Cass Review

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Kirsten Oswald

Monