1,637 people were not tracked, and did not benefit from an investment of £8 million and the provision of personal caseworkers. We have done all those things. I have met ex-Remploy workers. I went to Talit’s house in Oldham, and asked him what he wanted, and I met Chris from Burnley here at the House of Commons. We helped to reshape the whole package with the help of those people.

We have done a great deal, and, although there is more to do, I am proud of what we have done.

[Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that at a time when there are 6.9 million disabled people of working age in the United Kingdom, we need to find a better way of using the budget that is available, rather than supporting loss-making factories which employ only a tiny fraction of those people?

[Esther McVey]

I entirely agree. We must proceed with care and consideration, and we must also listen to the views of disability groups, advisers and experts, all of whom say that they would like to see more disabled people in mainstream work. That is what we must do: provide proper, sustainable, full-time jobs.

[Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)]

Today’s announcement will not affect the Remploy factory in Aberdeen, because it has already closed, although a social enterprise has been running the textiles business very successfully, which suggests that the factory had the potential to be more successful than the Minister has suggested. However, the social enterprise was formed by the more able workers, and those who have remained unemployed are the most disabled. Do the Government think that there is still a need for sheltered workplaces in this country?

[Esther McVey]

I agree with what the hon. Lady has said about what happened in Aberdeen. People have come together, and some of the workers involved have made progress. However, the most severely disabled need to be helped into work and supported while they are there. We have therefore announced a £350 million strategy, on which we shall be working over the summer. Moreover, in July we shall be launching a two-year awareness campaign at an employment conference, bringing together employers, employees and disabled entrepreneurs

[John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)]

As the Minister knows, a social enterprise bid has been submitted for factories in Coventry, Birmingham and Derby. It has received considerable public support, including from me. It is well financed and well advised, and above all it is inclusive. Can the Minister suggest a way of ensuring that it succeeds?

[Esther McVey]

At present, that bid is still part of the commercial process. There have been several significant bids for the automotive industry. KPMG is currently working on the process with Remploy. We must ensure that the best bid is successful, so that there are jobs now and there will be jobs in the future for those disabled people.

[Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)]

On Monday, I asked the Minister how many disabled people stayed in a job after 12 months. She said:

“Of the nearly 13,000 people who have started on Work Choice, a third—30%—have stayed in work.”—[Official Report, 1 July 2013; Vol. 565, c. 595.]

Given that many disabled people have been employed for 12 months, has she assessed why 70% of them are not staying in work long term?

[Esther McVey]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. We are looking at that, at what we can do and at the best way forward. That is why we have a brand new, two-year specialist disability employment strategy, which will start later in July, to see what is the best support we can give to those people.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

Could my hon. Friend confirm for people in Norwich what kind of support package they will have? She mentioned something about access to personal budgets and similar support.

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend asks a good question: what support do we offer and how do we provide that support? It is tailored to what the person needs, whether it is help with CVs or extra training, or support into the workplace. Therefore, it is dictated not by me but by the person who is coming forward who needs that help.

[Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)]

The Minister referred to the Wrexham site. She should claim no credit whatever in respect of Wrexham. It was she and Remploy who made the decision not to allow the business to continue there, and it has now moved to an alternative site. The factory remains closed and empty. When the Government asset-strip the Wrexham site, what will they do with the proceeds from the sale of the land?

[Esther McVey]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will be pleased to know that the Wrexham site is being sold with a view to making 10 to 20 jobs available for some of the ex-Remploy staff. That is the reality, which is far from the picture he is painting.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

The Minister will be aware that I have always been and remain opposed to the closure of the Remploy factories, but given the amnesia among those on the Opposition Benches, may I remind her that when the last Labour Government closed the Remploy factory in Bradford, they gave next to no support to the workers there and did not even monitor whether they found a job? Does she agree that that was totally unacceptable and that what is most important is that we do everything to find these people, who want and deserve to work, a job? The Government have a duty to help them as much as they can.

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend raises many key points, which are correct. Stages 1 and 2 were so difficult because there was no blueprint in 2008, and those people were not supported, tracked or monitored. It was shameful of Labour not to do that.

[Mr Frank Roy (Motherwell and Wishaw) (Lab)]

I do not understand why the Minister is misleading the House by saying that the Motherwell factory has opened. It absolutely has not. A year after the factory closed, many of the workers still do not have a job. There is no guarantee that when that factory is eventually opened by someone else any ex-Remploy worker will get a job there.

[Esther McVey]

I read out the names of the factories, including Bolton. It is anticipated that up to 10 employment opportunities for disabled people will result as social enterprises come forward. The hon. Gentleman is right: the factory may not be open at this moment but it is going through the process of opening, so considerable work is being done. That is why I can say that that has happened and is happening—we have been dealing with it for two years, knowing that it is happening.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that work programmes for the disabled should be efficient but, most important, they should be effective?

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend is correct. They have to be effective—that is what everybody wants—but the answer is more complex than that, because they have to be tailor-made and we have to look at the individual. So, yes, they must be efficient, but first and foremost they must be effective, caring and tailored to the individual.

[Mr Peter Hain (Neath) (Lab)]

But is not the truth that amid all the Minister’s spin and management-speak, she is strangling Remploy to death, and there is no prospect of the most vulnerable disabled workers in their 50s who work there all the time getting jobs in mainstream employment? By the way, her description of the 2008 programme is a total travesty. There was a £550 million subsidy for that, which she has cut savagely, and there was a programme for getting people into mainstream work, too. Also, she has given no guarantees, despite my asking the Secretary of State, and nor has the preferred bidder, who is based in Yorkshire, that the Neath Port Talbot site at Baglan will remain open. Can she give a guarantee on that now?

[Esther McVey]

I have a couple of points to make to the right hon. Gentleman. There was no spin in what I said; those were the numbers, and he is more than welcome to verify them. As for his comment about strangling, that is incorrect, too. I would say “liberating”. That is why some of the factories that closed have reopened and we are supporting them as best we can. If I were him, I would claim no credit for spending £555 million in 2008 on a modernisation process that went nowhere, or for estimates for contracts in the public sector that were grossly exaggerated—by 130%—and which never came to pass. Ours are real, they have been justified, they are monitored by an expert panel and KPMG is involved as well.

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

To put today’s statement in context, is it not fair to say that over the past three years Remploy employment services has found employment for 35,000 disabled and disadvantaged people, many of whom have similar disabilities to those employed in the factories?

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. That is exactly what it has been doing. It has found people jobs in mainstream work at a fraction of the cost. It can do it, we know we can do it, and that is what we are going to do.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

As far as I am concerned, Remploy was one strand of social services to help people with disabilities and give them dignity. More specifically, however, what is the Minister going to do to help Remploy in Coventry to develop a social enterprise there? It is facing problems with the acquisition of the land. Will she meet me, along with one or two of my colleagues, to discuss that?

[Esther McVey]

I will indeed meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss that. I should add that that is one of the automotive businesses, and it has attracted considerable interest because it is a viable business. KPMG is currently working on that with Remploy, and I will table a written statement shortly about what will happen there. The hon. Gentleman is right, however, that this is about dignity and supporting disabled people, and that is what we are doing.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Following on from the comments of the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), many of us are interested in the details of the Government’s national strategy for helping disabled people back into the world of work, whether through Jobcentre Plus, social enterprise, or supporting job clubs. My hon. Friend has talked about work that will be done in the summer, so will she give an undertaking to come back to the House when Parliament returns in September or October to update us on the national strategy, because all of us have disabled people in our constituencies who want to get back into the world of work, and we are keen to understand how we can engage with them and the Government to make sure they do so.

[Esther McVey]

I will indeed come back to the House to speak about our national employment strategy; that is only fair and correct. We have been working on it for some time. We have been analysing the Work Choice and Work programme figures and looking at other social support, such as job clubs, and we have developed for the first time ever this community support fund and opened 32 different sites across the country helping almost 750 disabled people.

[Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

The disabilities Minister has talked a lot about opportunities and moving forward, so is she satisfied that in Hull in the first year of the Work programme only 10 people with disabilities were found work? Is that acceptable?

[Esther McVey]

As the hon. Lady says, we are working on the Work programme and taking huge strides forward, and I am looking at the specialist disability support such as Work Choice and how to reshape it to make it even better.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

In the last Parliament we on the Work and Pensions Committee looked at the Labour Government’s decision to close a number of Remploy factories, and I have to say that the collective amnesia of Labour Members, which was most ably demonstrated by the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain), who oversaw the closure of Remploy factories in Wales when he was Welsh Secretary, is extraordinary. The people concerned is what is important here, however, so can my hon. Friend the Minister give us a sense of the additional disabled people who could be helped into work as a result of these changes?

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend asks a very good question: how many more people can be helped into work, and into mainstream work? That is what we are doing. We now have £350 million to do that. We have got to look at what works, get value for money and support as many people as possible.

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

First, may I echo the positive message from my right hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) about the advance notice given? That certainly compares very favourably with the MOD. On Cowdenbeath Remploy, there will be great disappointment in my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy), and the Minister knows the excellent work done by us and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). Will she meet the three of us as soon as possible to discuss what the options are for the two factories in Fife?

[Esther McVey]

I will indeed. I have met the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues as a collective group in the past, and I will certainly do so again.

[George Eustice (Camborne and Redruth) (Con)]

One of the barriers to disabled people going into mainstream employment is a misconception among employers that it will somehow cause them difficulty, although the evidence shows that the employers who overcome their apprehension often find that the disabled person compensates for their disability by having much greater ability in other respects and therefore becomes a very valued member of their team. What more can be done to educate employers and persuade them to give disabled people a chance?

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend makes a terrific point. This is all about awareness, and it is important to understand that only 3% of people are born with disabilities but most of us will acquire one during our life, probably in our 40s and 50s, so we have to do what we can because we all have a vested interest. On my hon. Friend’s specific point, we will be holding a disability employment event in July, bringing together some of the biggest employers locally, nationally and internationally to ask them, “What are you doing, how do we spread best practice, and what can we do to support you?”

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

How many employees at Remploy in Abertillery, closed last year, have now got jobs? Unfortunately, as of December, just three out of 21 had jobs.

[Esther McVey]

The hon. Gentleman is quite right. There were 35, actually, in December who had a job, and because of that we completely reshaped the process, so now, he will be pleased to know, 400 people have a job, 328 are in training, and that is out of the 1,100 who came forward for support.

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

May I thank the Minister for coming to the House and the Secretary of State for being present? May I also thank the Minister for the way this statement has been presented to the House, with the ministerial briefing that will be given to colleagues later and the fact that she took the time to write to Members who were affected by this? That is the way a statement should be handled, and she should be congratulated—and I am afraid I must say that the speech by the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire), who spoke for the Opposition, was one of the worst I have ever heard.

[Esther McVey]

I do not know what to say to that, but I think I might even be blushing. Thank you.

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

The Government spent £248 million less than anticipated on the Work programme in 2012-13, owing to provider under- performance under payment by results. In view of the disappointing figures about the number of ex-Remploy workers who have managed to find re-employment, can this underspend be used to extend proven alternative programmes for disadvantaged jobseekers, like the Work Choice programme for disabled people and Access to Work, which helps them cope with some of the obstacles they might face in the workplace?

[Esther McVey]

I am not sure that the hon. Lady has been listening. These are not disappointing figures; they are better than those for most other redundancies—that is how fast these people are getting into employment. We have given personal support. People are going on Work Choice and getting the tailored support they need, and we are doing this for 18 months.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend recall a fantastic Marks & Start event she attended in my constituency last year, where not only were more than 1,000 newly created jobs announced, but 200 of them were reserved for people with disabilities? Does she agree that that is an excellent model of how to help those with disabilities into sustainable employment?

[Esther McVey]

I do indeed remember being at Castle Donington with my hon. Friend at the Marks & Start site. This was a distribution centre looking for 1,000 employees, many of them disabled. He, like me, will be pleased to know that it is ahead of its target and is getting more disabled people into work there.

[Steve McCabe (Birmingham, Selly Oak) (Lab)]

In terms of helping people with their future choices, will the Minister give the House a commitment that she will continue to track the fortunes of these people? Will she regularly update us on how many find themselves in full-time work and how many end up in part-time, temporary or unpaid work?

[Esther McVey]

I will indeed, and I keep abreast of the figures on a weekly basis. That figure of 400 who have got a job did not include people who were on fewer than 16 hours, so more than that number are in work on fewer hours.

[Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend confirm that the specialist disability employment budget has been protected in the latest spending round? Consequently, it is all the more important that this money is used to help as many disabled people as possible back into work, as opposed to spending such a large sum on a small number of loss-making factories.

[Esther McVey]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Yes, that budget was protected in the spending review and we have committed to £350 million to support disabled people into work. That money has got to be best spent on people—not on failing businesses—to support them into work.

[Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)]

The loss of a further five Remploy factories in Scotland will be a devastating blow to disabled people in Scotland. Does the Minister not accept that, with the National Audit Office now conducting an inquiry into the shambles of a tendering process at the Springburn factory in my constituency, with growing evidence of asset-stripping and of confidential contracts signed on this Government’s watch between Remploy and private companies, this Government have sold the jobs of disabled people down the river?

[Esther McVey]

I ask the hon. Gentleman to be very cautious with the words he throws around the Chamber, many of which are inaccurate. He is correct to say that more information has gone to the NAO about the health care business and the commercial process that was undertaken, but the NAO will then just be considering whether it wants to take this further and look further into the programme. There has been no asset-stripping. There has been full governance and procedure in this commercial process, undertaken by an independent panel and by KPMG. Remploy is a legal entity in its own right and it is the legal steward of what goes forward. I warn the hon. Gentleman to be very careful with his accusations.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

If nothing had been done and Remploy had continued to suck up resources, what would the impact have been on other programmes to help disabled people back into mainstream work and on the inclusion agenda?

[Esther McVey]

We have to look at what disabled people want to do now, and they have said clearly that they want to be a part of mainstream society. They want to be in mainstream jobs and they are looking towards their goals and aspirations. We are helping them with that, be it as part of the alliance, as part of disabled people’s user-led organisations, as part of the role models programme or, as I said, as part of our new disability employment strategy.

[Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady have any guarantees that the companies that will be taking over the Remploy businesses will continue to focus on employing disabled people in the future?

[Esther McVey]

Let us examine how the bids were looked at and what the key criteria were for being taken forward and selected as the preferred bidder. The No. 1 criterion, goal and aim was the employment of disabled people. After that came viability, sustainability and value for the taxpayer, so employing disabled people was first and foremost at the heart of these commercial processes.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Roughly what percentage of Remploy employees are disabled ex-service personnel?

[Esther McVey]

I will have to get back to my hon. Friend on that. I do not know who were ex-service personnel, because now all types of disabled people, from all different backgrounds, are working there. However, I know that our key aim is to help all disabled people into mainstream work.

Points of Order

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

12:24

[Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. This is about the extremely offensive remark made by the shadow Leader of the House, to whom I have given notice, about me and some other Members at business questions. She accused us of being Taliban, and at a time when the brave men and women of our armed forces are fighting these evil people, and some of us have very close personal relationships with people serving in Afghanistan, I found that to be a completely objectionable remark. I wonder whether there is any way in which it could be withdrawn.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Would the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty) like to comment on that before I make a ruling?

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman has indeed given notification to my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), who regrets that, because of the running of the day, she is unable to be here. She has been clear that this is not the first time she has used the phrase “Tory Taliban”, and she has said on many occasions that that is what is said on ConservativeHome. As far as she understands it, it is a self-proclaimed term and she means no disrespect to the hon. Member for Wellingborough (Mr Bone), for whom she has a great deal of affection.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I would say that this is about using moderate language in the Chamber. Obviously, if people are offended, of course we do think about what we say in future. It is not a point of order, but it has certainly been aired a little bit.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I seek your advice, because last week the chief executive of NHS England appeared before us on the Public Administration Committee. He gave a clear answer to a question that I asked, saying that he would ensure that e-mails were released to the Yorkshire and Humber health and scrutiny committee. Since then, NHS England staff have again refused to do that. How do we ensure that when people, particularly those with such an important role in the public sector, give an answer to a parliamentary Select Committee they are held to it to ensure that they do what they say they are going to do?

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

As the hon. Gentleman will know, that is not a matter for myself in the Chair on the Floor of the House. The message has certainly been sent out loud and clear, and it will be recorded. I feel it is something that the Chair of the Committee may wish to take up as well.

Supply and Appropriation (Main Estimates) Bill

Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 56), That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Question agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time.

Question put forthwith, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

Question agreed to.

Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.

Backbench Business

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

NATO

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

12:28

[Hugh Bayley (York Central) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered NATO.

Let me begin by thanking the Backbench Business Committee for granting us time for this afternoon’s debate. I thank colleagues, particularly fellow members of the UK delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, for joining me in requesting this debate. We used to have three or four defence debates a year in this House in Government time, but when the Government allocated time to the Backbench Business Committee they gave up, among other things, those general defence debates. I am therefore grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for giving those of us with an interest in defence and security some of that time back. I hope that when members of the Committee read the report of the debate they will feel that it was worth while and that if we make applications in the future we might get similar debates, perhaps twice a year after the two annual sessions of the Assembly.

As delegates to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—I see in the Chamber many colleagues on both sides of the House who are part of the delegation—we have a responsibility to report back to colleagues on the work of our Assembly and of NATO. On my way into the House today, an hon. Member who had seen the agenda for this afternoon simply said to me, “You are having this debate, but why do we need NATO?” It is a question that those of us who believe that there is still a need for collective security and joint action with our allies must answer convincingly, not just for fellow Members of the House who do not share our view, but for members of the public who are often sceptical about the defence and security missions with which our country is involved and increasingly want a say in defence and foreign policy matters.

NATO, in a attempt to address that question, recently adopted a new strategic concept to define its role and mission. I do not believe, however, that we can any longer be satisfied that Ministers, ambassadors and generals understand what NATO is for. We need to explain to the public—and, clearly, from this morning’s conversation with a colleague, to other Members of Parliament—why it is still relevant and necessary.

[Angus Robertson (Moray) (SNP)]

I commend the hon. Gentleman and others for securing today’s debate. Will he confirm to other Members that his dealings with delegates from other NATO member states, particularly those from northern Europe, including Norway, Denmark and Iceland, show that they believe that the challenge of the Arctic and high north—in our backyard—should be taken seriously? Does it concern him that the Arctic and high north did not feature once in the last strategic defence and security review published by the Ministry of Defence and that the UK has declined to take part in NATO air policing operations operating from Keflavik in Iceland?

[Hugh Bayley]

I certainly agree that that is an extremely important issue in security, trade and environmental terms. The Arctic Council is one of the forums in which NATO member countries—the United States, Denmark and Canada—meet and discuss matters with Russia and other Scandinavian countries that border the Arctic. I do not think they would want the United Kingdom to join the Arctic Council as a full member, but we most certainly need to co-operate on these issues.

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Hugh Bayley]

I will, because I know that my hon. Friend has taken a particularly strong interest in this matter within the Assembly.

[Mrs Moon]

Let me reassure Members that NATO takes the high north seriously. I have been fortunate enough twice to go as a delegate to the high north and a NATO conference was held in Tromsø two years ago to consider the issues of climate change and the defence risks to our back door, which is largely vulnerable and undefended by NATO.

[Hugh Bayley]

If we go back to the time of the cold war, we can see why it was relatively easy to explain why we needed collective security.

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

I do not wish to delay my hon. Friend, but I thought it important to intervene following the remarks made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) to point out that one of the sub-committees of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will visit Greenland in September, which shows NATO’s interest. British Members of this House, including me, will participate in that visit.

[Hugh Bayley]

I am glad that my hon. Friend will be on that visit, discussing the matter with colleagues from other NATO countries. I look forward to hearing from him when he reports back.

During the cold war, it was fairly easy to explain why we had NATO and why we needed to work jointly with allies to defend ourselves. Europe was divided by an iron curtain. We in democratic states to the west wanted to preserve our freedom, our human rights, trade union rights, property rights, freedom of speech and freedom to protest while the states in the east—the USSR and its fellow travellers in satellite states—did not share those values. The Soviet Union was well armed with conventional and nuclear weapons and demonstrated that it was prepared to use those military assets to crush the Hungarian uprising in 1956, to blockade Berlin, to invade Czecho- slovakia in 1968 and to try to destroy the Solidarity movement in Poland. It was quite clear to most of the public why we needed military assets to protect ourselves and why we needed to co-operate with other countries to do so.

That was long ago. We still have foreign policy differences with Russia—for instance, over Syria.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and putting NATO in its historical context. Does he not think that with some hindsight, the 1990s, when the Warsaw pact collapsed, was a time when we should have promoted European security and co-operation rather than developing NATO as a stronger, bigger military force, and that that could have brought about a level of disarmament rather than rearmament?

[Hugh Bayley]

There has been considerable disarmament and a big peace dividend on both sides of the former iron curtain since the collapse of the Berlin wall. An attempt was made to rebuild a different relationship in Europe in which the Assembly played a large part, working with the emerging democratic movements in central Europe and in the eastern European countries to help them establish the institutions that enabled them in the fullness of time to join both NATO and the European Union. The door remains open—to countries such as Georgia, for instance. Indeed, I have had heard Russian delegates—they attend the Assembly as a confidence-building measure and because we have a joint NATO-Russia parliamentary committee—ask whether if, at some future date, Russia were to want to form an association with or to join the alliance, it would be possible for it to do so. It is important not to build new barriers between parties in Europe or between Europe and other parts of the world but to seek to build co-operation where we can.

[Mark Hendrick (Preston) (Lab/Co-op)]

In connection with the intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), does not my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) think that it is a bit peculiar that Croatia, a former Soviet bloc country, entered the European Union a few days ago whereas Turkey, which has been a staunch ally of European countries for many years and is a member of NATO, still finds considerable opposition to its membership of the EU from within the EU?

[Hugh Bayley]

I must say I strongly agree with my hon. Friend, but I do not want to turn the NATO debate into a debate about the future of the EU. Turkey plays and has played an important role ever since it joined the alliance in helping to defend our freedoms in Europe, and that ought to guide the views of other EU member states when decisions are made about Turkey’s accession to the EU.

I mentioned the history, but only to show that things have moved on. Despite our foreign policy differences with Russia on certain matters, such as Syria, we co-operate on many matters. Russia provides the land bridge to convey NATO’s non-military assets to Afghanistan and will help us remove many of our assets from Afghanistan as we bring our troops home.

The question that we must answer for Members of this House who do not share our views and for the public is, “If the cold war is history, why isn’t NATO?” It is not history because we still need international co-operation and solidarity with our allies and shared and permanent structures to plan to deal with the security risks we face, to deter those risks and, when things go wrong, to manage military action.

No single NATO state, with the possible exception of the United States, has sufficient military assets to protect itself from today’s risks without the help of colleagues. Actually, I do not think the United States should be excepted, because it needs and gains international legitimacy at the UN and elsewhere when it engages in military action that is supported by its allies.

Since the end of the cold war, we have needed NATO to end conflict in the heart of Europe—in Bosnia, for example; to respond to the threat of global terrorism, which had devastating effects on the streets of New York, London, Madrid and a number of cities in east Africa and elsewhere; and to protect human rights and stop ethnic cleansing, as in Bosnia, Kosovo and Libya. We needed NATO to provide humanitarian assistance during the 2005 floods in Pakistan and, indeed, following Hurricane Katrina in the United States, when other NATO states sent humanitarian assets. We have needed NATO to counter the threat of piracy off the horn of Africa: the losses suffered at the hands of pirates now cost insurers and shipping companies many hundreds of millions of pounds less than they used to, thanks to NATO and EU coastal patrols. We also need to work collectively with our allies to deal with new and emerging threats—cyber-attack, transnational crime, people trafficking or the drugs trade. All are threats that affect the United Kingdom, but none is a threat to which we can successfully respond and against which we can protect ourselves on our own.

What does the NATO Parliamentary Assembly bring to the table? Where is our added value? After the fall of the Berlin wall, as I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), the Assembly sought to build bridges with democrats in the former Warsaw pact countries that wanted to move closer to the west. Indeed, the Assembly moved faster than NATO itself or the Governments of many member states to open a dialogue with those democrats.

At the end of last week, General Nick Carter, the UK soldier and deputy commander of the international security assistance force, said that peace and reconciliation talks with the Taliban should have started a decade ago, and he is right. There were people engaging with moderate leaders in the insurgency in the mid-2000s, and I met them during some of my visits to Afghanistan; but there were disputes at the time about who should do this—whether it should be the Government of Afghanistan, or perhaps the United States. I remember when two people who had been involved in talks with elements within the insurgency were expelled from Afghanistan.

Last week, lead responsibility for security passed from ISAF to the Afghan national security forces in every part of Afghanistan. As our role changes so that we no longer provide the security lead in that country, we need to learn lessons from NATO’s biggest, longest and costliest military operation. Our Parliamentary Assembly has visited Afghanistan 11 times in the past eight years, and when preparing for this debate I looked back at our reports.

In 2004, we argued that NATO, which at that time had a role in Kabul but not throughout the country, should expand its presence throughout Afghanistan. In reports in 2004, 2005 and 2006, we called for a unified command, encompassing both ISAF, the NATO mission, and the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom. Between 2005 and 2008, we published reports calling for better burden sharing between NATO member states and for caveats imposed by some of the national contributions to NATO to be lifted. As early as 2004—nine years ago—we highlighted the need to accelerate the build-up and strengthen the training of Afghan national security forces; we stressed that particularly strongly from 2006 onward.

Even in 2002—more than a decade ago—we were stressing the link between security and development assistance; and from 2006, in reports and resolutions we called for what is now described as the comprehensive approach: diplomacy, defence and development co-operation. Again as early as 2004, we identified that much aid was used inefficiently because it was not channelled through Afghan institutions, and now even 50% of US aid is channelled through the World Bank’s trust fund and the Government of Afghanistan. Interestingly, in 2006—seven years ago—we called for reconciliation talks with moderate elements in the insurgency. Since 2006, we have stressed the need to challenge the safe havens in Pakistan and we have been involving Pakistani MPs in meetings of our Assembly. I have visited Afghanistan five or six times during the period our forces have been in the country, and I have to say that many of the prescient ideas reflected in reports of our Assembly came from British commanders, British diplomats, DFID staff or British aid workers.

The Assembly is an effective forum for sharing good ideas and good practice and, where we identify good practice adopted by one country, we try to persuade others in the alliance to support similar approaches. Often, it is easier for legislators who do not have executive responsibilities to reach conclusions on these matters than it is for members of a Government. We are still, even now, debating defence budgets, following the reports we produced some years ago on burden sharing. As we know, Robert Gates, the former US Defence Secretary, in his outgoing statement, called on Europe to step up to the mark on defence spending, and it is clear to our Assembly that most countries in Europe do not spend enough on defence. Indeed, only two—Britain and Greece—spend the 2% of GDP that NATO recommends.

When I put that point to our Secretary of State, as I have a number of times, he says that, with the economic situation so fragile, now is not the right time to press Governments of other countries to increase their defence expenditure, but I believe it is necessary for security reasons, and that the way to get through the difficulty is to seek commitments that, as the economic situation improves and Governments receive a taxation dividend from growth, they will devote a proportion of it to greater defence expenditures. I do not think we have public opinion on our side for that proposition at the moment, which is another reason we need to do more to explain why we have the security structures we have in NATO and why it is necessary to maintain them and finance them properly. Both the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and NATO itself need to do more to get their case into the public domain, and I congratulate the Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. May I gently say to the hon. Gentleman that he has been speaking for 20 minutes, and it was to be 10 to 15 minutes? I am sure that he is nearing the end now.

[Hugh Bayley]

Mr Deputy Speaker, I should not have taken so many interventions.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

You have had some extra time.

[Hugh Bayley]

I simply want to say this: we have a responsibility to make the case for defence spending in our constituencies and through debates such as this.

We need to stress also—this is the final point that I shall make—the importance of maintaining the trans-Atlantic relationship, which underpins NATO as an alliance. We share much with the United States and Canada in terms of our culture, history, family links from not just the United Kingdom but many European families, and trade links. The United States and Canada exported more to the European Union last year—$304 billion worth of goods and services—than they did to Japan, China and Korea combined, to which they exported $266 billion. EU exports in the opposite direction are more than $400 billion to the United States and Canada and $300 billion to east Asia.

We need to stress these things that we have in common. Of course the United States should focus on security concerns that it faces in the Pacific, but it should not forget the common interests it has with us in Europe, on which we need to work together.

12:50

[Mr James Arbuthnot (North East Hampshire) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) on securing this debate and I have agreed with all he said—with one exception, which I will come to —particularly about the need for NATO. The one exception was that I think there is a bit of work to be done on the need for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I was once a Member of what was then the North Atlantic Assembly for six months. Then I realised that for two years I had been a Defence Minister and had been completely unaware of the existence of the North Atlantic Assembly. Therefore I suggest that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly needs to do some work in order to build its profile.

It is a great pleasure to see the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Mr Swire) in his place, ready, willing and able to answer this debate. It is also a bit of a surprise, as some of us in our ignorance might have thought that NATO was a matter for defence, but there we are.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Captain George Duff of HMS Mars, who was committed to the deep, along with 28 of his crew, off the coast of Cadiz at the end of the battle of Trafalgar, and whose memorial is next to Nelson’s tomb in St Paul’s cathedral, would have been proud to find the French, the Spanish and the British working as closely together now as NATO allows us to do. Interestingly, at the battle of Trafalgar there were a lot of French and Spanish sailors in the British fleet, just as there were quite a number of British sailors in the French and Spanish fleets. That was not a matter of treachery—more a matter of expediency. In those days, when a ship was taken by the enemy, its sailors were given the not very difficult choice of joining the enemy crew or sleeping with the fishes. I do not want to describe Trafalgar as the beginnings of NATO, but it could be described as an early example of exchange postings.

Allied Maritime Command is the central command of all NATO maritime forces and the commander of MARCOM is the prime maritime adviser to the alliance. While the Allied Land Command is held by a US general, and the Allied Air Command by a US general— although at the moment the acting commander is French because the last US commander became chief of staff of the US air force—the Allied Maritime Command is not only based in the UK at Northwood, but is commanded by a British vice-admiral, Peter Hudson. We have an important and respected role to play in NATO.

And we play it to the full, with our crucial role in ISAF, our joint leadership in Libya, our contribution to Mali and the Balkans, and our operations in Sierra Leone and elsewhere. Some of those were not, of course, NATO operations, but even when NATO itself did not deploy, as the hon. Member for York Central said, the command structure, the training, the equipment convergence and the sheer competence of NATO were fundamental to our own command structure, training, equipment and competence. NATO is a vital resource and a valuable pool from which coalitions of the willing can be drawn.

The Defence Committee has been told that the United Kingdom is still regarded by its NATO allies as a leader, and so it should be. Unfortunately, the last strategic defence and security review spoke of “no strategic shrinkage” while shrinking the means available. That led to a perception that there is a gap between the United Kingdom’s stated policy and its delivery. The Defence Committee recently heard from Professor Lindley-French, who told us:

“The German-Netherlands Corps, which I know well, had several British officers in. About a week after we had made the statement in SDSR 2010 that we were going to reinvest in the alliance as a key element in our national influence policy, somebody in the MOD decided that they had to pull those British officers out of the German-Netherlands Corps headquarters. The Dutch and the Germans said, ‘Right, we will pull the Dutch and German officers out of the ARRC.’”—

that is, the allied rapid reaction corps—

“In a sense, what is happening is that we are declaring policy at one level, and somebody lower down the food chain is taking a spreadsheet action at another level, so we are sending conflicting signals.”

Not only the UK but NATO itself is facing unprecedented challenges. The fundamental one, as the hon. Member for York Central said, is how to maintain a strong alliance without a war, whether it is a cold or a hot war. The withdrawal of combat troops from Afghanistan will throw this matter into even starker relief than did the events of 1989. This will be exacerbated by the economic woes of the western world. How do you spend money on defence if your people are in financial pain, cannot see an external threat and are at the very best ambivalent about the use to which we have put our armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Mrs Moon]

rose—

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I give way to the hon. Lady, who plays such a valuable role on the Select Committee.

[Mrs Moon]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman and our Chairman of the Defence Committee. Is not part of the vital role of NATO in these straitened times to enable key competences to be maintained by allowing capacity sharing and allowing officers and service personnel to train, particularly in relation to platforms that have been cut in various countries?

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I agree. Capacity sharing is essential and there is a lot that we can do together. NATO at its highest levels keeps talking about pooling and sharing, but there is not much that can be pooled and shared if member countries are constantly cutting their defence capabilities, so that is a real worry and it is all caused by the financial concerns that we have.

The economic downturn has meant that the defence expenditure of most countries has declined, with the exception of countries that are definitely not in NATO, such as Russia and China, whose expenditure is increasing. Perhaps we in Europe know something about world stability that the rest of the world does not know, but in Europe, the United Kingdom is, as the hon. Member for York Central said, almost the only country which meets the NATO target of 2% of gross domestic product spent on defence. Greece does, but for increasingly irrelevant reasons of its own.

I believe that the 2% target has considerable importance which is not only symbolic. I am glad that the Secretary of State for Defence confirmed in answer to a parliamentary question last week that the UK will continue to meet this 2% target until 2015-16. I believe it is very important that it is met after that as well.

In February this year, in Oslo, the Deputy Secretary-General of NATO, General Verschbow, suggested that the 2% target might be replaced by an aspiration that no single ally needs to provide more than 50% of certain critical capabilities. I am always suspicious about aspirations, but what would the consequence of this be? In my view it would reduce the last remaining pressure on our European NATO allies to maintain their defence spending at respectable levels. It would be a negative aspiration rather than a positive one—it would say what countries did not need to do rather than what they did need to do. Sadly, our European NATO allies have no difficulty in agreeing what they do not need to do.

The only clear practical difference it would make would be that the United States would not need to commit so many of its forces to NATO. That would, at a stroke, weaken the alliance and result in reduced ambition overall. It is my clear view that it would be the wrong road to go down. I think we should stick with the 2% target and that we in the United Kingdom should find innovative ways of encouraging our allies to meet it.

The United States historically has provided the lion’s share of NATO expenditure. That country is now in the grip of sequestration over and above the originally agreed defence spending cuts. Nevertheless, our US interlocutors assured us that despite the rebalancing it is currently going through, the US still attaches importance to NATO and, within NATO, its relationship with the United Kingdom. The US looks on its allies for niche capabilities and says that it needs its friends more than ever, but when the Defence Committee visited the US a couple of months ago it made it clear that it expects other NATO nations to provide a larger share of their own defence, and well it might. The Libyan operation demonstrated that the US intention of taking a back seat whenever possible shines a stark light on the poor capabilities of its European allies in NATO. Air Marshal Harper told the Defence Committee:

“There is no question but that this operation throws into stark relief the capability gaps that exist between the non-US members of NATO and the United States.”

That is hardly surprising, because the US still spends more on defence than the whole of the rest of the world put together.

I have a dream, and it has tinges of nightmare about it. I foresee that the economy of the west will gradually get stronger, and that we shall therefore eventually be in a position to spend more on our own defence. However, before Europe decides to do that, and to create the defences that the instability of the world requires, we shall have to go through a major—perhaps catastrophic—incident that reminds our people that without strong defences we have no schools, hospitals, welfare payments or economy. Then, and perhaps only then, we shall painfully learn our lesson. Let us try to do it without having to go through too much pain.

13:02

[Mrs Madeleine Moon (Bridgend) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), some of whose relatives died in unique and novel ways. It is also a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), who has brought to the United Kingdom the great honour of his election as president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. It is one thing to garner the votes of one’s constituents, but quite another to garner the votes of 28 NATO member countries for the presidency of their body.

Unlike the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire, I value being a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I think it provides an opportunity to look at defence from the wider European point of view and to discuss and reflect on issues in the wider world in a way that the at times UK-centric Westminster bubble does not allow us to do.

I am pleased to take part in this debate on a subject that, as the previous two speakers have said, requires greater attention. Public awareness of NATO is low and I would suggest that that is influenced by the fact that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office does not maintain a specific budget for NATO-related diplomacy campaigns. I am aware that an FCO meeting will be held in about two weeks and I look forward to seeing whether that will represent the beginning of a new way of highlighting the importance of NATO.

I think that NATO helps us consider the challenges we face today and how to address them. Like the other speakers, I start by pointing out the need for a dose of reality. The UK has rarely, if ever, gone to war on its own. In all the major conflicts of the past, we have nearly always acted in concert with others—including our Commonwealth partners—and we have drawn on support, equipment and people from other nations. It is a fantasy to think that the UK will ever again act unilaterally in deploying its armed forces. All future military operations will be conducted as part of a coalition. We no longer have the range of platforms, personnel or financial resources to go it alone. We also face an increasingly complex set of challenges, many of which do not respect international borders or the traditional rules of engagement. We need the greater thinking power of those 28 countries in NATO.

NATO is under pressure from a number of different sources, all of which make its long-term survival very important. Getting every member of NATO to make an equal contribution will never be easy—it will probably never even be possible—and debates on burden-sharing are not new, but cuts made to defence budgets across the European partnership, coupled with the budgetary pressures in the United States, pose a real threat. The dose of reality that everyone in NATO needs to take is that we can no longer rely on a 70% contribution from the US to our defence.

Leon Panetta pointed out that the example of burden-sharing in Libya made it clear that the current level of US commitment to NATO would not continue. Robert Gates was more forthright:

“If current trends in the decline of European defence capabilities are not halted and reversed, future US political leaders—those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in Nato worth the cost.”

Those words should hang above the desk of every Secretary of State for Defence in NATO.

Most recently, General Odierno, a senior American commander, said:

“As the British Army continues to reduce in size we’ve had several conversations about keeping them integrated in what we’re trying to do…In a lot of ways they’re depending on us, especially in our ground capabilities into the future.”

Finally, at NATO’s 2012 Chicago summit, Dr Andrew Dorman said:

“There is a very real danger that as individual nations make cuts to their armed forces they will increasingly assume that some capabilities will be provided by others without necessarily communicating this assumption. Such a policy of risk-sharing can only really work if there is some degree of central management of the attendant risks to ensure that capability gaps do not appear across the alliance.”

He noted in the same breath that the UK Government’s decision to cut maritime control capability would be reasonable if other NATO members were able to cover the gap.

A quick survey, however, shows that we failed to take that into consideration. Norway has one maritime patrol aircraft, while Belgium and Holland have none. During a recent NATO Parliamentary Assembly visit to the Netherlands, I asked its chief of defence whether he regretted cutting their maritime patrol capability and selling it off, and he replied that he regretted it deeply. Ireland has two long-range MPAs, primarily to protect fishing. We are all, therefore, reliant on the French fleet of about 24 aircraft. We have little or nothing to protect our vital sea lanes. Pooling and sharing works only if there actually is something to pool and share.

On defence, it is constantly said that strategic thinking is not being done, that it has been left wanting in the race to cut budgets and that there is a real danger that the one forum we have to facilitate joint operations is being undermined by our failure to realise its worth. I do not think that we can rely on the much-anticipated peace dividend after our withdrawal from Afghanistan. It will cost significant sums to get troops and equipment home.

As European members of NATO wake up to the budgetary pressures in the US, we also have to face the fact that the US is pivoting towards Asia. Ministers have made it clear that they see that as presenting no threat to the US’s commitment to NATO, but it does pose such a threat. Hillary Clinton noted in the Foreign Policy journal:

“The future of politics will be decided in Asia, not Afghanistan or Iraq, and the United States will be right at the center of the action.”

President Obama, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, provided reassurance that the US defence cuts would not impact negatively on its commitment to the Asia-Pacific region:

“As we end today’s wars, I have directed my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia-Pacific a top priority. As a result, reductions in US defence spending will not—I repeat, will not—come at the expense of the Asia-Pacific.”

They will, however, come at the expense of Europe. By 2020, 60% of US naval assets will be in the Asia-Pacific region.

The US is responding to reality and we must do the same. The recent “Balance of Trade” study concluded that defence budgets in Asia will have increased by 35% to £325 billion by 2021, eventually overtaking the US. China has increased its defence spending by 7.8%. Russia has increased its defence spending by 16%. The UK will not launch a military operation alone again. The change of focus in the US puts pressure on NATO, making it essential that we take a central role in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and in the forum of NATO.

New threats emerge all the time and it seems that old threats are reappearing. Russia is reasserting itself. China is developing its armed forces and its capability at great speed. The collapse of Syria has implications for the wider region. There are threats to our cyber-security. The growing militarisation of south-east Asia, with the potential for disputes in the South China sea, is underlined by the clamour to augment submarine fleets across the region. Most countries, including China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia, have submarines and are looking to expand their numbers. Thailand is seeking to procure its first submarines.

Meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific highway to Europe is opening up. The high north will make it possible for Russia, China, Japan and the south Pacific nations to reach our back door much faster, and we will not have the ability to monitor it and see that they are coming. The high north has 22% of the world’s undiscovered oil. With the opening up of those sea routes, we will have a growing area of vulnerability. That is heightened—I am sorry to keep going on about it—by our lack of maritime patrol capability. Those issues can be dealt with only if we work together as NATO.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I am interested in what my hon. Friend is saying about the high north and the Arctic. Does she not think that it would be better if there were serious negotiations about a nuclear weapons-free Arctic, which would have to include Russia, Canada, the USA and all the European countries, as a way of bringing about some peace, rather than accelerating our expenditure?

[Mrs Moon]

My hon. Friend hopes against reality. Norway has taken 40 years patiently and persistently to negotiate a treaty with Russia on joint responsibilities in the Arctic circle. I think that it would take slightly longer than 40 years to get all countries across the globe to agree to nuclear non-proliferation.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is making an extremely interesting and well-informed speech. Should she not also say in response to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) that if there is an aggressor in the high north, it is Russia, which is aggressively arming and renewing its vast nuclear weapons stockpile in an attempt to dominate the high north? The idea that we should lie down meekly and let it do that unchallenged suggests that the hon. Gentleman starts from a rather naive standpoint. Russia’s fuelling of the conflict in Syria and the way in which it just walked into Georgia show how prone it is to reasonable negotiation.

[Mrs Moon]

I do not want to be as personal as that in response to my colleague. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the opening up of the high north makes it imperative that we maintain a continuous at-sea deterrent. Perhaps Russia is rearming, but we must also be aware that China is moving in our direction. It has sent through an ice-enabled ship on at least two occasions recently and is agreeing mineral trading rights with Iceland, which will facilitate regular voyages into our backyard. We need to be aware of that. I am not necessarily saying that it poses a threat, but we must not ignore it and must prepare for any risk that comes our way as a result.

I want to comment briefly on the NATO training mission in Afghanistan, which has been essential in building post-conflict capability. Capabilities of different levels are available across the NATO alliance. It is important that we recognise that the end of the cold war brought back allies from the eastern European bloc that have expertise in building capacity and creating democratic capabilities that we should utilise more.

I am aware that a number of Members want to speak, but I want to comment briefly on the Government-owned contractor-operated model. I recently asked a Minister what capacity the GoCo would have to facilitate bilateral and trilateral procurement with our NATO allies. The response was a bit pathetic, because I was told that nothing would change.

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly gives us the opportunity to test such ideas with our allies face to face. We can hear their assessment of what we are doing and their understanding of why we are doing it. I look forward next week to asking the French how they would feel about negotiating the joint procurement of equipment with an agency that could potentially be owned by a third power on our behalf. Next week, along with some of my NATO Parliamentary Assembly colleagues, I will travel to the US and attend briefings at the Department for Defence, the State Department and Capitol Hill. I will raise all the issues that I have raised today at those meetings.

In conclusion, NATO provides the opportunity to share our understanding of the world, its problems, its risks and conflicts, and to build a shared understanding and response. On a personal level, having the opportunity to meet people and share our thoughts and views on defence issues is invaluable. Long may it continue. Long may NATO provide Europe with the peace and security that it is dedicated to defending jointly among its 28 members, and which it has succeeded in providing for a long time.

13:19

[Jason McCartney (Colne Valley) (Con)]

I, too, thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting time for a debate on NATO in the main Chamber.

My first real awareness of NATO came when I was interviewed to join the Royal Air Force in the 1980s. I was asked how many countries were in NATO and who was the Secretary-General. Of course, all Members will know that there were 16 member countries at that time and that the noble Lord Carrington was Secretary-General. NATO has now grown to 28 member nations, with former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as Secretary-General. Like previous speakers, I now serve on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which brings together parliamentarians from the Atlantic alliance and contains 257 delegates from the 28 nations. I serve on one of the five committees, the defence and security committee. I am proud that a UK member, the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), is the current president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and is well into the first year of his two-year term. Congratulations, el Presidente.

NATO’s essential core tasks and principles are summed up in the strategic concept, and I will run through them. The cornerstone of the alliance, of course, is collective defence. NATO members will always assist each other against attack in accordance with article 5 of the Washington treaty. That commitment remains firm and binding.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

May I ask my hon. Friend’s opinion of whether French Guiana, in south America, might be defended under that collective security umbrella if it were attacked by Brazil?

[Jason McCartney]

My hon. and gallant Friend makes a good point. There are a number of anomalies, such as the situation of the dependency of the Falklands Islands and the tensions between Greece and Turkey, which of course are both member nations, in Cyprus. There are certain cases, of which he gave a prime example, in which article 5 perhaps has a little leeway.

Crisis management is another core task of NATO, and it has a unique and robust set of political and military capabilities to address the full spectrum of crises before, during and after conflicts. Of course, my hon. and gallant Friend was involved in one such conflict in Bosnia.

Another task is co-operative security. The alliance engages actively to enhance international security, through partnerships and by contributing actively to arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament. Other recently added facets of NATO’s work are cyber-security, which has been much in the news in the past fortnight, energy security and the threat posed by climate change.

NATO has been at the heart, and at the head, of command and control for current and recent western military interventions and operations. In many ways, it now delivers the military aspects of the United Nations’ work. I will highlight three examples. First, as we have heard, there is the international security assistance force, the NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan that the UN Security Council established in December 2001 under resolution 1386. Secondly, there was Operation Unified Protector, the NATO operation enforcing UN Security Council resolutions 1970 and 1973, concerning the Libyan civil war. Those resolutions imposed sanctions on key members of the Gaddafi Government and authorised NATO to implement an arms embargo and a no-fly zone and to use all necessary means, short of foreign occupation, to protect Libyan civilians and civilian-populated areas.

Thirdly, there is Operation Ocean Shield, which was referred to earlier. It is NATO’s contribution to the anti-piracy campaign off the coast of the horn of Africa, following the earlier Operation Allied Protector. Naval operations began early in 2009, having been approved by the North Atlantic Council, and primarily involve warships from the UK and the United States, although vessels from many other nations are also included.

That brings me to some of the challenges facing NATO, a big one of which is duplication. The operation against Somali piracy is a good example. I have been with the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to Djibouti, which is strategically placed on the horn of Africa, and there are clear signs of overlap and mission repeat. We have not only the NATO-led mission but an EU-led operation called Operation Atalanta, also known as European Union Naval Force Somalia. There is also an independent French air base, a US army camp and a Japanese air base. Time and time again, I ask the commanding officers how much liaison there is between the different operations, and I have never got a satisfactory answer.

[Mike Gapes]

The hon. Gentleman will be aware that at Northwood, in this country, there is close co-operation between the NATO and EU activities, and there is also UN discussion about anti-piracy activity. I do not think we should be quite as pessimistic as he implies.

[Jason McCartney]

I guess that the hon. Gentleman is a bit more pro-EU than I am. That is probably what is behind his comments. I will give another example of what duplication does. It can confuse command and control, and further evidence of that is the EU force headquarters being set up in Belgium, in a similar location to NATO’s headquarters on the outskirts of Brussels. That is more costly duplication of command and control.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman should be celebrating the success of the anti-piracy operation off the coast of Somalia. I will mention unnecessary duplication in my speech, but the activities that he has mentioned are complementary, as are those of the Chinese and a number of other Asian countries. They are all operating together successfully to achieve a common goal. It is a success, not a problem as he is trying to make out.

[Jason McCartney]

I disagree with the right hon. Gentleman. He will be well aware how confusing it can be to answer to two leaders—for example, the leader of one’s party and a union. As a serviceman myself, I believe it is important to have a clear command and control structure and for people to know whom they answer to.

[Mrs Moon]

The hon. Gentleman will remember that I was also a member of the delegation to Djibouti. I specifically remember the response that we received to our questions, which was that people found it helpful to move between the two different organisations, largely because of the different rules of engagement. They said that the European rules of engagement gave greater flexibility. We should bear that in mind.

[Jason McCartney]

And of course, as the hon. Lady will remember, another interesting aspect was the Japanese air base, which I think is the only place in the world where Japanese forces are operating militarily outside their own sovereign area.

Expansion is another area of concern. Ever more former Warsaw pact countries are joining. Poland, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have already done so, and many more are waiting to join and are already acting as observers. It is sometimes asked whether even Russia will join NATO at some point. It already has observer status at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, and I have chatted to the leader of the Russian Communist party in the Duma while on a NATO briefing. Having been a serviceman in the late 1980s and ’90s, I found that very strange indeed.

What would happen if Scotland were to go independent? How long would it have to wait in the long queue to join NATO? By the way, our NATO assets, including our Trident submarines, which I have visited on the Clyde, would have to be relocated.

My final area of concern is budgets, to which many Members have referred. There is an increasing balance of capabilities within NATO. Eighteen member nations are spending less on defence from their current budgets than they were four years ago, and as others have said, only three allies have spent the target of 2% or more of GDP on defence in the past couple of years—the United Kingdom, the United States and Greece. We have already heard about the situation in Greece because of its GDP. Would an independent Scotland be able to commit 2% of its GDP to defence spending? There is pressure on the United States, which now provides 77% of allied defence spending within NATO. Just a decade ago, it was 63%. The United States’ commitment to European defence as it shifts its focus to Asia is one of the biggest uncertainties.

NATO is at the heart of western defence and overseas operations. It is changing and adapting, and it has many challenges, but we on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will continue to scrutinise the Atlantic alliance, support it, celebrate its achievements and remember what is was set up for—keeping the peace in Europe.

13:29

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) for introducing the debate and describing the work of the Assembly, and for dipping into the history of NATO. That is a good starting point.

At the end of the second world war there was a triumph and a tragedy. The triumph was the end of the war, the defeat of Nazism, the foundation of the United Nations and the universal declaration of human rights and the UN charter. The tragedy was the descent into the cold war, the foundation of the Warsaw pact and NATO, and the decades-long nuclear arms race with costs borne by both sides and the economic problems that ensued as a result. Then there was the election of Gorbachev as President of the USSR, and his proposals for disarmament. The Reykjavik summit was unfortunately neutralised by Reagan’s proposals, and Gorbachev’s proposals for a common European home and promotion of European security and co-operation were not responded to effectively by the USA or NATO. Gorbachev eventually went and the Warsaw pact collapsed. Surely the 1990s were a time for reassessment and looking at an alternative. Why did NATO continue at that point when its cold war raison d’être had gone?

The Library briefing contains a helpful statement by J. L. Granatstein, a distinguished research fellow from the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. In the National Post on 5 March 2013 he wrote:

“Perhaps it might have been better if NATO had wound itself up at the end of the Cold War. The alliance instead sought for a new role, a new strategic purpose, and it found it outside the boundaries of the alliance.”

He goes on to mention Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and later the Libyan adventures of NATO.

I think we should seriously consider the whole purpose of NATO. It was founded as part of the cold war and had a specific area of responsibility—the north Atlantic. It successively increased its operations out of area, and with the Lisbon treaty it does two things. First, it vastly expands its area of operation to include Afghanistan, which by no stretch of the imagination can be anything to do with the north Atlantic, any more than can the seas off Somalia or North Korea, South Korea and south Asia.

[Mr Spellar]

Does my hon. Friend accept that in a more communicated and linked-up world, threats to our security from other parts of the world can have a significant impact on our security at home? Piracy off the coast of Somalia is a real threat to trade lanes between western Europe and east Asia. Those are massive trade lanes for the continuing prosperity of the world. Is that a threat to our security, and should we respond to it?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Of course piracy off the coast of Somalia is not a good thing. Instability in Somalia is very bad, but surely one solves that problem by political support for changes in Somalia—to some extent that is happening and considerable changes are taking place. I sometimes get the feeling that NATO spent the 1990s and early 2000s looking for something to do, and that it was more than pleased to get involved in Afghanistan and present itself as the armed wing of the United Nations. It may be that the UN should have its own force, and that is a matter for consideration and debate. However, when NATO calls itself the arm of the UN, what does that say to countries that are not in or aligned to NATO, or indeed are deeply suspicious of NATO and its activities? Members who talk about NATO as being the effective arm of the UN should think carefully about the implications of what they are saying.

The costs of NATO membership are considerable—probably far greater than those of membership of the European Union, which seems to excite massive debate on the Government Benches. NATO requires 2% of our gross national product to be spent on defence, and Members complain that other countries do not meet those demands. Presumably, NATO membership requires a level of expenditure that many countries simply cannot afford, yet they are required to make that expenditure and, for the most part, to buy those arms from the United States or approved suppliers that produce NATO-issue equipment. We must think far more seriously about why we are in NATO and what it is achieving.

Let us consider Afghanistan from 2001 onwards. Yes, 9/11 was a dreadful event and an act of murder against civilians, but was it an appropriate response to invade Afghanistan? Twelve years later, 400 British soldiers, a larger number of American soldiers, and a very much larger number of Afghan civilians, and others, are dead. Drone aircraft are operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and there is a real threat to the civil liberties of everyone in the world from Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition and anti-terror legislation. That has not made the world a safer or more secure place.

[Mike Gapes]

Does my hon. Friend accept that in 2001, an estimated 10,000 terrorists came out of training camps in Afghanistan from areas that the state had effectively handed over for al-Qaeda to operate in? Was there not a need to protect communities around the world by removing those terrorist bases from Afghanistan?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I question the figure of 10,000 and I would take my Friend back a little further. In 1979, Soviet support for the then Afghan Government provoked a massive US response and arming of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan. Massive amounts of US money went into Afghanistan from 1979 onwards and—hey presto!—the Taliban were formed with US weapons. Al-Qaeda was founded by US trainers. What goes around comes around and we should think more carefully about instant information and instant sending of vast amounts of weapons to opposition groups. The same may happen if we decide to send arms to one group in Syria. Where will those arms end up? A little bit of historical analysis might be helpful.

[Mrs Moon]

My hon. Friend is right to say that what comes around could go around. Does he also accept that some of the conflict in Afghanistan perhaps also led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, bringing freedom and democracy to swathes of people across Europe? Some of those countries are now members of NATO, having recognised the importance of joint defence in securing independence and democracy.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Of course the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was a mistake; it was just as disastrous as previous British interventions and the current NATO intervention in Afghanistan have been. It did irreparable damage to the leadership of the Soviet Union through its cost and loss of life. It was a disaster and a contributory factor—not the only one—to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Is NATO the answer to the problem? Should we not have a more assertive policy of peace and disarmament around the world, rather than the NATO policy of rearmament above what any country can realistically afford, which in turn encourages more rearmament?

I was alarmed by the whole discussion about the Arctic and the so-called threat from the north. A whole new scenario seems to be being built up, namely that China will somehow occupy the Arctic and invade us from the Arctic ocean, and therefore we must develop a new missile shield—as we already have aimed against Russia—to protect ourselves. The USA is moving more into the Asia-Pacific region. Should we be thinking more about regional peace and security measures? That has been achieved to a large extent in Africa, Latin America, and parts of central Asia. Should that not be our direction of travel, rather than one that involves large levels of armaments?

The other point I want to raise—this will not be popular with many, if any, Members in the Chamber today—concerns NATO’s preference for being the nuclear umbrella, and the holding and potential use of nuclear weapons. These are the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. There is no “limited use” of nuclear weapons. There is no limited availability of them. You either use them or you do not. If you do, it brings about the death of very large numbers of people, a nuclear winter and the destruction of the lives of millions of people. Those who argue that NATO should hold nuclear weapons must in reality be saying that they would be prepared to use them, with all the consequences that that would bring about.

[Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, for whom I have a lot of time. On this issue, however, I disagree. Does he agree that nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented and that it is in the interests of global security that the democracies of the world join together in a common nuclear defence rather than unilateral nuclear disarmament, which would only hand greater power to countries and forces in the world that do not wish to see democracy prosper?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Of course the technology of nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented; indeed, Einstein in his later years said that if he had his time again, he would have been a clockmaker rather than making the discovery he did. He did not make it with the intention of starting nuclear war, but that was a danger that came from it. Obviously nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented, but it is possible to give them up. South Africa did so, as did Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. There are nuclear weapons-free zones around the world. The prize surely would be a nuclear weapons-free middle east, which would require the nuclear non-proliferation treaty conference that was envisaged to include Iran and Israel to actually be held rather than endlessly procrastinated on. It will not be easy; of course not. But if we do not start somewhere, more people will get off the nuclear non-proliferation treaty trail and go elsewhere. Egypt has already left the NPT because of inaction by the nuclear powers over the middle east nuclear-free zone. Should not we be doing the same in terms of an Arctic nuclear weapons-free zone as a step towards a nuclear-free world? Everybody says they want a nuclear-free world, but at the same time are rearming, rather than going forward on it.

We are spending £34 billion a year of our money on defence and we are bound to spend at least 2 per cent. of GDP as long as we remain members of NATO, as all other countries must do. Those countries that are in the EU and NATO obviously accept both treaties. Those that are in the EU but not in NATO have a problem because of the close relationship between the EU and NATO. One can hardly say that the traditional neutral foreign policies of, for example, Sweden and Ireland can be maintained while the EU maintains this close relationship.

My plea is simply this. We live in a world where a quarter of the world’s population are hungry, if not starving. We live in a world where the environmental consequences of what we are doing are catastrophic for future generations. Yet we are spending a vast amount of money on armaments, which, in turn, encourages others to spend vast amounts of money on armaments. We have a growing arms race between NATO and Russia, despite the apparently cosy chats between members of the Russian Communist party and delegates to the NATO Assembly. I absolutely welcome those and wish they could be videoed and portrayed to the whole world. The same applies to China.

If we are to live in a world of peace in the future, it will not be achieved by spending more and more on weapons. It will be achieved by spending less on weapons and more on dealing with the problems of human misery and human insecurity. I hope that instead of developing a nuclear shield or the missile shield along the eastern flank of NATO, we will instead move towards much better relations with all the power blocs as a way of bringing about a more peaceful world.

I do not believe in the continuation of defence alliances that have within them a built-in accelerator of cost and of danger, as well as massive pressures from the arms and other industries to sell more of their goods, when the needs of the world are health, education, food and housing. Those are the issues that we should prioritise, not weapons of mass destruction. I realise that this is a minority position in the Chamber today but I am not actually alone among the wider public in holding those views.

13:44

[Stephen Gilbert (St Austell and Newquay) (LD)]

Of course the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) has outlined a minority perspective, but that shows the value of this Chamber in allowing those perspectives to be aired.

I disagreed fundamentally with the hon. Gentleman on a number of points. First, he said that NATO was looking for a role in the early 1990s and was therefore keen to latch on to Bosnia and Kosovo, whereas at the time NATO commanders were very reluctant to get involved in those conflicts. It was the international community, through institutions that I am sure the hon. Gentleman supports, that was looking for a mechanism to deliver its collective will on the ground. The only mechanism available to the international community at the time was NATO.

[Bob Stewart]

May I just confirm what my hon. Friend is saying? At the time, I was the chief of policy at Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s headquarters. It was my job to try to avoid getting involved in Bosnia and places like it, but I was given political instructions that we had to start thinking about it. What my hon. Friend says is absolutely accurate; the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) is wrong.

[Stephen Gilbert]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend and I am pleased that he has been more successful in some of his more recent endeavours than he was in getting NATO to stay out of the Balkans. It was the international community looking for a vehicle to deliver its will on the ground that led to the NATO involvement in south-east Europe, which shows the benefits of an alliance that brings together collective action in support of common values.

I do not entirely share the view of the hon. Member for Islington North on Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people are now going to school there in a way that they did not before. There is now a freedom for women that has not been felt recently. There is also the beginning of self-determination. NATO has helped to bring an end to a religious dictatorship there and my hope is that, as the negotiations go forward, it will continue to protect the newly won rights for people there.

I would like to pay tribute to the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) and to my hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney) for securing this very important debate. My hon. Friend talked about the danger of unnecessary duplication—we may see that in some of the remarks today—but that in itself pays tribute to the work of the Parliamentary Assembly and to its British delegation, which works on a cross-party basis, putting the British national security interest first. The delegation is able to come back to this House and to the country and share a fairly coherent and joined-up criticism of NATO where there are criticisms to be made. We also play a key role in advocating the benefits of the alliance for everybody.

We all recognise that the world has changed. NATO was born into a Europe that was divided, and it formed the bedrock of our security for 60 years. The world was split between two diametrically opposed systems of government that were forged out of the second world war, the largest conflict in history. For much of its existence, NATO has been preoccupied, rightly, with conflicts between states, but as hon. Members on both sides have said, that has now shifted. It is no longer simply about interstate warfare. In Bosnia and in Kosovo, NATO has involved itself with civilians as well as states and this new role has been cemented in Afghanistan and, more recently, under the right to protect mandate delivered by the UN in Libya. That latter conflict displayed a strong example of how NATO, in accordance with international will and international agreement, was able to deliver effective military capabilities to prevent, I believe, the escalation of that conflict and to hasten the end of hostilities.

Humanitarian-led intervention is only one part of the changing landscape. There has been a paradigm shift towards focusing on international terrorism and piracy, as we have heard, and UK forces are highly active alongside NATO and EU allies in these regards. Cyber-security is also a new frontier for NATO. The unrelenting computerisation of our society and our reliance on the internet bring many opportunities for NATO Governments and citizens, but it brings significant dangers too. The scale of such infrastructure is something that no state could have anticipated in 1949. It requires a completely different approach that, through common endeavour, is better delivered within the alliance.

The power structures of the world have shifted far more rapidly than many predicted. We now live in a world where China is the world’s second largest economy, and it looks set to overtake the United States this century. This, coupled with the relative demise of the Russian economy and the break-up of the Soviet Union, has seen the attention of the United States shift firmly to the Pacific. That poses fundamental questions for NATO, an organisation that remains embedded in the regional geopolitics of Europe and the Atlantic.

The US remains by far the largest contributor of money and matériel for NATO. In 2011, the US spent 4.8% of its GDP on defence. Germany, Italy and France failed to contribute even 2% of their respective GDP. Like many hon. Members, I think it is deeply unfair that our European NATO allies expect the US and the UK to bankroll European defence. It is right to expect our allies in NATO to contribute fairly to the upkeep of NATO forces, and I call on Ministers not to be shy in their discourse with our European counterparts. Calling for member states to contribute fairly is one part of ensuring that the organisation remains effective. For NATO to be effective, we do not just need a willingness to deploy military force when necessary, but for our European allies to be willing to fund that resource, so we have the ability to deploy when the time is right.

On procurement, we can and should do things differently. There are many ways to work more closely with our European allies. We must ensure that the sum total of a country’s specific specialised contribution exceeds its individual parts. By procuring equipment and weapon systems together, we can create the flexibility essential to meeting the array of challenges in the 21st century. For example, it is wasteful to buy planes that cannot land on another country’s aircraft carriers, to have to supply different types of bullets for different countries, or to have radio systems that cannot be integrated or talk to each other. We must ensure that our armed forces can operate as effectively as possible with troops from other countries. That underscores the point made by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) about how unlikely it is for this country to go to war by itself. The more likely scenario is that we will always be acting as part of a coalition, so it is important to make that coalition effective—very basic stuff that NATO continues to get wrong.

Let us be clear: Britain should always be able to retain control over the deployment of its forces. We must do so wisely and with appreciation of the consequences of engaging our men and women in armed conflict. However, the EU can play a role in developing institutions and structures that allow humanitarian access and peacekeeping missions in partnership with NATO where possible. As I and other hon. Members have said, the gaze of the United States is now firmly on the Pacific. Having EU structures, where appropriate and necessary, to help plug the gaps left by the Americans, who are now more concerned with Beijing than Berlin, will be in the UK’s national interest. Deeper EU defence co-operation makes economic sense for the same reasons that it does within NATO. We are stronger together, and if we are smart, it will not be an additional burden to the taxpayer.

[Mr Jenkin]

Will my hon. Friend explain why it is necessary for the EU to duplicate what European nations can already do on a military and politically co-operative basis through NATO? Does he agree that it is essential not to waste resources by duplicating NATO structures that already exist?

[Stephen Gilbert]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns. It is clear that we need to reduce duplication both within the EU and between the EU and NATO. There will, however, be certain fundamental operational ways in which a resource on a European basis can best plug a gap that NATO does not move into. I suggest that these things are best looked at on a case-by-case basis.

[Mr Jenkin]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Stephen Gilbert]

No, I will not.

It is my view, and that of the Liberal Democrats, that NATO should remain the bedrock of our international defence obligations. It should be properly and fairly funded, but it must adapt for the 21st century.

13:55

[Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert), who, like me, is a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. I want to pick up on a reference he made—it has come up in other contributions too—to Kosovo.

During the Whit recess, I went with a NATO Parliamentary Assembly delegation to Serbia and Kosovo. We went by road from Belgrade through north Mitrovica and south Mitrovica down to Pristina. We visited a Serbian orthodox monastery in Kosovo, which is now in an area overwhelmingly populated by Kosovo Albanians, rather than Kosovo Serbs. One interesting development is that in Belgrade, Mitrovica and Pristina everybody unanimously praised the work of KFOR, the NATO-led force doing the vital job of providing stability and protection to the minority Serbian communities and religious places in Kosovo, as well as acting to prevent conflict in north Mitrovica.

KFOR divided Kosovo into five areas of operations, and its commanding officer is German. The most difficult area covers north Mitrovica, in which approximately 80,000 Serbs live. Many do not accept that they live in Kosovo—they still identify with Belgrade. Significantly, the KFOR commander for this area does not come from a NATO country—he is from the neutral country of Switzerland. Through its structure, infrastructure and continuity, NATO enables partner countries and others to participate and play important roles in NATO structures.

There is a similar situation in Afghanistan, with an alliance of 28 countries—or 43 countries, I am not sure what the actual figure is now—that participate in international operations. NATO has played an essential part in providing the framework for that to happen. Similarly, EU co-operation is happening in different places. Wearing my Foreign Affairs Committee hat, I was in Mali last month. I was pleased to meet and talk to the EU’s training mission, led by French officers who are doing a fantastic job, which includes 46 British forces personnel. Interestingly, for the first time British officers will be in charge of Irish soldiers, from the Royal Irish Regiment. The two flags will be working together for the first time since the 1930s. That is a symbol of international co-operation. That work is done under an EU initiative, so that Ireland, Sweden and other EU countries that are not in NATO can nevertheless contribute and work with NATO countries. Often, the assets and resources of NATO are used in that way to enhance our European defence and security.

[Hugh Bayley]

rose—

[Mike Gapes]

I give way to the president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

[Hugh Bayley]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the new military co-operation between Britain and the Irish Republic. When I was in Mali, just a week or two before him, I saw a training unit led by a British major and, from the Irish Republic, an Irish captain. However, my hon. Friend made a slip of the tongue: he referred to the Royal Irish Regiment, but of course those forces were from the Republic of Ireland.

[Mike Gapes]

I am grateful for that intervention.

Let me turn to some of the other issues that have been raised. An important point was made about the internet and cyber-warfare. NATO has a facility in Estonia—I have visited it with the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and I know that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly has also visited it—to bring together best practice for dealing with cyber-warfare. As we have seen from the media headlines in the last few days, we will face significant challenges, not just from states but, I suspect, over the coming decades from private interests and private companies spying and stealing data and commercially sensitive material. We also know of reports—I am not in a position to say whether they are true—that the Iranian nuclear weapons programme was seriously set back because of the activities of some countries and the so-called Stuxnet, and there are other areas where these matters are also of great importance.

International security is enhanced by co-operation, not just in hardware and personnel but in intelligence and security sharing. We need to be honest: these are not issues that can be dealt with by simplistic headlines in The Guardian or any other newspaper. They have to be looked at seriously. There needs to be international co-operation to deal with threats to our security, which might come not from terrorist bombs but from somebody sabotaging a banking system or undermining the supply of electricity or water to our major cities by making a minor change to a software programme, albeit one with potentially disastrous consequences. We need to look at those issues. I believe that NATO has a role in that respect.

My final point relates to the United States, which has already been referred to several times. We have heard about the so-called pivot towards Asia, President Obama’s strategy of leading from behind and all the other concerns that we have as Europeans. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly provides one of the few forums for members of the US House of Representatives and the Canadian Parliament to come to meetings at which we can have regular discussions with them. Sadly, given the nature of the insane political system in the United States and two-year elections to the House of Representatives, it is difficult for its members to get abroad very often, because they have to spend all their time raising election campaign money or fighting re-elections, normally in their primaries.

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly is important, because it means that there is a group of Americans from the Republicans and the Democrats who have had contact with and learnt about European politics. In the same way, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly provides a way for people from European countries to understand the politics of other countries better. The current President of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, was a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly for many years. I am sure that that was important, given that he comes from the AK party, which comes out of an Islamist tradition. He has clearly learnt a great deal and built confidence and understanding with other European parliamentarians and those from across the Atlantic.

The forum that is provided, the specialist committees and the reports that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly publishes provide members of Parliaments in different countries with vital information that they would not always get from their own Ministries of Defence—I am glad that the Minister is in his place to hear this. In the more than 10 years that I have been attending meetings of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I have found that the access we get to high-level meetings and the information we get in those meetings is often far superior to the level of information I used to get as a member of the Select Committee on Defence or the Foreign Affairs Committee. That is not something to be proud of.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Can my hon. Friend say—I am genuinely interested in this—what degree of influence over NATO policy and strategy the Parliamentary Assembly has?

[Mike Gapes]

Without straying too far from what I was going to say, I can say that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly produces reports which are published online and are published in draft form before final versions are produced. Every year the NATO Secretary-General produces a response to the points made. It is a bit like the relationship between Select Committees and the Government. Recommendations are made, reports are published and then the NATO bureaucracy—the Secretary-General, on behalf of NATO as an institution—responds to the assembly’s recommendations. The Secretary-General and other senior NATO figures come before our meetings. We hold them to account, whether at the February session in Brussels or the autumn meeting, which rotates among different countries.

There is therefore a level of connection and accountability, although NATO is not a democratic parliamentary structure. It works through a consensus arrangement between the different member Governments. In a sense, the NATO Parliamentary Assembly is far less democratic than other bodies—there is no qualifying majority voting, like in the European Union—while the European Parliament has a lot more powers. Nevertheless, the work we do as parliamentarians, representing our national Parliaments but also understanding and working in co-operation with others, is vital. Under my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), the president of the assembly, I believe we will have a much higher profile in future.

13:59

[Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) on securing this debate. He has fulfilled his responsibilities as president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in an exemplary manner, to the credit of Members in all parts of this House.

All three of the major military contributors to NATO have in the last few weeks made a significant policy change on the supply of equipment to Syria. All three have said that they are now ready to supply lethal military equipment to Syria. I want to bring before the House what I believe is a critically important case study before those countries, and possibly other NATO countries, decide in specific detail whether they will supply military equipment to Syria and, if so, what types.

Over the last few days, I have been analysing what was supplied to Gaddafi’s Libya in the five years prior to the outbreak of the Arab spring. The UK was one of the NATO suppliers, and was far from the only one. Non-NATO countries were supplying arms as well, and contributing to the substantial Libya-Gaddafi arms stockpiles. That five-year period ran from the beginning of 2006 until the end of 2010, which was of course the eve of the Arab spring.

I shall give the House a brief snapshot of the arms export licences that were approved by the previous Government here. They covered items including components for assault rifles, armoured personnel carriers, command and control vehicles, military utility vehicles, military communications equipment, cryptographic equipment, electronic warfare equipment, artillery computers, and components for surface-to-air missile launching equipment. The decision to issue an export licence for that last item— components for surface-to-air missile launching equipment—was made here in London, in blissful but understandable ignorance of the fact that within a few months NATO aircraft, including those from this country, would be overflying Libya to establish the no-fly zone.

Then came the change of Government in May 2010. In the subsequent seven months leading up to the outbreak of the Arab spring in 2011, the present coalition Government continued the policy of the previous Government. Indeed, I believe that they somewhat enlarged it. The export licences that were granted to Libya’s Gaddafi regime covered items including small arms ammunition, semi-automatic pistols, sniper rifles, assault rifles, machine guns, military communications equipment, cryptographic equipment, military cargo vehicles and, once again, components for surface-to-air missile launching equipment.

I raise this case study because the key issue for NATO in relation to supplying arms to Syria is to determine what has happened to the Libya-Gaddafi arms stockpile. To help us to answer that question, we are indebted to one key public source: the report presented to the United Nations Security Council by the panel of experts charged with reporting to the Security Council on the implementation of Security Council resolution 1973. I believe that that report should be made compulsory reading for all Ministers considering whether NATO countries should supply weapons to Syria and, if so, what weapons they should be.

I wish to place before the House a few key sentences from that recently published report. The panel of experts states that

“the proliferation of weapons from Libya has continued at a worrying rate and has spread into new territory: West Africa, the Levant and, potentially, even the Horn of Africa. Since the uprising and the resulting collapse of the security apparatus, including the loss of national control over weapons stockpiles and the absence of any border controls, Libya has over the past two years become a significant and attractive source of weaponry in the region. Illicit flows from the country are fuelling existing conflicts in Africa and the Levant and enriching the arsenals of a range of non-State actors, including terrorist groups.”

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I compliment the right hon. Gentleman on his excellent speech. Does he agree that, once those weapons have leeched out of Libya, there is no way of retrieving or controlling them, and no way of knowing where they will end up? This happened in Afghanistan in the past, and it could well happen in Syria.

[Sir John Stanley]

The hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to learn that he has anticipated a point I am about to raise.

I raised the future of the Libya-Gaddafi arms stockpile with the director-general of the Royal United Services Institute, Professor Michael Clarke, when he gave oral evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee last week. His answers were extremely illuminating. In reply to my first question to him, he said:

“The arsenals that existed in Libya, as we all know, were extensive, and there has been almost no control over those weapons stocks. The new Government has proved virtually incapable of preventing those weapons stocks draining away.”

He went on to make this key point:

“Weapons never go out of commission; they just go somewhere else. Almost all weapons find a new home once a war is over.”

On Syria, he said:

“There is a lot of evidence that Libyan weapons are now circulating pretty freely in the Levant, and that seems to be where they will have the most destabilising effect.”

The huge geographical dispersal of the Libyan stockpile is happening not only because of the breakdown of security in Libya following the end of the Gaddafi regime but because, in the middle east and in north Africa, all through Saharan Africa and down to west Africa, arms are seen in a different way from in NATO countries. In NATO countries, the value of weapons relates to their military capabilities. We ask how capable a weapon is, how much firepower it has, how accurate it is, and so on. In that part of the world, however, there is a different approach to weapons. It is not merely a matter of their military utility. They are tradeable items.

I put that point to Professor Clarke:

“Would you conclude from that, as some people have, that the very act of supplying weapons in those circumstances means that you are basically supplying weapons into a commercial market? The moment the weapons leave your possession—whether it is weapons or ammunition—they become commodities to be sold at the highest price.”

He replied:

“I would agree with that. There is no such thing as an end-user guarantee on anything other than the most sophisticated of weaponry. Everything below the level of major aerial, maritime and ground-based combat systems—the really high-tech stuff that we produce—that is classed as small arms, light weaponry or even medium-range weaponry, is on the market once it is sold to anybody.”

A key question for NATO is whether our decision takers will take account of the very different way in which arms are seen in that part of the world. Arms are seen not merely as weapons but as money-making opportunities. Arms are bazaar items; they are there to be bought and sold at a profit if at all possible.

In conclusion, I say to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence, to my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and, most particularly, to my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister: before deciding whether to supply particular lethal weapons and equipment to Syria, take note of what happened to the Libyan stockpile. They should ask themselves the questions, “Where are the British weapons that went into that stockpile; which countries are they now in; and in whose hands are they now in?” Most of all, they should ask themselves, “If Britain is going to supply military equipment to Syria, what is the risk of putting petrol on the fire?”

14:20

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

If I may say so, it is a privilege to follow such a powerful speech about the spread of weapons. The whole House respects my hon. Friend’s extraordinary devotion to his work on arms control for the Quadripartite Committee. He approaches his subject with a passion and knowledge that is probably unrivalled in either House of Parliament.

If I may, however, I would like to respond, perhaps impertinently, to my hon. Friend’s implied rebuke to the Government for their helping to persuade the European Union to lift the arms embargo on the supply of weapons to the Syrian National Council—the least unrespectable part, if I may put it that way, of the Syrian opposition, which we would want to be properly represented in the peace negotiation or peace settlement that we are all striving to achieve. I support the Government in seeking to redress the extraordinary imbalance affecting the more reasonable forces involved in this extraordinarily bloody and complex conflict.

NATO should be agonising over this whole issue because it will have to pick up the pieces of a spreading war and conflagration that almost inevitably will occur unless the United States, Russia and the other major powers in the region—including, perhaps, even Iran—start to sit around a table and work out how to contain the conflict.

We were right to question whether there might be a case for sending arms into Syria to try to redress the imbalance, because the regime is already using a massive stockpile of weapons. Russian-trained pilots are flying Russian aircraft, dropping Russian munitions and firing Russian shells out of Russian guns at civilians all over Syria. I find it very difficult to tolerate the idea that the Russians should be able to do whatever they want in their bloody way in that country, while the west sits idly by doing nothing. It is not just the Russians, as extremist Sunni factions, too, are being armed by Qatari and Saudi interests, which are pouring weapons into the Syrian conflagration.

The danger is not that our sitting back and doing nothing will mean that nothing happens or that the pre-2010 stasis will reassert itself as Assad reasserts his power. The danger is that this conflagration will grow and grow and grow. I therefore think the Government are right to try to redress the political balance and to tempt the Americans into entering this crisis—otherwise, NATO will finish up having to pick up the pieces in a very much more active and perhaps unfortunate way than we would wish.

That brings us back to our subject, Madam Deputy Speaker—I hear you heaving a sigh of relief—which is the question, “What is NATO in our modern age?” I thought that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, was right when he said that NATO has become a coalition of the willing—an organisation or a military alliance from which a coalition of the willing can be drawn. I do not rebuke the Minister for representing the Government at this debate because NATO is a political alliance that represents the foreign policy of this country, albeit backed by national military capability, pledged in co-operation to support the objectives of that political alliance.

Why is NATO still needed? I hope that I have just exposed one possible reason—to prevent war and to contain conflict. The reason NATO seems to be redundant and out of date to so many of our citizens today is that it has been so successful—the most successful military alliance in modern history—at containing, deterring and preventing conflict so that our continent feels perhaps deceptively safe from foreign conflict. NATO not only won the cold war, but keeps the peace. People should not forget the adage “If you want peace, prepare for war”, as that is what NATO is about.

Deterrence is the watchword—preventing wars rather than fighting them. That is why we spend money on defence—not to use the military capability in hot conflict, but so that we do not have to use the capability at all. Its use is pacific. That is one of the reasons the nuclear deterrent lies at the heart of NATO military doctrine. It is the relationship between the future of NATO and the continuation of our own nuclear deterrent that I shall explore briefly this afternoon.

There are three NATO nuclear powers: France, Britain and the United States. What threatens the future of NATO today is not just apathy or the parsimony of its member Governments’ defence budgets, and neither is it ignorance about its vital role. NATO is not going to be abolished suddenly. Nobody is going to make a decision at some NATO summit that NATO has had its day and will be wound up. The great danger is that NATO withers. I put it to the House that, with the war fatigue following Iraq and Afghanistan and the lack of appetite for NATO to play its deterrent peacekeeping and stabilisation role across the world, NATO is already withering. The collapse of key components of NATO is another danger, as is the uncertainty and the question mark that still exists over the continuation of our own nuclear deterrent. In fact, that is a threat to the continuation of NATO.

With the greatest respect to those who advocate European Union alternatives or supplements to NATO, I say that without NATO European defence is sunk. NATO has been doing European defence and security and it is doing European defence and security: there is no substitute or alternative to NATO.

We have left a question mark about the vital part of NATO’s capability. Our nuclear deterrent is pledged to the defence of NATO and our NATO allies. The Government have conducted a study into possible alternatives to the Trident nuclear deterrent. Now is not the time to go into great detail about that, except to say that we understand that it has exposed the truth: that there is no viable or cheaper alternative to our nuclear deterrent. Trident is the only viable nuclear deterrent on offer to the United Kingdom.

[Mr Spellar]

Can the hon. Gentleman—who is probably better informed than Opposition Front Benchers on this—give us any idea of when he expects the outcome of the study to be published so that we can have that informed debate?

[Mr Jenkin]

I am ahead of the right hon. Gentleman, and ahead of the official Opposition. I have tabled a question to the Prime Minister, and I am waiting for his written reply. I cannot tell the House any more than that, although my hon. Friend the Minister might be able to do so.

We know that there is no alternative to Trident, because we have been briefed to that effect, so why does this uncertainty still hang over our deterrent? The answer is that there is now talk of our no longer needing continuous at-sea deterrence. It is being said that we could have, or could risk having, a part-time deterrent by having fewer than the four submarines that are essential to the guaranteeing of continuous at-sea deterrence.

I need hardly explain to the House why that idea simply does not bear scrutiny. At a time of crisis, putting a nuclear submarine to sea to stand guard over our country is a very public act, because submarines go to sea on the surface. The submarine would be exposed to possible enemy pre-emptive attack, and our foreign policy would be exposed to accusations of escalation and inflammatory acts at a time when sensitive international negotiations were taking place. A continuous at-sea deterrent that is not at sea 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, is not a viable deterrent. It would be vulnerable to attack and vulnerable to misinterpretation, and at a moment of crisis we would hardly ever dare to put it to sea. I cannot imagine why it takes intelligent people so long to work out that if we are not going to order four submarines, we might as well not order any.

I regret to say that that uncertainty is being sustained by our Liberal Democrat coalition partners. The implication must be that they want the issue to be a bargaining chip in the negotiations of a future coalition. As my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has repeatedly pointed out, if they have a choice between coalition partners at the next general election and one of the parties offers unilateral nuclear disarmament—which is what this amounts to—that is the party that they will choose.

The hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) is shaking his head. If I am wrong and the Liberal Democrats are now committed to the renewal of the Trident deterrent with four submarines, I invite the hon. Gentleman to put me right.

[Stephen Gilbert]

Like the hon. Gentleman, we are all eagerly awaiting the publication of the report that is being prepared by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister. When we have seen that report, we can have a debate on the basis of some facts.

[Mr Jenkin]

I do, indeed, eagerly await the report’s publication. I wonder what the delay can be.

I do not think that the report turned out to be quite what the Liberal Democrats wanted, although many of us had been saying that submarine-launched Cruise missiles, land-based systems or new air-launched weapons would be not only impossibly expensive, but probably illegal under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. However, I am glad that they have learnt that much. Perhaps they will now learn something else.

Because that uncertainty rests over our deterrent, it rests over the whole of Europe’s deterrence system. We should not imagine for a moment that it would be easy for a French Government, equally afflicted by austerity and public pressures, to sustain their deterrent if we were going to wind ours down. We should not believe for a second that the United States would remain as committed to NATO and the transatlantic alliance if it became apparent that the European powers were no longer prepared to shoulder their burden of nuclear responsibility in the defence of our own continent. We should not think for a minute that the United Kingdom’s relationship with the United States could stay the same if we threw the gift of the Trident nuclear deterrent back in its face after the US had gone to such lengths to share the costs, development and risks of the system that we both deploy.

The hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) rightly referred to the importance of continued co-operation between our conventional forces. It is true that we engage in extensive military co-operation. The airborne forces based in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) need to be integrated with the American military command when necessary, so that we have a role in supplementing American forces. The Americans can do so much less unless they have international support, and we are always their first port of call in that regard. It is our influence over American policy that gives us our leverage. That is why, when there is a really big international crisis, the American President does not call the French, the Germans, the Japanese, the Indians or the Chinese. It is always the British Prime Minister whom the American President calls first.

Many people are aware of the importance of the intelligence-sharing relationship between the Americans and GCHQ, which demonstrates an extraordinary degree of trust, but it is not widely known how integrated our nuclear forces are. We send our submarines to the United States, and the Americans subject them to readiness-at-sea trials. The Americans train our crews for NATO operations, and, indeed, we train theirs. We certify their crews for readiness at sea. The relationship between our two nuclear submarine fleets is deeply symbiotic. It is burden-sharing in the real sense of the term. If we were not to maintain continuous at-sea deterrence, we would deliver a mortal blow to the US-UK relationship, to our ability to contribute to global security, and to NATO.

Let me make two more points, which will serve as a coda. Last week the Public Administration Committee published a report, “Engaging the public in National Strategy”, which explains how “deliberative” polling can be used more effectively to help us to understand what motivates our voters, what aspirations they have, and what sort of country the British people want ours to be. Members of the public were asked a number of questions, one of which concerned nuclear forces. It became clear that most people in the United Kingdom would order the four submarines: 57% said that they would rather do that than give up our nuclear weapons altogether, which is what the alternative amounts to.

Let me say finally that the great danger—the wild card—is Scotland. The Scottish people must make their own decision about their independence, but even if they vote for it, if they want Scotland to continue to be a member of NATO, they had better accept that the British nuclear deterrent will remain at Faslane. It would be impossibly expensive to move it, and were they to insist on scrapping it, they would deliver a fatal blow to the affordability of our nuclear deterrent. If it were brought down to some other part of the United Kingdom over a short period and stationed there—if a deep-water port were found where all the weapons systems and weapons storage and protection facilities would be welcome—not only would Scotland be giving up the largest employer on its own west coast, but it would be wrecking NATO. The fact that Scotland has taken a stronger anti-nuclear stance than any other NATO member—refusing, unlike any other NATO member, not just to admit visiting nuclear forces but to allow any nuclear forces to be stationed on its soil, even in a crisis—means that it would never be allowed to join NATO.

14:39

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I am going to return to the theme that the vice-president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly started us on: why NATO? By the end of next year, we will be out of combat in Afghanistan. Clearly, there will be a period of readjustment for western armed forces. The British Army is being reduced by 20%. The other armed forces—the Air Force and the Navy—are being reduced by a similar amount. The Americans are already declaring that sequestration will take $50 billion a year out of their $550 billion budget, which is a lot. Therefore, fundamentally, there will be big changes.

When NATO started in 1949, General Lord Ismay said that its purpose was

“to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”

Obviously, the situation has changed a lot. The Warsaw pact was formed in 1955 as a reaction to NATO. We could not have had NATO without German rearmament.

I and other members in the House spent most of our military careers preparing for what we loosely called the third world war, hoping it would not happen. Thank goodness it did not happen on the north German plain. When the Berlin wall fell, everything changed and NATO had to change. As I have explained to the House on previous occasions, after I came back from Bosnia, in my last two years in the Army, I was a member of the planning team at Supreme Allied Commander Europe. We most definitely were not seeking a new role outside Europe; it was largely thrust upon us. Therefore, doubts remain about NATO and its solidarity. I agree that we must keep banging on about NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. We must keep it. The problem is that some people, particularly in France, suggest that the alliance is

“an alliance of the unable and unwilling”.

A French academic said that. I put it to the House that NATO has a good future.

Twenty years ago, who would have thought that Russia would be resurgent? Russian military spending is now increasing by three quarters of a billion dollars; it will have increased by 53% by 2015. Russia still possesses more than 1 million troops and it has 20 million in the reserve. However, the Russians have big problems. Russian military prosecutors recently said that about a fifth of the budget had been embezzled, so they are trying to sort that out. However, look at the Russian navy. We have talked about the high north. That navy has been transformed in the last eight years: 45% of the ships in the Russian navy will be replaced by 2015. By 2007, Russia was building as many ships every year as the Soviets did at the height of their power.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) made an excellent speech on the nuclear deterrent. The Russians certainly think in terms of flexible response. They envisage using tactical nuclear weapons in their exercises; a recent exercise that they undertook in the Baltic states suggested exactly that. Part of their war-fighting ability is to use nuclear weapons. That is one of the reasons that we must retain our nuclear deterrent.

[Mr Jenkin]

Not only do the Russians exercise that capability, but they talk about it, have not renounced first use and have said that they would use their nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict against their neighbours.

[Bob Stewart]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He puts it better than I could write it.

In China, Xi Jinping has consolidated his power. He talks of fighting to win wars. There has been a 10.7% increase in the Chinese military budget. The strategic forces of China now have 3,000 miles of tunnels. They have 850 nuclear warheads ready to launch. They are almost at strategic parity with the United States. They are also building globally deployable forces, which are now edging into the Mediterranean, as we have heard, and coming through the high Arctic. They are challenging western strategic military superiority.

Something else is new, and we have touched on it in the debate: cyber-warfare. The Defence Committee has just completed a report on that. It is a new form of war. It is invidious and evolving at unimaginable speed, with serious consequences. Cyber-space is an aspect of asymmetric warfare. It is very difficult to identify sometimes where these attacks are coming from. State actors such as China, North Korea, Iran and Syria are devoting resources to it. Hacking can be more deadly than the gun. The targets are government, industry and the military. There is great concern in the west about how disruptive cyber-attacks can be. For example, on 23 April, in seconds, the United States stock market dropped 1%, losing $136.5 billion, because of a false tweet put into the system, possibly from Syria.

The United States is changing some of the focus of its direction. Its strategy now, as the Defence Committee heard when we were in the US, is to concentrate on trying to avoid war much more. The Americans do not want any war that is not short term. They are looking at Asia. Sequestration will cost an enormous amount in military terms. The Americans consider that Russia is not a great threat at the moment—although its military spending is increasing, as I have mentioned—but that China is and it is growing in power. However, as one American academic put it to the Committee, “Going to war with China would be like going to war with your bank if you are an American.” Thankfully, since 2001, there have been huge improvements in US intervention power: there has been a two thirds increase in its intervention power capability.

The lesson of European, and world, history is that surprise is normal. The unexpected should always be expected, so we should expect to be surprised. Therefore, whatever we do within NATO, we must try to work in such a way that our armed forces can deal with as many envisaged eventualities as possible while also expecting that we will still be surprised. NATO gives us more combat power, by collaboration with others.

I am about to conclude Mr Deputy Speaker—I think you might be looking at your watch. The problem is that our potential enemies remain our potential enemies. Symmetric warfare between states is not dead. We may think it is. We have not had a war for 70 years, when Europe historically had six or seven each century, and thus the public ask, “Why do we have to spend money on defence?” The problem is that that has not gone away and we may well be surprised.

Defence is an insurance policy, therefore. We want to deter the possibility of war. We do not want to use nuclear weapons. The point of possessing nuclear weapons is to avoid using them by avoiding threats. The aim is to help our country be left alone and not be attacked, and, in NATO terms, the aim is to avoid all NATO countries being attacked.

I believe very strongly that we must remain part of NATO as I believe it has a big future. I disagree with those who say its purpose, in Lord Ismay’s definition, is gone. No, NATO is required because it helps us, as a medium-sized nation, to combine with other nations—the French, the Germans, the Spanish and other nations that are not members of NATO—and form a coalition of the willing to deal with problems in the world.

We must have the resilience to adapt, to deter and to deal with the unexpected, and we should try to do that as cheaply as possible of course. The days of huge military budgets are over; they are long gone. The best way is for us to collaborate and work with like-minded states, and NATO is most certainly the best means to that end.

14:51

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Members who have secured this debate, especially my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley), a long-standing colleague and the president of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. May I also say, Mr Deputy Speaker, how pleased I am to be participating once again in a defence debate, although, like the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), I am slightly puzzled as to why the Minister for the Armed Forces is not responding? Sometimes the working of the minds of Government business managers baffles even me.

The debate also takes me back to the first defence team of the incoming Labour Government, with Lord Robertson, Lord Reid and our late and much-missed friend and defence stalwart who died recently, Lord Gilbert. I am proud to have been part of such a formidable team.

I was very pleased and encouraged by the nature of the debate, which demonstrated the bipartisan support for Britain’s defence in NATO and our own armed forces. It is right, therefore, to stress the bipartisan support for NATO by all Governments of both political parties since the war, which has also reflected the solid support of the British people. Members on both sides of the House have spoken in that spirit in the main, recognising, I am sure, that it was Attlee and Bevin whose foresight founded NATO and also, incidentally, commissioned Britain’s first nuclear weapons programme.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

NATO was originally a political grouping and then became military after the Berlin blockade, and particularly after the Korean war. The right hon. Gentleman is right to mention that the Labour Foreign Secretary of 1948 prepared the basis for the Western European Union, however. It has now gone, but it was an important part of the history of political and military co-operation in Europe.

[Mr Spellar]

The hon. Gentleman will also find that the North Atlantic treaty, including article 5, was signed in 1948 and that Ernie Bevin was the prime instigator of that. The hon. Gentleman is right that there were a limited number of countries and that other countries came in later, but that demonstrates the foresight of that Government, who saw the nature of the threat and recognised Britain’s responsibility to play our part in addressing it—and, as I have said, who saw the need to commission Britain’s first nuclear weapons programme.

We should also recognise and celebrate the fact that NATO has been one of the most successful military alliances in history, if not the most successful, especially if judged by the attainment of the objectives in restraining and containing an aggressive and virulent Soviet threat until the ultimate, and, in George Kennan’s prediction, inevitable—even if it was rather protracted—implosion of that empire. NATO protected the free world and western Europe, and also provided a beacon of hope for the liberation, with minimal bloodshed ultimately, of eastern Europe.

That does not mean that we should unthinkingly continue an organisation that has served us well in the past, but we must give serious consideration to adapting such an effective organisation to deal with emerging challenges and threats. I was very much taken by the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) about the ability, through NATO, to undertake strategic thinking. The success of that policy of NATO inevitably and legitimately raised questions about the role of defence and collective security through NATO at the end of the cold war. My hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) touched on that period during his contribution. I have to say, and I think that there would be some agreement on this among some Government Members, that the then Conservative Government, under their policy programme “Options for Change”, too readily reached for the so-called peace dividend, cut too far and too fast, and badly undermined our capability. They did not comprehend the stark warning from Senator Pat Moynihan that the world was still a dangerous place and that the end of the cold war represented perhaps less threat but also less peace.

[Mr Arbuthnot]

I remember, because I was then a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Ministry of Defence, that the Labour party was begging us to cut further and faster at that time.

[Mr Spellar]

The Labour defence team I mentioned recognised fully how the impact of the cuts the Conservative Government had put through under “Options for Change” had caused huge problems, particularly on the manning side. Huge disruption was caused to manning levels, recruitment and training.

[The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr Hugo Swire)]

Would the right hon. Gentleman say that that created more of a problem or less of a problem than the £35 billion black hole that his Government left this Government to sort out?

[Mr Spellar]

Interestingly, Government Members have got back to their default answer to every question being the so-called black hole, as these days Unite and Len McCluskey are normally the cause of all the problems. This is a ridiculous way for Government Members to continue, because many Conservative Members at the time of “Options for Change”—those who were involved very much on the military side—were concerned at the cuts that were taking place. They did recognise that they were not planned, that the Treasury was taking too much out of defence and that that was to the detriment of defence.

Unfortunately, the current Administration seem to be repeating that error with their policy of drastic retrenchment in our military capability. That is damaging not only in itself—we will have a debate on that—but in the message it sends to Washington, because there is a proper debate in Washington about the balance of military expenditure and its deployment. We need to get that into perspective, because it is undoubtedly true that, as President Obama says, America is still the indispensible power. We should recognise that US defence spending is twice as much as that of the other NATO countries combined, including Canada and Turkey. Furthermore, as we all know, the US spends its money, particularly in the equipment programme, more efficiently.

There have been exaggerated concerns about a US pivot towards the Pacific, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgend mentioned. The move from an estimated 60% focus on the Atlantic and 40% focus on the Pacific to a 50:50 balance is a shift, but 50% of the US defence budget is still more than that of the rest of NATO put together; the US is still a formidably effective and overwhelming presence. Our real concern should therefore be voices on Capitol Hill, as people there may become weary of what they would see as carping criticisms from Europe. They may question whether, after the end of the cold war, the US still has that obligation to show such a commitment to European defence unless European countries, including ourselves, show a similar level of commitment.

Hon. Members have mentioned Secretary Gates’s comments about the need for Europe to pull its weight in NATO. Otherwise, he said, NATO will have little future. He has called for the European nations to step up to the bar.

We are either all in this together, committed to playing our full parts, or we are not an alliance that will last. We should also recognise that our public are becoming wary and weary and that there is public reticence about international military expedition. Mixed and impatient European public opinion on Libya demonstrated that, and I would say to the right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) that if he looks in Hansard he will see that at the time of the Libya situation, I was raising questions in this House about the fate of surface-to-air missiles—an issue that had been raised with me at a very senior level by concerned officials in the Russian administration; they had sold them to Libya in the first place, but they were concerned about their location.

We need to recognise that there is a danger that multilateralist proactive action will be hampered by public scepticism and reserve arising from the experience of recent conflicts and that that will be a problem in all our countries. I recognise that the percentage of GDP spent on defence by the UK is greater than that of other European nations whose defence spending, as a number of Members have mentioned, is at a level that is unsustainable if we are to continue to have an effective European component in the alliance. Those are significant issues with which Ministers and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will have to continue to deal.

I say to the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney), regarding his remarks about Somalia, that I think it is unfortunate for us to start to pose NATO against the EU in that context. Somalia is a particularly bad example to pick. There is no uncertainty in the mind of a serving rating or officer about the chain of command—the person who is giving him the orders is above him in the chain of command. In fact, Somalia has been enormously effective in dealing with piracy—not one ship has been captured by the pirates this year and there has been a dramatic drop in piracy and in the number of people being held—and in integrating the international efforts of countries with different traditions, and perhaps even different objectives, but with a combined objective of trying to keep the sea lanes open and to protect seafarers, vessels and cargos. Those operations have been well synchronised between the various parties. It shows that where there is a properly organised European component that can play a useful part and is an encouragement to countries of the EU to step up their contribution to defence within that framework, rather than a cause for criticism.

[Jason McCartney]

Would the right hon. Gentleman be happy to know that there is an EU mission staffed with 80 people in Djibouti, duplicating the effort provided by our embassy, the French embassy and the German embassy? Or is he happy yet again to spend yet more money on more bureaucracy?

[Mr Spellar]

Again, the answer to everything is Europe. If efficiencies are needed, that is worth considering—and they would be welcome—but I notice that the hon. Gentleman in no way denied that this was an effective operation. There might be some surplus people, and let us have a look at that, but the integration of the NATO operation and Operation Atalanta has been very successful. We should be celebrating that, because other piracy problems are emerging in other parts of the world that will need to be dealt with and the United States will be neither able nor willing to participate in all of them. Issues might well arise in west Africa partly because of terrorism but partly because of the serious rise in the influence of organised crime.

[Jason McCartney]

Of course it is a successful mission in Somalia; there are so many people there doing so many things. Another example of the overlap came when we went to Northwood for a briefing: we had a briefing from the NATO admiral—a three-star—and had to have exactly the same briefing an hour later from an EU admiral. Too many three-stars and top brass—come on!

[Mr Spellar]

No doubt in the second world war, the hon. Gentleman would have complained if he had to meet both Montgomery and Eisenhower. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) has only just walked into the Chamber, but he seems to have a lot to say.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I think I know when people came in, but not to worry about that. I am more concerned about the fact that you have been speaking for 15 minutes and only have a minute left, Mr Spellar.

[Mr Spellar]

I have been giving way, Mr Deputy Speaker.

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

Giving way does not extend the debate, and we have given a lot of extensions. There are 15 minutes for each Front Bencher. I am very lenient and can allow a minute or two, but not much more.

[Mr Spellar]

In that case, Mr Deputy Speaker, I shall move on to two other areas I think we need to consider in the context of NATO. One is security, the work of GCHQ and operations in cyberspace.

For Britain, more than for any other alliance country, our relationship with NATO is intrinsically bound up with our defence and security relationship with the United States. That is clear to those who serve in the Parliamentary Assembly and other right hon. and hon. Members who take defence and security matters seriously. Our relationship with the United States is unique and indispensable, not only in the hard power defence of our liberties and interests, but in the developing struggle against international terrorism and organised crime—especially the trafficking of people, narcotics and weapons, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central said—and in the sphere of cyberspace, through our security services and GCHQ.

Unfortunately, albeit for understandable reasons, success against those threats cannot be widely publicised, but the pooling of technology resources and intellectual analytical capacity, and indeed the courage of individuals who often have to operate in very dangerous environments, is a joint endeavour. We owe a great debt to all those involved in that work and should acknowledge it more widely, and I am pleased to do so here today.

Military and security cohesion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the ongoing health of the alliance. Other elements of the transatlantic relationship also need to be refreshed, which is why the talks on the transatlantic trade and investment partnership are so encouraging. As ever, there will be a host of complications and vested interests to overcome, but if the participants can keep their eye on the main prize, it will be considerable. Achieving greater integration of the north Atlantic market, with five of the G8 countries and approaching half the world’s GDP, would not only provide a vital economic boost, but further consolidate our political and security relationships.

NATO, founded by the great post-war Government of Attlee and Bevan, has served this country and the free world well. It faces challenges, and we should be prepared to meet them. We should remember that some of those who argue NATO’s irrelevance today are those who, at the height of the cold war, were most opposed to NATO. Collective defence and collective security have served us well throughout my lifetime. May they continue to do so into the future.

15:08

[The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr Hugo Swire)]

I thank the hon. Member for York Central (Hugh Bayley) and my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney) for requesting this debate, which has highlighted NATO’s continued importance to the UK’s interests. I pay tribute to their work and that of other right hon. and hon. Members who serve in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—an institution that, as we have heard today, provides an important link between NATO and the public in its member countries.

I join all those who have congratulated the hon. Member for York Central on being elected president of the Parliamentary Assembly by parliamentarians from NATO parliamentary delegations in November. He has visited Afghanistan more than half a dozen times, so I also pay tribute to his unwavering support for our armed forces.

Since it was established in 1949, NATO has been fundamental to transformations in regional security: consolidating the post-war transatlantic link; preventing the re-emergence of conflicts that had dogged Europe for the preceding 50 years; contributing to the fall of communism and the gradual democratisation of the former Soviet bloc; and leading operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Libya. Purely through its existence, NATO serves as a potent deterrent to those who would wish us harm. It remains the best tool we have for tackling certain threats to our national security further afield.

NATO is at a crucial juncture. The end of combat operations in Afghanistan will change the nature of daily life for the alliance. The continued pressure on defence budgets and the US rebalance towards Asia further change the strategic context in which NATO operates. Yet the threats and challenges that face us in the 21st century make NATO more, not less, important: continued instability in the middle east, north Africa and the Sahel; the growing risk of nuclear proliferation; and increased threats from failed and failing states, from both state and non-state actors. Against this complex backdrop, it is all the more important that NATO is fit for purpose in political and military terms.

Despite concern over the US’s rebalance towards Asia, the United States has been clear that it remains committed to transatlantic defence, but we need to ensure that Europe is seen to be carrying its fair share of the burden of that defence. The hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) and others raised the issue of the Government pressing our European allies to meet the target of 2% of GDP defence spending. As my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary said at his most recent meeting with NATO colleagues, we will continue to press them to do that, while doing what we can to protect defence investment and maximise its impact in the shorter term. I agree with the hon. Member for York Central that we need to explain to allies and our own public why this spending is important.

We will also continue to press to make the NATO defence planning process as robust, transparent and rigorous as possible, and for all Europeans to organise our collective capabilities in a more cohesive, coherent and prioritised way. Small multinational frameworks such as that which we have achieved with France through the Lancaster House treaties may be the best way of doing this.

The United Kingdom remains committed to filling 100% of our allocated slots in the NATO command structure. At the organisational level, we need to ensure that NATO remains open to change and able to build on its experience, that it is reform-minded and continuously reforming, that it is fully accountable and that its activities and procedures are transparent and fully in line with best practice, which will underpin its future credibility. The UK has been leading efforts to ensure that NATO remains lean and effective, evolving as the security environment changes so that it stays relevant and responsive, and we will continue to do so with energy.

Afghanistan will remain an important focus for the alliance after the end of combat operations. ISAF’s transfer of security responsibility to the Afghans is on track for completion by the end of 2014. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has said, we can be proud of what we have done in Afghanistan, but along with other members of the international community, our work is far from over. Post-2014, the UK will take the coalition lead at the new Afghan national army officer academy and look to operate in NATO’s train, advise and assist mission, Resolute Support. This is in addition to the £70 million that the UK has committed to funding the Afghan national security forces.

It will be crucial to the alliance’s future credibility that it is able to maintain an open door to those European democracies which meet the standard and wish to join. The United Kingdom remains firmly committed to the prospective membership of Georgia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, once they are ready to join. The hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes) asked about Kosovo. KFOR continues to maintain freedom of movement and a safe and secure environment in Kosovo, in line with United Nations Security Council resolution 1244. As he will know, the UK fully supports the continued NATO presence in Kosovo as long as conditions require. Supreme Allied Commander Europe has advised that strategic patience is the order of the day and we share that view.

NATO’s ability to work with partners will be crucial. A number of right hon. and hon. Members touched on this during the debate. Partners considerably augment NATO’s capabilities—for example, providing 10% of the air campaign in Operation Unified Protector in Libya in 2011. Partnerships also boost NATO’s political weight: partners see mutual benefit in working with the alliance and it is an incentive to do defence better. The UK will continue to lead the way in giving focus and momentum to NATO’s partnerships.

Considerable attention has been drawn to NATO’s relationship with one partner in particular—Russia. I fully agree with those who have highlighted concern over Russia’s political direction in recent months and years, but it is vital that we continue to engage with Russia. It is already a key security partner in areas such as counter-terrorism and maritime security. We should continue to look for common ground where it exists in order that we can more constructively discuss the issues on which we do not agree. That is the approach we will continue to take, both bilaterally and within NATO.

The middle east is a region of obvious strategic importance, as demonstrated by current developments in Egypt. It is absolutely right that NATO continues to monitor and discuss developments in the region, including considering their impact on the alliance and whether it can contribute to security there. That is why we support the current careful deliberations in NATO on whether it might provide some assistance to the Libyan Government. It is also why we believe it is right for the North Atlantic Council to discuss the situation in Syria, including with NATO’s partners in the region, such as Jordan and Morocco.

Various Members, including the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who is no longer in his place, the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who serves on the Defence Committee, and the hon. Member for Ilford South, who serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee, asked a number of questions about the high north. The Arctic is not currently a region of high tension and the Arctic Council has proved to be successful at maintaining inclusivity in the region. Although some regional actors may look to NATO to deter selected activities and act as a guarantor of security, the Secretary-General recently stated that NATO currently has no intention of raising its presence and activities in the high north.

Members will have noted with interest the strong support given by the hon. Member for Bridgend and my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) for maintaining a continuous at-sea deterrent. Deliberations are underway and we will just have to wait and see the results of the review. I was interested by the statistic that 57% of those consulted in a recent poll would rather order four more Trident submarines.

The high north is not neglected by the Government. The Under-Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), visited the headquarters in Bodo in May, where he met senior military personnel and discussed threats and challenges in the high north, not least those resulting from climate change.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Swire]

I was just about to address the points raised by the hon. Gentleman. He mentioned the peace dividend following the collapse of the Soviet bloc. As he knows, NATO is a collective security alliance and deterrence remains one the alliance’s fundamental security tasks. The fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the allies is political—to preserve peace and prevent coercion and any kind of war. He will know that NATO has reduced the types and numbers of its sub-strategic nuclear forces by more than 85%. Moreover, the alliance has declared its reduced reliance on nuclear weapons and has ruled out their use except in the most extreme cases of self-defence. The circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated by allies are extremely remote.

The hon. Member for York Central asked about the state of NATO-Russia relations. NATO and Russia have been co-operating through the NATO-Russia Council for 10 years. The alliance, including the UK, remains committed to the NATO-Russia relationship. We have seen much in the way of good, practical co-operation on a number of mutual security challenges, including Afghanistan, counter-narcotics, transit routes and helicopter maintenance, as well as work against piracy.

My right hon. Friend the Chairman of the Defence Committee gave us a little vignette of his ancestor ending up in Davy Jones’s locker and described how one of the first multinational taskforces was at the battle of Trafalgar. He went on to describe NATO as a vital resource from which a coalition of the willing could be formed. That probably encapsulates this debate as well as anything else should any headlines emanate from it.

My right hon. Friend also discussed value for money, which is incredibly important. The United Kingdom emphasises the importance of resource management and rigorous prioritisation of military requirements. Our national position is that NATO budgets should operate within the framework of zero nominal growth, but approved budgets will require the consensus of all 28 member nations. Within agreed common funding ceilings, NATO prioritises all military requirements. As my right hon. Friend will know, there is an ongoing debate within NATO regarding the limited use of common funding as an enabler for NATO forces in 2020. The United Kingdom consistently urges realism and applies a rigorous standard to all NATO expenditure.

The hon. Member for Bridgend and other Members talked about the implications of the US pivot. The US has been clear that the rebalancing towards Asia should not be seen as a threat to the transatlantic relationship. Security threats and challenges evolve; so should the response. The US is increasingly a security partner to Europe, rather than the provider of security for Europe. The unbreakable bond between north America and Europe remains the bedrock of our security. The US has demonstrated its commitment to NATO, including through practical investments, such as the bases for NATO’s ballistic missile defence. It is worth repeating that even after the withdrawal of US army personnel from Europe, their numbers remain higher in Europe than anywhere else outside America. There are about 70,000 US personnel in Europe.

The question of whether Scotland would remain a member of NATO were it to vote to leave the United Kingdom next year has been raised. The SNP Minister for Transport and Veterans, Keith Brown, this week admitted for the first time ever, before the Defence Committee, that Scotland’s membership of the defence alliance would not be “automatic”. It most certainly would not, and nor would its membership of the EU, the UN Security Council, the OECD and almost every other international forum that it enjoys being a member of through being part of the United Kingdom.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) made a very good speech about Syria, which my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) also referred to. I say clearly again that the United Kingdom has made no decision to arm the Syrian opposition. Our priority remains finding a political solution and establishing a transitional Government. We are providing advice, non-lethal equipment and technical assistance to the moderate opposition, whom we recognise as the sole legitimate representatives of the Syrian people.

In closing, I come back to my earlier argument. The uncertainties of the 21st century make an alliance such as NATO more, not less, important. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex said, NATO remains the world’s most successful military alliance, based on a shared set of democratic values. The Government fully intend to maintain that success and to build on it.

15:22

[Hugh Bayley]

I cannot respond to all the wonderful, well-informed, thoughtful and powerful contributions that colleagues have made to this debate.

I will respond briefly to the exchange between the hon. Members for St Austell and Newquay (Stephen Gilbert) and for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) about NATO’s initial reluctance to get involved in the former Yugoslavia. In the early ’90s, before I was a member of the Parliamentary Assembly, I was part of a cross-party delegation to NATO along with Max Madden, who would have been close politically to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), and the late Michael Colvin, who was a mainstream Conservative. We went to ask how practical it would be in military terms to intervene. Everybody at NATO said that it was utterly out of the question, until we got to meet the chairman of the military committee, Sir Richard Vincent. He said that it would have to be done sooner or later, and the longer we waited, the more difficult the military options would be.

I welcome the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North. He is very much in a minority in the Chamber, but he speaks for many people in the general public whom we have to convince. The Chairman of the Defence Committee, who made an extremely good speech, said that he disagreed with me on one point. He said that the NATO Parliamentary Assembly is not doing enough to make the case for the Assembly or for NATO itself. I would agree with him about that. Perhaps we have made a start today in this debate.

This has been an exceptionally good debate. It is my intention to go back to the Backbench Business Committee and request debates twice a year after the spring and autumn plenary sessions of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. If they are as good as this debate, they will be worth while and will help to explain why we are a member of the alliance and what the Parliamentary Assembly does.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered NATO.

Corporate Structures and Financial Crime

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

15:24

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the use of corporate structures in the UK and money laundering, tax evasion and other financial crime.

It gives me pleasure to introduce the debate and to thank the many Members from all parties who proposed it to the Backbench Business Committee, which we also thank for granting us the time for it. Perhaps in anticipation of it, earlier this week the Financial Conduct Authority made by far its strongest ever comment, including those of its predecessor organisation the Financial Services Authority, about the banks and so on. As a relevant introduction to the debate, let me quote Tracey McDermott, head of enforcement at the FSA, who this week said that banks’ trade finance businesses

“remained particularly vulnerable to abuse by criminals and terrorists, and that in some cases the shipments being funded by lenders were just ‘fresh air’.”

Martin Wheatley, the new chief executive of the FCA, warned that organised criminal gangs “filtered, cleaned and rebottled” £10 billion in the UK every year using banks and other financial services.

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[John Mann]

I will finish my introduction first, because banks are just one aspect of the problem and I want to focus on all aspects in my brief comments.

The problem is that we have opaque structures that mean that people can avoid tax and participate in illegal activities such as smuggling and money laundering. The amount of unregistered money involved is estimated by some analysts worldwide as being in excess of £20 trillion. A third of that is estimated to be directly linked with the European Union, and a third with UK Crown dependencies.

I will illustrate how the problem works. An individual sets up a firm in a country that keeps the names of directors a secret, then links that firm with another firm in a respectable place such as the United Kingdom, where the details of who owns a company do not have to be registered if it is owned by another company. They then set up nominees to be directors of the opaque firm, register with the corporate registry in the initial country, open a bank account for the original firm and funnel money through the firm in the legitimate area to the original firm in the opaque country.

There are many examples of that, and all areas of our national life, such as football, now seem to be covered by such structures. Whether it is illegal or legal, it is a major problem for transparency. We as legislators should be particularly concerned about any illegal aspects, and the banks have been at the forefront of those, as we have seen with the problems of money laundering. HSBC funded Iran with transactions involving £19.4 billion through shell companies over seven years, through the Channel Islands and the Cayman Islands. That broke sanctions but was incredibly hard to trace, because it happened through opaque shell companies

In the case of crime, in one year alone the same company funnelled £7 billion through the Mexican Zetas drug cartel, the biggest and most violent criminal agency anywhere in the world. Again, it did so through shell operations. Various mafias have also been involved.

The BBC’s “Panorama” exposed rather efficiently a woman called Lana Zamba, a Russian-born Cypriot yoga teacher, who was the director of a firm called Nomirex and 23 other UK-based firms. Records showed that those firms were inactive between 2007 and 2009, but “Panorama” demonstrated that £350 million had passed through them in that time.

[Mr Pat McFadden (Wolverhampton South East) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for his energy in securing today’s debate. In the cases he outlines, does he agree that the complexity of modern global banking should not be used as an excuse for ignorance by those charged with the stewardship of the banks, and that we should put in place regulatory—and if necessary criminal—sanctions to ensure that responsibility cannot be evaded on the basis of professed ignorance? Responsibility for running large global complex organisations must be taken by those in charge.

[John Mann]

My right hon. Friend makes a valid and relevant point about criminal sanctions. The banks’ uniqueness is that they are the channel for funds. Because things are recorded in this technological age, it is straightforward for banks to investigate themselves and see what is going on, so the plea of ignorance by those at the top is inexcusable.

What my right hon. Friend and I are saying, and what I interpret the Financial Services Authority to be saying, is that responsibility must be taken at the top. Pleading ignorance is simply not good enough. We are talking not about small, missed operations but about huge major operations that funnel vast amounts of money. It is easy for banks to identify and track such operations, yet they choose not to do so. There seems to be a particular problem of huge reputational risk to the City of London because banks based in the UK have been those most often caught out. However, I have produced a document that demonstrates that this is not simply a UK problem. In recent years, every one of the top 50 banks in the world has had this problem and experienced prosecutions or ongoing investigations into prosecutions.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for securing a debate on this subject. Does he agree that a board member should be made explicitly responsibly for each bank’s compliance? Anti-money laundering and due diligence provisions should be used effectively by the authorities to apply existing rules and ensure that people even go to jail if they have committed such crimes.

[John Mann]

The hon. Lady makes a valuable point about the importance of compliance and how that must take place at senior level. Everyone at senior level in a bank must take responsibility and be held accountable for the structures within it.

This is not simply a banking problem. Money laundering and some aspects of criminality are the biggest problems in terms of the volume of money involved, but there is also an issue of percentages and actuality of individual companies. Banks are not setting up opaque structures to create criminality; they are turning a blind eye while their structures facilitate criminality. Others are using weaknesses in corporate structure to create criminality.

Of the half a million companies that struck themselves off the UK corporate register in 2010, 40% had never filled in accounts with Companies House, and 33% had paid no corporation tax that year. If large numbers of companies are not submitting accounts and returns to Companies House, we have a fundamental problem. Our problem in dealing with this issue is demonstrated, rather ironically, if we look at the two Front Benches. The hon. Members present are excellently and diligently representing their parties, but one notes that they come from different Departments. That is part of the problem when it comes to Companies House, and I hope the Minister will clarify—we hope on behalf of the Government —who is responsible for Companies House and who should be holding it to account in Parliament.

Companies House is underfunded, under-resourced and perhaps under-specialised, and such opaqueness in our country has grown dramatically, allowing the creation of opaque corporate entities. That encourages criminality and discourages transparency for the general public, decision makers in Parliament and others.

On the impact of such actions, valid estimates indicate that Africa is losing twice as much in tax it cannot collect because of opaque corporate structures as it gets in development aid. In other words, if we cracked this problem, the amount of development aid required from the west to Africa would diminish dramatically because the tax base itself would be generating income, which is, of course, a key component of a vibrant democracy.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I have never understood why successive British Governments have not tightened up in this area. I understand that there needs to be international agreement, but at least in America there would be some accountability; we only have to look at Lehman Brothers and others to see that. I do not understand why we allow tax havens not too far from these shores to exist.

[John Mann]

Let me come on to that. In Davos in 2010, the Prime Minister said that he wished to “shine a light” on corporate ownership. In the Lough Erne declaration, the calls were for more transparency, more international co-operation and stopping firms shifting profits to avoid tax.

What needs to be done by Government in these areas? On transparency, it is essential that the Government follow up their G8 commitment and create a UK register of beneficial owners, making things transparent and traceable and deterring people from using this country for illegal purposes. All major countries—not least those in the G8 and the EU—need to collaborate. I note that Italy is already suggesting that it will not collaborate, and we need to tackle those countries that are suggesting that they will not co-operate even with the modest proposals emanating from the G8.

We need effective enforcement with, as we have heard, clear sanctions for law breaking; we need criminal sanctions; we need the collecting of fines. On the corporate structure, I suggest that raising the cost of setting up a company from the current £15 and hypoth—[Interruption]—and using that money explicitly and exclusively to ensure better regulation and policing. Hon. Members know which word I mean but I will not try to spit it out; we might be here for the rest of the afternoon. Hypothecating is the word. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”]

Firms that have not filed up-to-date tax returns need much greater sanction for not doing so. The fact that so many choose not to do so and get away with it is a fundamental and major weakness. This is where this House needs to put its beady eye on what is going on at Companies House. Is it properly resourced? Are its powers great enough? Is it doing the job properly? I would suggest that out of those, at least two must be at issue; perhaps all three. We must get on top of this in the near future.

The question of tax liabilities and of how much liability and responsibility are needed for directors in relation to the law needs to be reconsidered. As a specific micro-proposal that I think could have a huge impact, it should be illegal for anyone to set up a bank account outside this country without informing HMRC and Companies House first. In other words, if people are using British corporate structure, we should stop letting them set up overseas operation without anybody knowing what is going on.

We need legislation relating to the Crown dependencies. I have made this point on many occasions and I will make it again briefly now. It is unacceptable that our taxpayers provide defence and legal structures for those countries when they have an opaqueness that, whatever tax system and regime they end up having, does not allow anyone to know what is going on. The football industry in this country provides a good example. In vast numbers of football clubs nobody, including the spectators and those who are owed money when the clubs go bust, has a clue who owns what bit and where and how. These major institutions are an example of how deep the problem has become and how we have failed to deal with it. We need to look to our regulations, such as those being introduced on banking, and think about how they can be applied to UK dependencies. Leaving them as they are is simply unacceptable, and it is becoming increasingly counter-productive for this country.

[Tessa Munt]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I wanted to draw it to his attention that the power has been used several times by the UK already to make the dependencies comply with other parts of regulation, so we could just require them to do what they should do. I would give as examples the banning of the death penalty, the rules on acceptance of homosexuality, and, on a slightly minor level, an acceptance that they should ban pirate radio.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Lady knows, because it is repeatedly pointed out to her by occupants of the Chair, that interventions must be brief. That was another very long intervention. I think she has made her point. While I am on my feet, may I also say to the hon. Gentleman that he has been speaking for quite a long time? This is a short debate and a lot of people want to get in, including, funnily enough, the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt).

[John Mann]

Madam Deputy Speaker, my speech was already at an end, save for the final sentence. I did not wish to hog the debate with illustrations and proposals. I wanted to set some of the terms of the debate and implore those on both Front Benches to come forward with effective proposals, because this is a major issue for the UK economy and for our democracy.

15:42

[Sir Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)]

This is probably the first time in my parliamentary career that I find myself almost entirely in agreement with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). I think it is right to say—I am sure my hon. Friend the Minister will confirm this—that so too does the Prime Minister. He has stated that he thinks beneficial ownership information should be in the public domain. The head of tax at the CBI has also stated that he thinks that information should be public, saying that it is a “no brainer”. The International Banking Federation has said that this needs to be done, and it supports public registries as a way of making anti-money laundering and “know your customer” requirements both less expensive and more effective.

I wanted to intervene on the hon. Member for Bassetlaw to make a point about money laundering, which now punishes lots of innocent people. One of the biggest supporters of international development in countries like Somaliland or Somalia, are remittances, but they need systems to make them work. Barclays bank, which has facilitated remittances, is now suspending that facility. It is not that it thinks the people receiving the money in Hargeisa or Mogadishu are abusing it; it is concerned that it can no longer properly police who pays the money in because of money laundering. Therefore, large numbers of people living in grinding poverty around the world will now be denied access to an important part of their development funding because of the actions of those who have been engaged in criminal money laundering for a long time.

Anyone who becomes a company director—the Register of Members’ Financial Interests shows that I am a director of a number of companies—must register at Companies House. That includes registering all the other companies of which they are a director and their home address. All sorts of public information is involved, which can be found not only by shareholders but by the general public, the media and non-governmental organisations. The information is totally accessible. There is absolutely no valid reason why that should not apply to corporate structures across the world. It is absolutely right that we should be at the forefront of that.

I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) about the overseas territories. Some 20 years ago, I was a junior Minister in the Foreign Office under Douglas Hurd—now Lord Hurd—as Secretary of State. We undertook a review of the contingent liabilities for the dependent territories, as they then were. There are considerable contingent liabilities, as we saw with the Falkland Islands and elsewhere. Those territories look to us to offer them protection, but as my hon. Friend pointed out in an intervention, there is a quid pro quo. The quid pro quo should be that if they wish to remain overseas territories and benefit from the Crown, the Union flag and all that protection, we should be able to expect their banking systems and company registries to comply with accepted international norms of transparency and accountability.

I am conscious that a number of people want to take part in this debate. What has been put forward this afternoon is substantially a no-brainer. When my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary replies to the debate, I hope he will make it clear that what has been put forward has the full support of the Government, as I am sure it does. As the hon. Member for Bassetlaw made clear, the challenge for us will be ensuring that other G8 countries support us. However, there is absolutely no reason why we should not take a global lead on this—and be proud to take a lead—while the UK has the presidency of the G8.

15:44

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak in this debate and am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) for persuading the Backbench Business Committee to hold it. I am extremely concerned, as are all hon. Members, about the morality of cheating in the tax system and, as my hon. Friend said, the economic distortions it creates.

Ordinary small and medium-sized enterprises cannot cheat in that way, and the collapse in the high street is being exacerbated by the tax advantages enjoyed by the internet companies that facilitate online shopping. Indeed, the international internet companies are among the most significant offenders when it comes to tax avoidance. Their business model is built on an apparently free offer to consumers, but the services are paid for by advertising, which is targeted through the collection of personal data from consumers based on the cookie system. I have secured a separate debate in a fortnight’s time on the internet companies’ use of personal data. Today I wish to say something about their business model and its implications.

A Public Accounts Committee report found that between 2006 and 2011, Google paid the equivalent of $16 million in income tax in this country on revenues estimated at $18 billion. It claimed that advertising sales were being made in Ireland, when in fact the two contracting parties were in the UK.

Facebook, another US-based company, has 33 million users in the UK, with 25 million people visiting the site each day. Its revenues from advertising are estimated at around £170 million a year, but last year it reported sales of only £20.4 million. Using that figure for its sales, it reported a pre-tax loss of £13.9 million in 2011, enabling it to pay just £238,000 in tax last year. The position with Twitter is even worse, if that is possible to imagine. It did not even submit any accounts last year.

I want to set the behaviour of those companies, in relation to their corporate structures and tax performances, in the context of the cost to society and the public purse that they are creating. Everyone agrees that online child abuse is a serious crime. We in Parliament, the public and the industry are committed to its eradication. The Internet Watch Foundation is a fantastic organisation that takes down sites that carry child abuse images. It is a membership organisation for the industry, so we were all shocked to hear of the very small contributions that the industrialists were making to its work. Until a month ago, Google was donating £20,000 to the Internet Watch Foundation. In recent weeks, it has upped its contribution to £250,000 a year for four years, and the other media organisations have collectively offered a further £250,000 a year for the same period. I learned this week that Facebook makes a contribution of only £10,000 a year.

The problem with that is that the Internet Watch Foundation is hugely strapped for cash and unable to deal with all the alerts it receives. It is worried, because a survey that it undertook has suggested that, although 1.5 million people have seen child abuse images, only 40,000 reports have been made to the organisation. It is calling on the public to report more, in the interests of child protection, but it requires more resources to enable it to respond. Furthermore, once members of the public start to respond, they are not going to be able to distinguish between the different categories of image—illegal, obscene and indecent—and they will report everything that disgusts them.

We have a similar situation with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre—CEOP—which is the part of the police force that deals with these issues. It believes that 60,000 people in this country are downloading child abuse images, yet its resources are so limited that it was able to secure only 1,570 convictions last year. At the same time, the companies that distribute that material are not paying the taxes that would help properly to resource the police. I have met representatives of those companies and written to Ministers about these issues. I am still waiting for a reply from Ministers.

Returning to the business model that Facebook uses to generate its revenues, I want to explain a further connection between the two kinds of crime. A whistleblower recently informed us that advertisements were appearing alongside the indecent images of children. They were advertising the services of a large number of household-name companies, including PayPal, John Lewis, Procter & Gamble, EE, Hewlett Packard, Betfred, Bing, Johnson & Johnson, Google, BSkyB and Western Union. Facebook has now agreed to do a manual sweep to remove the advertisements from the sites, because the advertisers do not want to finance them and do not want to be seen to finance them. It would be helpful if we had public statements from those companies on their views on that, and on whether they are happy to have so much advertising being channelled to other organisations that are not paying their proper taxes.

[Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)]

I might have misheard her, but it sounded to me as if the hon. Lady was making serious allegations about John Lewis. Will she please reconfirm them for the benefit of Government Members?

[Helen Goodman]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Lady returns to her point, I am sure she is going to tell us how what she is talking about connects with financial crime. We are discussing corporate structures, tax evasion, money laundering and financial crime. The crime she was describing was serious, but she said there was a link between it and financial crime, and I would quite like to hear what it is.

[Helen Goodman]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Let me respond to the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). The companies that I listed have been inadvertently caught up in financing in this particular way, but the question for them is whether they have made it clear, publicly, that they do not wish to be financing the distribution.

In response to your point, Madam Deputy Speaker, the problem is that we have a system through which money is hoovered up in one way and can then be used to finance any other kind of crime—the crimes that I have described, but also those mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw. What we do not have from these organisations is any proper accountability that would allow us to get to the bottom of the issues and tackle them properly. It is extremely problematic that we do not have international agreements about how to deal with these internet companies when it comes to their taxes and their other behaviour. Although it is true that tax avoidance is a scourge and tax evasion is a crime, the industry’s use of these sites helps to promote other kinds of crime. I believe that there is a serious cultural issue about these companies that must be addressed.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way again. I have used privilege in this place to name and shame financial wickedness and, indeed, industrial scale tax avoidance. I have always done so, however, in an attempt to provide evidence. The hon. Lady has made some serious allegations in respect of which I am concerned she has not provided us with any evidence.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Gentleman may not be aware that a whistleblower showed me a large number of pages on which I saw some of these advertisements. The point I am trying to make to him is that the companies are inadvertently drawn into this through the targeting and retargeting of advertisements. Their money is being used to finance the internet companies according to the business model that operates, so if they do not want to be involved, they must take steps to avoid doing so.

To offer the hon. Member for Dover some comfort, Marks & Spencer, for example, took the view that it really wanted action to be taken—and it took it publicly, which had a tremendous impact on Facebook and on what Facebook was doing. The other companies have not yet come out as clearly as Marks & Spencer did.

I had better not speak for too long. This is an important debate, and I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw for opening it up. I am very concerned, however, about what the debate is uncovering.

15:58

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

As I said earlier, I thank the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) for bringing this issue to everyone’s attention and for providing an opportunity for us to debate it this afternoon. He has already raised the effect that anonymous shell companies have on facilitating the corruption that keeps many poor countries poor. Hidden company ownership may be a particular problem. I welcome the efforts of the Prime Minister during his G8 presidency, particularly his calling on the EU and the G8 to work together to break through the walls of corporate secrecy and to ensure much more transparency.

Any move that can clean this whole business up will have a major impact on the world’s efforts to tackle poverty. If we are to commit regularly to having a substantial percentage—0.7%—of moneys being put into aid, we need to make sure that the money is used effectively and that there is a clean-up. It has been noted that a third of the world’s poorest 1 billion people live in resource-rich countries, but as a result of weak governance and widespread corruption, finances do not always reach Government accounts. In fact, many of those resource-rich countries have been looted by the very politicians who are meant to be running them and developing their economies.

It is primarily companies that are used to move dirty money. The World Bank reviewed 213 large cases of corruption between 1980 and 2010, more than 70% of which were found to have relied on anonymous shell companies. Companies registered in the United States topped the list, but the United Kingdom and its Crown dependencies and overseas territories came second.

It seems to be terribly easy to set up anonymous companies and trusts. It is very cheap to create complex corporate structures, and the practice of using “nominees” does not help at all. I hope that the Minister will emphasise the need to put beneficial share ownership into the public domain. A “many eyes” procedure would ensure that company ownership was subjected to continuous tests. I agree with the hon. Member for Bassetlaw that we should not just leave it to HMRC. Beneficial owners are individuals—living people, real-life human beings. We are not talking about yet another company and yet another trust.

The financial action task force, the intergovernmental body that sets global anti-money laundering standards and makes recommendations, has said that the system does not work, and that it is much too easy to avoid due diligence. In many countries, company service providers are all too willing to flout the law. A large number of the world’s major economies are ineffective in preventing companies from being misused by money launderers. Six of the G8 countries and 18 of the 27 European Union member states are listed as being “not compliant” or only “partially compliant” with the new recommendations on beneficial ownership.

Many countries do not require banks, lawyers or company service providers to identify beneficial owners of corporate clients. The penalty in the United Kingdom and the United States for having a fake identity in the form of a passport is up to 10 years in prison, yet anyone who is willing to pay a small amount—I think it is £200 or £300—can create a fake ID through a company and then use the company to hide behind, and the penalties for that are very small.

One way of preventing abuse of anonymous companies is for countries to require all information about beneficial owners, the names of all people behind trusts and foundations, to be put into the public domain. It is essential for such information to be public, rather than being accessible only to the police and other law enforcement agencies. There is no interrelationship between most of these countries, and they cannot carry out the necessary tests. If only HMRC or the police can gain access to our information when fraud is suspected, it will not be possible for us to check other countries’ systems, or for them to check ours.

It is cheap to put beneficial ownership into the public domain. It has been suggested that 99% of companies that are registered in this country are family companies or micro, small or medium-sized businesses. There is a clear relationship between the ownership of companies and individuals. Only 1% of companies registered in this country have a complex financial structure.

We have said that banks could be charged with greater duties to ensure that they are more compliant and rigorous in exercising their duties to ensure that money laundering does not take place, but they have a conflict in that they stand to make very big profits in accepting the business of rich and dodgy customers. Our anti-money laundering laws sound fairly stringent, but, as has been said already, they bear down heavily on smaller companies and it is the big, professional organisations that are trying to launder money through the system on a major scale and that can do that quite easily.

There is little personal responsibility from individual bankers—HSBC is a strong example. In 2012, it agreed to pay a record $1.9 billion fine levied by the US authorities after admitting that its anti-money laundering systems had failed; it laundered hundreds of millions of dollars at least for drugs cartels, terrorists and pariah states such as Mexico. The Senate sub-committee that carried out the investigation described HSBC’s cultures as “'pervasively polluted”.

During that time, over 47,000 people died in Mexico at the hands of drug traffickers, so it is important that we deal swiftly and effectively with such companies. The penalties could be toughened greatly. As I said earlier, we should make individual people on the board responsible for looking after that part of the business. However, I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw that every bank executive should be responsible and made liable for the damage that they cause and that there should be a rigorous system of penalties, which should include the option of imprisonment.

I do not want to go on too much longer. The most important point is that bringing in a public register of beneficial ownership will not involve a huge amount of red tape. The point has been made already that a number of individuals are clear that it would be easy for this country to make such a move. I cannot stress enough how important it is to small businesses to ensure that everyone gets a fair deal, that taxes are paid and that there is absolute clarity when money passes back and forth across the world.

16:07

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) not only for obtaining the debate and for making another strong speech on the subject, but in particular for his relentless campaigning on the issue of financial crime in all its forms, including money laundering, tax avoidance and evasion. That is what I want to concentrate on.

As the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) said, at the G8 summit, the Prime Minister made a great media blitz of his supposed crackdown on corporate tax avoidance. He tried to get UK-controlled tax havens to sign up to an OECD agreement on providing tax information. He also tried to secure a worldwide standard on automatic tax information transfer, to get the G8 countries to reveal the identity of shell companies and to help developing countries to get their rightful entitlement to tax. All those are extremely worthy objectives and no one in the House would demur from any of them, but all he achieved—it is achievement, rather than aspiration, that matters when one is Prime Minister—was a bland statement in favour of the principle of tax information transfer, without any actual means of enforcement.

The Prime Minister defended that feeble result by claiming that little can be done without international agreement and that it takes time to build that, but that is not true. Of course the best result would be an internationally agreed set of rules, but even in the absence of that there is a great deal that Britain can and should do. First, as a number of Members have said, the UK controls 10 Crown dependencies and overseas territories, which collectively embrace over one fifth, I think, of all the world’s tax havens. Most of them have signed up in principle—[Interruption.] Well, we shall see, but they have certainly signed up to the proposal for tax information exchange, and it is now within the purview of the British Government to enforce that proposal, if there is any reneging or backsliding, by the simple expedient of refusing to recognise any financial transactions emanating from those areas if there is any failure to secure full compliance.

That will generate a great deal of resistance, not least from the tax havens themselves, but also I suspect particularly from the big UK banks, which are the main users of these tax haven facilities. Since the Tory party continues to get more than half of its income every year from the banks—[Interruption.] There is no need to roll the eyes or shake the head, as that is an important fact, so facing down the banks on this important issue will test the Government’s resolve.

I therefore want to ask the Minister the following question, which I hope he will answer: will he assure the House that the Government will enforce these tax information exchanges with the tax havens they control? I agree he cannot do that without international agreement in the other havens, but he can control these ones. Alternatively, are we simply going to find that the Prime Minister’s fine words, which we all agree about, will just fade away in a puff of smoke after he has had his PR day in the sun?

What makes the Chancellor’s remonstrations about tax avoidance being immoral seem perverse is that he himself has now emerged as the arch proponent of tax avoidance. He is changing the controlled foreign company rules from 1 January next year to allow any multinational company with a subsidiary in a tax haven—and as the Minister knows very well, 98% of those companies do have a subsidiary in a tax haven—to reduce their corporation tax liability from 23% to a mere 5.5%. Given the boast of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor about cracking down hard on corporation tax avoidance, that is breathtaking hypocrisy. The message is, “Don’t worry about artificial tax avoidance. You needn’t do anything about that, because I am going to serve it up to you on a plate.”

Then the Government went even further. They have put forward the pro-tax avoidance proposal of the patent box, a wheeze whereby any patented process applying to any part of an enterprise, however trivial or minor, not only secures a reduction in corporation tax to 10%, but applies to the entire enterprise. Frankly, the more the Government go on in this way, pushing corporation tax almost to zero, the more tax avoidance fiddles become redundant, because the Government are doing it for them. Perhaps that is the Government’s aim.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Meacher]

The hon. Gentleman was a tax lawyer, I think. He is also a very mischievous Member of this House, but I will still give way to him.

[Charlie Elphicke]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind remarks about me. It is all very well for him to have a go at this Government, but he will recall that under his Government revenues from corporation tax rose by 6% while revenues from income tax, paid by ordinary folk in this country, rose by getting on for 100%. Does he think his own Government did such a great job?

[Mr Meacher]

I do not think that the previous Government did a great job. They did an appalling job on corporation tax, and the hon. Gentleman might be pleased to know that I said so at the time and I have always taken that view. The hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) raised the issue of capital gains tax with me when I was last speaking, and I think that that tax should be at the same level as income tax. Corporation tax is another matter, of course, but it should be well above the levels the Government are now proposing.

The Government can and should restructure the whole approach on tax avoidance by switching the onus of proof away from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and on to the potential perpetrators. That is exactly what my General Anti Tax-Avoidance Principle Bill was intended to do. It would have made it clear that any scheme whose primary purpose was to avoid tax, rather than being any genuine economic transaction, would be invalid in law and struck down. In order to discourage perpetrators of this attempt to bend the will of Parliament, there would be a sizeable penalty for attempting to subvert that will. My Bill had only a 10-minute showing on the Floor of the House, thanks to Tory filibustering of the prior Bill on that day, so perhaps I might take this opportunity to ask the Minister: does he accept the general anti-tax-avoidance principle? If he does not, what are his reasons for rejecting it? I think he will say that the Government are putting up their alternative—the so-called GAAR or general anti-abuse rule—but that really does not meet the ticket. I wish to say why, and I hope that he will listen to why the Government’s GAAR is really no alternative.

The GAAR is based on a report by Graham Aaronson, who was always a representative of the tax-avoidance industry and never of the tax-compliance will of Parliament. I accept that the GAAR will have some effect, because it outlaws egregiously aggressive and abusive tax avoidance, but of course the implication of that is that it legitimises rather less extravagant tax avoidance.

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)]

indicated dissent.

[Mr Meacher]

Perhaps we should have some debate about that.

[Mr Gauke]

Let me put the right hon. Gentleman’s mind at rest on this by saying that the GAAR does not do that. We accept that the GAAR is directed at egregious tax avoidance. It is an additional tool, but there will still be targeted anti-avoidance rules and other measures that the Government take. I want to make it very clear that we are not saying that if something falls outside the GAAR, there is no problem with it.

[Mr Meacher]

I am glad to hear it, but the Minister and his Government will have to prove that in the outcomes that we see over the months ahead. He makes an important point, but there is a perception that if we opt for a rule that is limited to dealing with the worst kind of tax avoidance, it suggests that the rest is rather less important in the Government’s mind; I cannot see the point of having a GAAR if one is also going to “include” other abusive tax procedures, about which there is equal concern. I am sure that debate is coming along, but I am glad that he said what he did and we shall certainly hold him to it. The GAAR could actually make things worse and, even at this late stage, I ask the Government seriously to reconsider whether they should not take over my Bill.

The Government could and should recognise that their strategy to deter tax avoidance, which has been in use for many years, including under the previous Government, via the disclosure of tax avoidance schemes—DOTAS—is of limited value and is inadequate on its own. It requires those who are designing and trying to sell these schemes to inform HMRC in advance about each new scheme they introduce. I understand that something over 100 new schemes have been disclosed in each of the past four years under the DOTAS proposals. That shows the industrial scale—I think that was the word that the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) himself used—of tax avoidance going on in the City.

DOTAS still leaves two problems. First, it can take HMRC many years to defeat any of the schemes if it goes to the courts and, secondly, some of those promoting such schemes will go to great lengths to avoid disclosure. Even if they are detected and taken to court, the penalty is often something derisory like £5,000 or so. Those involved in such schemes have every incentive to fail to comply with what the Government are seeking.

HMRC’s working definition of tax avoidance, which is often seen as a rather nebulous concept, is, rather sensibly,

“using the tax law to get a tax advantage that Parliament never intended”.

I think that is extremely sensible, so why can it not be cast in statute? Why can it not be laid down as the principle by which the Government and HMRC will test such schemes? That would see off the tax avoidance industry far more effectively than the soft touch of DOTAS. We are coming to the same view on tax avoidance as we did on the banks, and unless persons as opposed to organisations are held responsible—if need be, in extreme cases, by criminal sanctions—very little will happen. If a person were subject to a penalty that was a multiple of the tax charge—perhaps two or three times the charge, depending on the blatancy and gravity of the offence—for seeking to pervert the will of Parliament, that would act as a serious deterrent.

[Charlie Elphicke]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Meacher]

I think that others might wish to speak, but I am sure that I will carry on the conversation with the hon. Gentleman outside and on other occasions.

Finally, corporation tax is, as everyone recognises, so riddled with loopholes as a result of the evolution of the international economy and corporation structures over the past 30 to 40 years that it urgently needs wholesale restructuring. The drive towards territorial taxation must be abandoned and replaced by unitary taxation by which multinationals are taxed according to where their genuine economic activity occurred and not where they pretend it occurred to collect the huge windfalls of transfer pricing.

Surely the most appropriate corporation tax base is either free cash flow or economic rent—the amount, in other words, a business earns in excess of its cost of capital. There are several ways of doing that: removing interest deductibility, introducing an allowance for the cost of corporate equity or shifting the tax base towards tax flow and away from accounting profit.

I have tried to offer several positive proposals. I realise that it is possible to make a lot of pejorative remarks, which are probably just, about the performance of this Government and the previous Government in tackling the problem, but I have tried to be as positive as I can. Unless the Government adopt at least some of the proposals, their claims to have serious intentions about cracking down on today’s enormous cancer of corporate tax avoidance will be seen as the pretence that, sadly, I sometimes think it is.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. I remind the two remaining Members who wish to speak that we are running out of time. So that we can hear the Front-Bench speakers, may I ask them each to take a maximum of six minutes? I will not put a limit on the clock, as they are both experienced Members who can judge it for themselves to enable us to hear the wind-ups.

16:24

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

Thank you for your guidance, Madam Deputy Speaker.

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher). I am glad to be doing so on a day when he has been very positive. I would hate to follow him on a day when he was being negative—it would be like having a dementor circling the room. It is always a pleasure to see him in this House, though, especially when he has so many to choose from.

I wanted to take part in the debate to do two things. First, I wanted to set out that the vast majority of businesses established in our country do the right thing by tax and the right thing by corporate structure. They really do work hard to stay within the rules, and they, like everyone else, are shocked when they see other corporate structures not doing the same.

Secondly, I wanted to congratulate and support the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann). It comes as a bit of a shock to me to say that, but I know that he has worked hard on this subject. I do not agree with him on everything, but he does raise a number of valid points; he states them and debates them well and they need to have a good airing. I look forward to continuing the dialogue with him.

Before I got involved in this political charabanc, I was a small business man. I much preferred running a small business and being able to do something positive to sometimes sitting through debates and ultimately achieving nothing. We remain a nation of small businesses and we should encourage them, so I believe it is important that we allow small businesses to set up and establish themselves quickly and cheaply. I therefore disagreed with the hon. Gentleman when he talked about making it more expensive and complicated to set up a company.

Only a year or so ago, I set up a company, and it was a delight to be able to do so online and quickly. There are a few hoops to jump through—one has to prove one’s identity, for example—but I thought the right checks and balances were in place. If we want to create wealth in this country, as we all do because that is where our taxation comes from, enabling businesses to be set up quickly is a good thing. I hope that the hon. Gentleman forgives me for disagreeing with him on that point.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb), I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee. We have been going through report after report on a series of corporate structures that were set up in a slightly interesting way to avoid paying tax, but to do so legitimately. We have been able to show where tax has not been paid or where people think tax should be paid, but it is only a thought, only a process. The companies that have come before us have all been able to say to us, “We do exactly the right thing both by the law in this country and by international law.” If we are serious about tackling this problem, we need to engage on an international stage. That is why I welcome very much the Prime Minister’s words and deeds at the G8 summit and what I expect will happen in future.

The right hon. Member for Wolverhampton South East (Mr McFadden) mentioned the complexity of modern-day banking. In fact, now that banks are so interlinked, there is an odd sort of transparency about banking transactions. Banks can make themselves as complicated as they like, but with modern technology and the internet—something the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) was moaning about—comes a degree of transparency that, should we wish it, could clear up a number of issues behind the scenes. Again, however, that would have to be negotiated on an international basis.

[Damian Collins (Folkestone and Hythe) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that transparency about ownership, particularly the ultimate beneficial owner, of a company should be welcomed? For many years, the identity of the real owners of some football clubs, such as Coventry City and, previously, Leeds United, was hidden in dummy companies registered offshore.

[Chris Heaton-Harris]

I agree. Coventry City is a perfect example. It announced today that it is moving in with Northampton Town, a club that is local to me. I am sure fans would love to know what went on behind the corporate structure there.

I have one wish, which is to ensure that we get some sort of transparency behind these corporate structures. Members will know that I am a big campaigner against onshore wind farms. Many of the developers have an unbelievably complex corporate structure that sucks money—subsidy, actually—out of this country and away to far-flung lands through a number of countries and a number of companies.

There is a job to be done. I welcome this debate, I congratulate the hon. Member for Bassetlaw on securing it, and I look forward to working with him and others in the House to get the right job done.

16:30

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) and I associate myself with his remarks about my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), who is an assiduous campaigner on this and so many other issues.

My small contribution will be about the way in which proceeds of crime have found their way into the financial sector, and I will seek assurances from the Minister that the Government are doing everything they can to deal with the issue of proceeds of crime within our financial structures. Some £675 million is owed by 178 criminals who were each ordered to pay back £1 million or more after their conviction. Prosecutors are unable to force repayment by 45 offenders whose debts to the taxpayer total £225 million. Clearly, the law as currently written and the existing structures are not sufficiently able to deal with the way in which these proceeds are kept by the Mr Bigs who, having committed horrendous crimes, are able to continue with their life after prison and are not asked to pay back what they owe.

I am glad that the Government are proposing changes to the law. I recently had a letter from both the Metropolitan Police Commissioner and the Director of Public Prosecutions about a wish to examine default sentences, changing the definition of “confiscation” in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, amending the Bail Act 1976 to prevent absconding—once somebody is out of prison, there is no way in which they can be made to pay this money—implementing the EU Council framework decisions on the execution of orders freezing property or evidence, and making sure that agencies work together so that if someone has committed an offence, they do not rush out of the country because the Passport Office has given them a passport.

On money laundering, as the House knows, 85% of drugs profits are earned by distributors in the United States or Europe. The current estimate is that global drugs profits are £380 billion, the majority of which enters the financial system. Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has said:

“I cannot think of one bank in the world that has not been penetrated by mafia money.”

Banks with British bases, such as Coutts and HSBC, have been found guilty of money laundering.

As the Home Affairs Committee said recently, until these companies hear the rattling of handcuffs in their boardrooms, they will not take seriously the issue of drugs money within our financial systems. Indeed, we recommended new legislation to extend the personal criminal liability of those who hold the most senior positions in banks and are found to have been involved in money laundering. As my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw said, it is hoped that the new Financial Conduct Authority will be much tougher than the Financial Services Authority, which in our view did not do enough to deal with the issue.

Yesterday the Home Secretary reclassified khat as a class C drug because she believes that sales of it have entered our financial systems and fund Islamic extremist groups such as al-Shabaab. In January the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said there was “insufficient evidence” that khat caused health problems. The panel found “no evidence” that khat, made from the leaves and shoots of a shrub cultivated in the horn of Africa and the Arabian peninsula, was directly linked with serious or organised crime. The problem is that once these drugs are banned, they go underground and the drugs barons are able to launder even more money.

[Mr Jim Cunningham]

The hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) has raised the issue of Coventry football club. I do not want to go too far down that road, except to say that the parent company should be investigated. It set up two sub-companies, one of which went into administration and was then given by the administrator to the other company. It is a ludicrous situation for the people of Coventry to find themselves in: the fans are up in arms, they do not know where they are going to play next season and all sorts of threats are being made.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) responds to that point, I remind Mr Cunningham that the courtesies of the House indicate that he should not enter a debate at the end and immediately intervene, because he has not been present at any stage during the debate.

[Mr Cunningham]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

We will not discuss this now, but I am sure Mr Cunningham will remember it for the future.

[Keith Vaz]

I thought that my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) was going to tell me that the directors of Coventry City were chewing khat. I did not realise that he wanted to make another point.

In conclusion, I say to the Minister: let us look at the proceeds of crime and the way in which financial structures protect them, and let us use effective action through the structures of Government and the financial agencies to try to make sure that the Mr Bigs pay back the money they have stolen.

16:35

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

In beginning this debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) pointed out that the responsibilities of the two Front Benchers relate to different Departments. The reason why I am speaking on behalf of the Opposition is that it is our view that too many of the matters under discussion are crimes, should be crimes, should be prosecuted and are not being prosecuted at the moment. My presence underlines the emphasis that the Opposition put on that.

We welcome the fact that tax evasion was on the agenda at the G8 and the Prime Minister is right that we need to pierce the corporate veil. Lack of transparency enables criminals to hide behind shell companies and launder the proceeds of crime. In our view, however, the Prime Minister left the heavy lobbying until too late and the international commitment to breaking down corporate secrecy was weak. In fact, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) has said, it was feeble. The G8 members only agreed to consider national registries of the beneficial ownership of companies, which, to be frank, is very little commitment at all.

What is the Government’s commitment to that registry? Will it be public? The hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) has said that the Prime Minister is on record as saying that he wants it to be public, but what does that mean? Will it be rigorous?

Every legal entity is ultimately controlled by a natural person—somebody who lives and breathes and who can go to jail if they do things wrong. Will there be a requirement that the information registered on beneficial ownership always includes a natural person? What penalties will there be for failing to supply the required information? Will there be an obligation to record the owner of bearer shares where the owner is not registered and the issuing firm does not track subsequent transfers of ownership? Will there be an obligation for companies that use nominee directors to reveal on whose behalf those directors are working?

We are told that the Government are reviewing all of this, but it seems to me that there is plenty of wiggle room. Will there be an obligation on the part of the registry to carry out due diligence on the information it receives? In practical terms, will Companies House have the resources to do that? Past studies have revealed that Companies House has not even had sufficient resources to routinely check company directors against a list of disqualified persons.

Will Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have the resources to investigate? HMRC currently faces £2 billion of funding cuts this Parliament, leading to a further 10,000 job cuts. Will the Crown Prosecution Service, also cut by more than 27%, have the resources to prosecute? Will the Government strengthen the regulation of corporate service providers that set up sham companies and straw-men directors? We do not know. Will we be told, and if so, when?

What we do know is that a future Labour Government will bring an end to the era of tax smoke and mirrors. As the shadow Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls), and the shadow Exchequer Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell), have set out in Labour’s policy review on corporate tax, the Government should ensure that HMRC has the power, resources and capacity it needs. They should also explore how their general anti-abuse rule can be strengthened. The Government should also deliver internationally agreed reporting rules so that large multinational companies have to publish the key pieces of information that people need to assess the amount of tax they pay.

We also need to look at the channels through which the laundered money goes. Of the 17 banks analysed by the FCA, half were found not to have proper processes to prevent money laundering. Four of those were UK banks. I was disappointed that the FCA did not name those banks and have written to it asking it to do so.

Many Members have referred to last year’s US Senate report, which found that HSBC had been used to launder the money of Mexican drug lords. It called HSBC a conduit for

“drug kingpins and rogue nations”.

The US Department of Justice fined HSBC £1.25 billion for money laundering. I am not aware that the UK authorities have taken any action on that, beyond requiring an improved monitoring regime. Of course, the chairman of HSBC at the time became the Minister for Trade and Investment in this Government and continued to be so until recently.

Whether it is LIBOR rigging, money laundering or sanctions evasion, the UK has been slow to investigate British banks. When it has punished them, the fines have been dwarfed by those imposed by the US. For example, Barclays was fined £101 million in the US for LIBOR rigging, whereas the Financial Services Authority in the UK fined it £60 million and the Serious Fraud Office is still investigating. The SFO prosecuted only 20 cases last year and convicted 14 individuals. In the past two years there has not been a single corporate prosecution.

[Keith Vaz]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent point, which reflects what was said in the recent Home Affairs Committee report. However, there is an issue with the absence of personal liability, not just corporate liability. It is individuals who made the decisions.

[Emily Thornberry]

I am getting to that. I am grateful to my right hon. Friend.

Is it any wonder that KPMG has just reported that in the UK, fraud cases totalling more than £500 million were recorded in the first half of 2013, which is up by more than a quarter on the previous year?

We need a change of culture in our law enforcement agencies. We must equip them with the tools and resources that they need to get on the front foot. Under English law, companies are criminally liable only if it can be proved that a director was personally involved in the wrongdoing. That is an extremely high threshold—a problem to which the hon. Member for Wells (Tessa Munt) referred.

There is a good case for holding companies vicariously liable for their employees’ economic crimes, unless they can demonstrate that they had adequate compliance procedures. The last Labour Government did that in relation to bribery with the Bribery Act 2010. We want to build on that, but this Government want to water it down. They say, for some reason, that rules against bribery are red tape. That stopping people bribing one another can be seen as red tape is beyond belief.

If we change the law on corporate responsibility, we may see an increase in the number of companies that are prosecuted, so we must have a penalty structure that is worthy of receiving them. The highest fraud fine to result from an SFO prosecution is £2.2 million. The highest fine clinched by the US Department of Justice is larger than $3 billion. Why do we not introduce a system in which sentences are based on a percentage of the company’s turnover over the past three years?

Although the SFO’s problems are not entirely down to under-resourcing, resources are important because these crimes are expensive to investigate. Last year, the SFO’s budget was £34 million, compared with £40 million in 2009-10. In 2014-15, it will fall to only £30 million. It is so short of money that it has to go cap in hand to the Treasury whenever it wants to take over a major prosecution. That at least gives the impression that the Chancellor has a secret veto on whether fraud investigations take place.

The US approach of topping up the funds of fraud prosecutors is much more appealing. Where possible, confiscated assets are returned to the victims. The proceeds from the many cases in which the victims cannot be traced are poured into a central fund. Each year, teams of prosecutors bid for a portion of that fund for asset tracing and law enforcement investigations. We have the beginnings of such a system in the UK. We could extend that and put large fines or at least part of them into the pool as well. In these austere times, we need to explore such alternative means of funding.

[Stephen Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

The hon. Lady is eloquently describing the failure of the tripartite regulatory regime that her Government put in place. She is correct that the fines in the UK are a fraction of those in the US. A further failure is that the fines have rewarded other banks. This Government have ensured that the fines that are paid do not reduce the levy so that banks no longer profit from the wrongdoing of other banks. That was the regime that her Government put in place.

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but in the time I have available, I would like to look to the future and consider the best method that we have for solving the current problems. I am happy to talk to him at some length outside the debate, because I am committed to the issue and will be interested to hear his point of view.

It seems to me that one good way in which the assets in question can be used, instead of lowering the levy, is to put them into a pool that prosecutors can use in future. That would help to pump up what we are doing. That seems to be a way forward, and I am putting it before the House today to get some sensible responses.

[Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Emily Thornberry]

Unfortunately I am running out of time, but I would like to hear from the hon. and learned Gentleman briefly.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

The hon. Lady urged us to look to the future. Does she agree that one thing that we need to consider with reasonable urgency is an alteration in how corporate criminal liability is described in law? At the moment, we have the Victorian “directing mind” principle, which is not really appropriate for vast international companies. Does she agree that we need to Americanise the system—

[Helen Goodman]

She’s just said that. If you’d been here, you’d have heard it.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

It is always so lovely to hear the hon. Lady, but I am actually addressing the shadow Attorney-General.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) responds, I point out again that interventions made by people who have only just arrived in the Chamber, not having been present at any point during the debate, do not show the best courtesy to the House. I hope that all Members will bear that in mind.

[Sir Edward Garnier]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. If I have caused any offence, I apologise. The reason I addressed the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) was that she and I have a joint interest in the matter. I am sure she did not take offence.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Thank you, Sir Edward, but you are continuing the debate. Your point is on the record, but we are now eating into the Minister’s time. I understand that he does not mind, so I call Emily Thornberry to conclude her speech.

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) and appreciate his expertise in the matter, but I actually did say that immediately before he came into the Chamber. I am glad that there is now cross-party agreement, and I urge him to ensure that his party’s Front Benchers adopt my ideas. Now is the time to move on in relation to fraud, and I believe that companies should be held liable for the fraudulent activity of individuals, building on the Bribery Act. That is a way forward, and if we can agree on it, then great—let’s do it.

If the Government are committed to a crackdown on crime, why have they left it to Labour to amend the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill, which will come before the House again on Monday? Why have they not tabled amendments? We understood that the Prime Minister was committed to introducing a crime of reckless management of a financial institution, so why have the Government not tabled such an amendment? Why do we need to do it? It seems odd. We are concerned that, although the Prime Minister is happy to make pledges when everyone is watching, he hopes that when nobody is noticing he can carry on and do nothing.

It seems to us that an offence of reckless banking needs to do more than deliver symbolic sacrifices after the event. We need managers to be held liable if they turn a blind eye to those who are committing crime. They should have a responsibility to monitor what happens. No single person brings a bank to its knees and no single person should be responsible for UBS, Société Générale or Barings, whatever some may want us to believe. There are further people who are also responsible, and we need to ensure that the law allows for other people to be prosecuted. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Government’s record on basic economic crime such as the failure to ensure that people are paid the minimum wage. In the past three years, only two bosses have been prosecuted for that, and workplace inspections have halved in the past 12 months. It seems to us that it is about time the Government started taking seriously economic crime of all types, including people not being paid a basic wage.

16:48

[The Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury (Mr David Gauke)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann) on securing the debate. It has been wide-ranging, but I will focus my remarks, at least to begin with, on the issue that he focused on most, which was company misuse. If I have time, I will address other issues that were raised, such as tax avoidance, although to be fair we had a debate on that a week ago.

I am pleased to address company misuse because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) rightly pointed out, the Prime Minister has demonstrated leadership on this issue on the international stage. The Government are committed to tackling illicit activity and the misuse of corporate vehicles to facilitate such activity, and we are well aware of the impact such things have on the UK and the global economy. Such misuse is made possible because companies can be used to hide who is really in control and who is the beneficial owner. Hidden beneficial ownership to facilitate criminal activity is a long-standing issue, and international standards have proved difficult to implement effectively for many jurisdictions. For that reason, the Prime Minister put tackling that issue at the heart of the UK’s G8 agenda. I am sorry that one or two right hon. and hon. Members have been less than generous in recognising that.

[Stephen Williams (Bristol West) (LD)]

At Lough Erne it was agreed that each of the G8 countries would come forward with a national action plan for implementing the agreements made there, which for the UK will hopefully include the Crown dependencies. Have the Crown dependencies come forward with their draft plans, and do they include commitments to publish registers of beneficial ownership?

[Mr Gauke]

It is perhaps worth saying a word or two about the Crown dependencies because they have received criticism during the course of the debate. There is nothing illegal about an international structure, especially in a globally integrated economy, but what must stop is the use of offshore structures to hide assets and income illegally, and to evade taxes. The overseas territories and Crown dependencies have all committed to automatically sharing information to fight tax evasion, and to producing national action plans to set out how they will improve beneficial ownership transparency. The Crown dependencies have already published their plans, and the overseas territories have committed to do so by the end of the year. This is a significant step forward in transparency, and we will continue to work closely with the overseas territories and Crown dependencies to ensure that the action to which they commit is robust and ensures the effectiveness of their systems. It would be a pity for this debate to give the impression that we do not acknowledge the significant progress made in recent months.

Returning to the G8, there was collective action to improve transparency of beneficial ownership and make it easier for law enforcement and tax administrations to fight company misuse. The G8 have committed to a set of common principles, and each member has committed to publish a national action plan. The US, France, Italy, Japan, Canada and the UK, as well as the Crown dependencies, have published their plans already, and Germany and Russia have committed to do so before the end of the year, along with the overseas territories.

The G8 action plan means a number of things for the UK. First, we will legislate to ensure that all companies know who owns and controls them. Companies will be required to obtain and hold information on their beneficial ownership—a requirement that will make it harder for criminals to hide their identity, and easier for law enforcement bodies to trace company misuse. Secondly, we will require that information to be held centrally at Companies House and made available, at a minimum, to law enforcement and tax authorities. Again, that will enable law enforcement and tax administrations to track down beneficial ownership information much more quickly. It will also help us develop better working relations with our international counterparts, by responding to their requests more quickly during cross-border investigations. To address the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (Tessa Munt), it is important that law enforcement agencies and tax authorities co-operate on such matters.

We will also consider whether that information should be made publicly accessible. Although there would be significant advantages to such an act, such as enabling greater scrutiny of the accuracy of the information and allowing investors and others to understand better with whom they are doing business, there would also be legitimate concerns about individual confidentiality and whether the information would always be used in the right way. The case of companies involved in animal testing raises an interesting point. Hon. Members may be interested to know that we have committed to consult on this issue.

Thirdly, we will be looking at what measures can be taken to mitigate the misuse of nominee—or sham—directors and bearer shares. The fact that both are currently allowed to exist is inconsistent with our desire to know who really owns and controls UK companies, so the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills will be issuing a public discussion paper on these precise issues shortly, setting out a number of options for reform.

I turn now to the issue of Companies House, which was raised by the hon. Member for Bassetlaw. The House will be aware that the core function of Companies House is to receive company information and make it available to the public, and a key part of this is ensuring that accounts and annual returns are delivered for every company. Compliance rates for those documents—97.9% for annual returns and 99% for accounts—are the best they have ever been and are amongst the best in the world, but we will continue to consider additional means to ensure that companies comply with all their statutory filing requirements.

For example, in response to calls for more transparency about the extent of company subsidiaries in tax havens, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has asked Companies House to check the accounts of all FTSE 350 companies for the disclosure of overseas subsidiaries information. Hon. Members may be interested to know that Companies House will publish the findings on this at the end of July.

On HMRC, there are legal remedies to stop taxes being avoided or evaded through dissolving companies without payment that HMRC makes regular use of. As an example, HMRC frequently requests restoration of companies to the register and then liquidates them, an act that allows liquidators to pursue directors for misfeasance and other wrongdoing. As a Government, we have reinvested in HMRC significant sums to deal with tax avoidance as a whole.

We are short of time and I am unable to address issues such as the general anti-abuse rule and the wider issue of tax transparency, but I am grateful for the opportunity to set out the Government’s commitment to dealing with opaque company structures that facilitate financial crime. It is thanks to the Government that this was put on the agenda for the G8 and that countries around the world are setting out action plans to deal with beneficial ownership. It is why there is a much greater exchange of information between jurisdictions now than we have seen before. We have a proud record in this area and I am grateful for the opportunity to make that clear.

16:58

[John Mann]

We have had a useful debate with, I think, 16 contributions, interventions and speeches. I was a little taken aback by the number of plaudits from Government Members, but I will perhaps take up the offer from the hon. Members for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) and for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), who spoke by proxy for other Oxfordshire Government Members. We could perhaps form a little group to take such issues forward: a friendly society, perhaps. We could call it Unite and we could all join.

The responses from those on the Front Benches were different, but there were important points from both. With vast numbers of companies not submitting returns, as they should, to Companies House; with situations such as those at Leeds United and Coventry City football clubs, where people do not who owns them, including those who work at and pay for those clubs; and with the biggest criminal gang in the world laundering vast amounts of money through a British bank, there is clearly a major issue that has not been addressed but needs to be addressed. There are different arguments and ideas on how to take this matter forward. It is important for Parliament to keep it on the agenda and hold the Government to account. I also think—

17:00

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 9(3)).

Business without Debate

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

Sittings in Westminster Hall (e-petitions)

Ordered,

That this House:

(1) notes the recommendations of the Procedure Committee contained in paragraph 7 of its Sixth Report of Session 2012-13, Debates on Government e-Petitions in Westminster Hall (HC 1094), on the extension of the current pilot for debating e-petitions in Westminster Hall and agrees to extend the changes to Standing Orders No. 10, No. 14 and No. 152J to the end of the current Parliament;

(2) approves the recommendation in paragraph 8 of the Report relating to the wording of the motion to be debated and that Standing Order No. 10(5)(a) be amended accordingly as follows:

In line 37, leave out ‘from [petitioners]’.—(Anne Milton.)

Petitions

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

Christians in Pakistan

17:00

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

It is my great privilege to bring before the House a petition from the residents of Nelson, Lancashire and others. It was gathered together by the Nelson Asian Christian Fellowship.

The petition states:

The Petition of residents of Nelson, Lancashire, and others,

Declares that they condemn the attacks that took place in March 2013 that targeted Christians in Lahore, Pakistan, where two churches and 178 homes were burnt, and regrets the actions of the local authorities in the city who failed to protect the buildings from attack.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government of Pakistan to remove any laws that discriminate against minorities, abolish the blasphemy laws, release Asia Bibi, and to provide protection and security when such incidents occur in future.

And the Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.

[P001191]

Hawthorns Skate and BMX Park Desborough, Northamptonshire

17:01

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

I have the great privilege to present a petition signed by 810 of my constituents in support of the Hawthorns skate and BMX park in Desborough in my constituency, which has been collected by Belinda Humfrey, one of my most distinguished constituents, to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled.

The petition states:

The Petition of supporters of the Hawthorns Skate and BMX Park Desborough, Northamptonshire,

Declares that the Petitioners support the campaign to save the Hawthorne Skate and BMX Park in Desborough, Northamptonshire, which is a large park, with ten varied wooden ramps built to national competition standard, which was first established in 1999 and which has since benefitted from National Lottery funding and has been maintained, repaired and rebuilt by the voluntary efforts of the local community; further that it has been used by thousands of local boys and girls, and now faces the threat of closure by Kettering Borough Council, which owns the land on which the park is sited and which wishes to build residential properties on the park site and the eight acres of neighbouring green space, which were established for leisure and sports use in 1974 and which the Petitioners believe are unsuitable for housing development because they are located by a nature reserve.

The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urge the Department of Communities and Local Government to encourage Kettering Borough Council to review the planned closure of the Hawthorns Skate and BMX Park.

And the Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray.

[P001193]

Stafford Hospital

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—(Anne Milton.)

17:04

[Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for this opportunity for a debate on Stafford hospital.

On 31 July, the administrators of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust will present their proposals for the future of health services at Stafford and Cannock hospitals. They, as well as Monitor, to which they report, and the Government, have a tremendous opportunity to show the way forward for the NHS as a whole, which celebrates 65 years this week. This trust special administration is the first under the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and is a chance to show how emergency, acute and maternity services can continue to be provided affordably, locally, safely and to the highest standards. We are also talking about the administration of a trust that has been the subject of intense scrutiny since the revelation of appalling standards of care in some parts of Stafford hospital in the period to 2009. Since then the improvement has been marked, as the Care Quality Commission has evidenced, although there is no complacency about that on our part.

When tens of thousands of people marched through Stafford on 20 April this year to a rally that I had the honour to address, along with the Bishop of Stafford, we were showing just how much we value the services provided at Stafford and Cannock. We were also expressing our concerns about the future—a future that the contingency planning team’s report, which came out earlier this year, said was unlikely to include the provision of most acute, emergency and maternity services in Stafford, even though our maternity services have some of the best outcomes in the country. When the trust special administrators produce their report, I hope they will provide us with complete access to the data on which they worked, as well as the assumptions made—something that did not happen with the contingency planning team.

We were also making it clear that we cannot see how other, neighbouring hospital trusts, which are already under so much pressure, could cope with substantial numbers of additional patients who would have to come for treatment, travelling considerable distances on routes that are not well served by public transport.

[Gavin Williamson (South Staffordshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if we do not keep a strong core of services in Stafford and at Cannock, the consequence for other trusts could be a deterioration in the care they can give patients, which would be highly detrimental for patient care right across Staffordshire?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend. Many people, including those with more experience of these matters than I have, have said the same.

The coincidence of the publication of the Francis report—which was commissioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Mr Lansley), whom I am glad to see in his place—and Monitor’s contingency planning team report into the future of services at Stafford and Cannock was, I have to say, unfortunate. Both organisations were running to independent timetables, but the coincidence gave rise to the incorrect impression that the proposed downgrading of services at Stafford was somehow the direct consequence of the failures in care until 2009. Let us be absolutely clear: it is not. In fact, the financial problems of the trust are long standing. It should never have been granted foundation trust status by Monitor back in 2008.

However, the impression that exposing poor care somehow resulted in threats to services had a double effect. First, blame was completely unjustifiably put on those who spoke out. Secondly, the impression was given that if people speak out in future anywhere else, local services might be at risk. The result is that Stafford has experienced ups and downs in the last few months. They include the wonderful coming together of a community of all ages and a group supporting the services at the hospital working across the political divide. Sadly, however, we have also seen cases of threatening behaviour against Julie Bailey and members of Cure the NHS, who courageously brought the serious problems at Stafford to light. I will not mince my words: it has been heartbreaking to hear people—good people, with the welfare of the community at heart—on opposite sides of an argument that should never have happened.

At the same time, hundreds of people in the community have put in a huge amount of time and effort to support Stafford hospital. I want to mention some by name. They include Sue Hawkins, Cheryl Porter, Karen Howell, Brian Henderson, Diana Smith, James Cantrill, Chris Thomas, James Nixon, Councillors Mike Heenan, Rowan Draper and Ann Edgeller, and Ken Lownds—who has put in a huge amount of expert work—together with my hon. Friends the Members for Stone (Mr Cash), for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) and for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson).

But I wish to focus on the future, and I am going to concentrate on Stafford hospital although Cannock, too, is vital. Stafford is one of the many small district general hospitals up and down the country that play a vital part in our emergency and acute infrastructure. The number of acute beds has fallen substantially in the past 20 years, including in Staffordshire. The new PFI-funded hospital that opened recently in Stoke has 250 fewer beds than its predecessor, although it is none the less a wonderful hospital. We all welcome the fact that the length of hospital stays has fallen sharply, to an average of less than four days, but a report from the Royal College of Physicians published last year pointed out that there is little room for further reduction. Indeed, as the population begins to age, the average length of stay might start to creep up again.

The only way to manage acute beds, even at the current capacity, is to ensure that people do not have to be admitted in the first place. I am sure that we all want to see that happen, but it will depend on expanded community provision and the better integration of health and social care. That will happen, but it is not happening yet. Even when it does, my firm belief is that although it might halt the increase in demand for acute services, it will not reduce it at this time of a rising and ageing population. The Government are listening to experts who say that we need substantially increased rail capacity by 2035, so I am sure that they will also listen to the experts who say that we cannot cut any further the local and regional capacity for emergency, acute and maternity care. I say to Monitor and to the Government that Stafford is ready to be a national leader in such integration, with patients and the provision of the highest quality of care put first. However, that demands time and co-operation.

The first element of co-operation involves a larger acute trust. In the case of Stafford, the obvious partner is the University Hospital of North Staffordshire in Stoke. Working with UHNS as one team will bring advantages to both hospitals and both communities. For Stafford, the chance to become part of a university hospital will be an exciting prospect. We already welcome third, fourth and fifth-year medical students from Keele university medical school, and they report that they value the experience of working in a busy district general hospital. For the clinical staff at Stafford and at Stoke, the chance to work as a much bigger team across two sites would bring greater opportunities for them to develop their skills and experience. Frankly, for Stafford, it would also ensure that there was much less chance of a return to the complacent culture of the past that the Francis report identified as a major problem in parts of the hospital. For Stoke, which is already under considerable pressure as a result of the reduction in beds and has had to reopen up to 100 old ones, coming together with Stafford would offer welcome additional capacity. It would also create a larger catchment area, which would make some specialties that are currently marginal at Stoke much more viable.

But this would not be easy, as UHNS also has a substantial deficit and a PFI cost that is frankly unsustainable. I urge the Government to do everything within their power to cut the cost of UHNS’s PFI so that the 750,000 and more people who would rely on a combined major acute trust—whether in Stoke, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Leek Stafford, Cannock or further afield—can continue to have access to services delivered as locally as possible.

[Mr Aidan Burley (Cannock Chase) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this timely debate as we await the final report from Monitor at the end of this month. We must oppose any serious downgrading of Stafford hospital, but the other hospital that was poorly managed by the former Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was Cannock Chase hospital, which has been mismanaged to the point that 50% of its hospital buildings are currently lying empty. There is therefore a threat to its future. Does my hon. Friend agree that any solution provided in the report at the end of the month must involve Cannock hospital being fully utilised, and Stafford hospital not being downgraded?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I entirely agree with my hon. Friend, and I congratulate him on the huge amount of work that he has put into ensuring that Cannock Chase hospital can be better utilised.

The second part of co-operation involves community services. Instead of seeing acute hospitals as buildings into which people disappear and then re-emerge at some point, let us make them a full partner in community services. In fact, they should be a hub for those services. Stafford, Stoke and Cannock can be groundbreakers in this, and set an example to the rest of the country. In Stafford, we long for the chance to show the country that we provide the highest standards of care, and that we will never again let patients be treated in the shocking way that many experienced in the past.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and I commend him for bringing this issue to the Floor of the House. Does he agree that we have a national health service, and that any loss of services at Stafford could send out ripples that would affect services at Burton-on-Trent—also in Staffordshire, and also a hospital under some financial pressure that services a large proportion of the medical needs of my constituents in North West Leicestershire?

[Jeremy Lefroy]

As usual, my hon. Friend makes a powerful point—that this debate is not just about a relatively small district general hospital, because it will have ripple effects. We have a pretty efficient national health service, but it does run on tight margins, so that if we take one acute hospital out, it could have effects right across the whole region. Local clinical commissioning groups have a vital part to play, and I want to pay tribute to the good work they are doing in developing community services in Stafford.

The third element of co-operation comes from Monitor itself. Under the Health and Social Care Act 2012, Monitor now has responsibility for setting tariffs, including those for emergency and acute services. It would be rather strange if Monitor were to continue the programme introduced in 2009 of constant 4% year-on-year real cuts in tariffs, and then be forced to pick up the pieces of acute foundation trusts around the country that fall into deficit as a result of the tariff cuts it has made. Monitor has the chance to challenge the assumption that acute services can continue to squeeze out annual efficiencies—in some cases, and not just in Stafford—of up to 7% a year, while elective services enjoy a relative feast.

Monitor has the opportunity to ensure that the necessary changes to the provision of acute services are done in such a way that will allow acute services to continue to be provided locally. Monitor itself could become an excellent example of joined-up government, and in doing so carry out its legal requirement under section 62 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to promote the

“provision of health care services which…is economic, efficient and effective, and…maintains or improves the quality of the services.”

Finally, the national Government have a vital role to play in co-operation.

[Joan Walley (Stoke-on-Trent North) (Lab)]

I am most apologetic about arriving late to this debate and not having the opportunity to hear the opening part of the hon. Gentleman’s speech. To find a long-term solution for health care in Mid Staffordshire and in North Staffordshire, it is vital that the Minister refers in his reply to the best way of ensuring that the emergency services and all the other services that people want can be retained. That can be achieved only if we have a proper collaboration between the University hospital of North Staffordshire, which must be at the front of—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Had the hon. Lady been here from the beginning, she would have heard what the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) said about that. Her intervention was rather long, and we are running out of time.

[Jeremy Lefroy]

I would like to place on record my thanks to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) for her co-operation on this issue. She has really been of great help.

As I was saying, the national Government have a vital role to play in co-operation. Well distributed emergency and acute care is part of our national health infrastructure; it cannot be left entirely to local or even regional bodies to determine what is provided. My constituency and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Stone, for Cannock Chase and for South Staffordshire host the M6, the M6 toll road and both routes of the west coast main line and are also scheduled to host HS2. Stafford’s critical care unit provides a value supplement to the larger ones in Stoke, Wolverhampton and Walsall, in case they are under great pressure. There is a strong argument for such vital infrastructure to be funded nationally rather than being dependent on local CCGs, which, in the case of those in South Staffordshire, the Government have recognised receive considerably less than their fair funding share.

The administration of Mid Staffordshire is a great chance for Monitor, through the administrators, to show that it is listening to and acting on the concerns of my constituents about the need for vital emergency, acute and maternity services to remain at Stafford. This provides, too, an excellent opportunity for the Government to show first how they have responded to the Francis report by putting patients first, and secondly how the 2012 Act is not, as some would have it, about fragmentation and privatisation, but about co-operation and quality of care for the patients who must be at the heart of the NHS.

17:19

[Mr William Cash (Stone) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) for his tireless work in relation to Stafford hospital. I myself campaigned vigorously and successfully for a public inquiry, and was able to give evidence to it. However, the Government have still not arranged a debate on the Francis report, although it was published many months ago, in February. That is completely unacceptable. I know that the Secretary of State for Health wants a debate, so, for heavens sake, will the Government get on with it? Will they have their discussions, so that we can debate the matter and establish the root causes of what went wrong?

If the discussions do not produce the results which, as my hon. Friend said, are absolutely necessary, the national health service itself will not be able to live up to what people have claimed that it can produce. It could stand or fall on the basis of the results of those discussions. As we know from the media, many people are questioning the workings of the national health service, and with some justification. If the Government get this right, the health service as a whole will benefit enormously. I urge them to act.

Let me also say that the Prime Minister himself has expressed his concern about the treatment given to Julie Bailey, and we are following that up with the police.

Finally, I ask the Government and the Minister to make certain that Stafford hospital is given an opportunity not only to prove itself, but to prove that the national health service can work properly.

17:21

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (Dr Daniel Poulter)]

It is a great pleasure to reply to the debate. Let me begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), and expressing my great admiration for the work that he has done so tirelessly during his time in the House. He has been a tremendous advocate for all his constituents, for the hard-working staff at the trust who are doing their best in very difficult circumstances, for all the people who have rightly spoken out about earlier problems at the trust, and for the patients. He is an example to us all of what a hard-working and dedicated constituency Member should be.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash), who has been raising this matter tirelessly for many years. It is a tribute to the efforts of both my hon. Friends that we have got to where we are today.

I can reassure my hon. Friend the Member for Stone that the findings of the Mid Staffordshire inquiry are at the forefront of the Government’s mind. As he will recall, our response to the Francis report set in train a number of important pieces of work. First, we asked Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of NHS England, to look into 14 hospitals where there had been two years of higher than standardised mortality ratio indicators. That work is now reaching fruition. Following a report as damning as the Francis report, which looked into the culture of the NHS, we thought it right to investigate other hospitals that could give rise to concern, and we now think it right to examine the findings of Sir Bruce Keogh’s report before we report back to the House. We also set in train Camilla Cavendish’s review of nursing and Don Berwick’s inquiry into a minimum-harm and no-harm culture in the NHS. All those inquiries have formed part of our response to the Francis inquiry, and they have all been independent of Government. We shall have the reports in the next few weeks, and we shall then be able to arrange the more considered debate on the Floor of the House for which my hon. Friend has rightly called.

My hon. Friend the Member for Stafford was right to highlight the fact that the health care challenges in more rural areas, where travelling distances are longer, are by definition different from the health care challenges in urban areas. He was also right to highlight the fact that, throughout the NHS, in Stafford and elsewhere, we face the challenge, in both human and financial terms, of better looking after an ageing population and better providing dignity in elderly care.

My hon. Friend was right to highlight the fact that we need to support people such as Julie Bailey, who was treated appallingly in the light of her great courage and conviction. We must support people inside and outside the NHS who have the courage to speak up when there are concerns. We have made that clear in our initial response to the Francis inquiry report. That is why we have set up a whistleblowing hotline and are tackling the cultural issues in the NHS. We will support staff who want to raise concerns, so they can do so free of fear and intimidation. That is absolutely the right thing to do.

It is admirable that local people have continued to come out in full support of their hospital through the Support Stafford Hospital campaign. That was demonstrated by the 50,000 people who marched through Stafford with my hon. Friend in April and by other local events such as the Night of Light event in May. I am sure that we all agree that it is vital that the trust special administrator, currently in place at the trust, develops the right proposals for the future of services at the hospital to provide high-quality, affordable and sustainable services. I will return to that later.

The NHS is about to celebrate its 65th anniversary and its 65th year has perhaps been its most challenging. In that year, we have perhaps questioned some of the things that we held dear. I work in the NHS, I believe in it and I believe that our NHS should be and is one of the very best health services in the world, but when things have gone so badly wrong it is right that we learn lessons from what has happened, that we ensure that we put them right and that we support staff when they raise concerns. It is right that we drill into how to ensure that we listen to staff in learning how to put things right in local hospitals. We must also ensure that we create a culture in which trust managers always listen to what front-line staff tell them. In my experience, when things go wrong in front-line patient care, it is often because there is a disconnect between management and front-line staff. That is why the Government, through the Health and Social Care Act 2012, are embedding in the NHS a culture of clinical leadership, which will benefit patients massively.

On the future of Stafford hospital and the issues raised in the debate, the events that took place led Monitor to intervene and, over the past few years, there has been a whole health economy approach to improving services at the trust. That has led us to where we are today. Monitor, as the regulator of foundation trusts, appointed a TSA at the trust in April 2013 to determine the future provision of services at the trust. As we know, that process is ongoing.

I should be clear that, while the TSA is developing its proposals, I cannot discuss that in much detail. Nor is it known what the TSA is likely to propose. It is right that that process is free of political interference. However, what I would expect, and I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree, is that the TSA fully engages with key stakeholders during that process, including clinical commissioning groups, local health care providers, local authorities and local MPs, which I have been assured is the case. The TSA is legally bound to consult on its proposals and I would expect that any proposals meet the four tests for any service change and reconfiguration, which were set by the former Secretary of State for Health, now the Leader of the House of Commons.

[Joan Walley]

Can the Minister assure me that, following publication of the report by the trust special administrator, as well as the people and communities in Stafford, the people and communities in North Staffordshire will be consulted? There are wider concerns about how any further collaboration will affect health care, which has to be improved in North Staffordshire as well as in Stafford.

[Dr Poulter]

I thank the hon. Lady for her question. As I highlighted earlier, it is absolutely right that the TSA will look at the whole health and care sector in Staffordshire, and of course the implications of any potential change for neighbouring hospitals. That is implicit in the work that the TSA is doing. This is, of course, not an issue I can dictate from the Dispatch Box or the Secretary of State determines. It is for the TSA to decide what its own work is, and it is important that that is done without political interference, so the right decision for local patients in Stafford and surrounding areas can be reached. I am sure the hon. Lady will agree about that.

I appreciate the concerns of my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford that acute services should remain at Stafford hospital. However, the TSA is independent of Monitor and therefore it would not be appropriate for Monitor—or, indeed, Ministers or the Department of Health—to seek to influence this process. My hon. Friend is aware that, at the request of the TSA, Monitor granted an extension to the period in which it can develop its proposals and the consultation period. I understand that the TSA is expected to consult on its proposals between August and October 2013, and I am sure my hon. Friend and his constituents will play an active role in that, and that the views expressed in the House today will be listened to as a part of the deliberations of the TSA and in the consultation process that follows.

I appreciate my hon. Friend and his constituents will experience uncertainty while the TSA develops its proposals. However, the TSA is engaging widely with the broader health economy as these proposals are developed and I understand that includes speaking with my hon. Friend and the Stafford Hospital Working Group. I would, therefore, encourage my hon. Friend to continue this dialogue with the TSA to ensure that his views and those of his constituents are fully taken into account as proposals for the future of Stafford hospital emerge.

I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend and my hon. Friend the Member for Stone, because if it were not for their work, we would not be where we are today and the people of Stafford and Staffordshire would be much more poorly represented. Their record speaks for itself and they have our full support in the work they are doing as advocates for their constituents. I look forward to continuing to support them in my role as a Minister, and the Government stand ready to support Stafford hospital.

Question put and agreed to.

17:32

House adjourned.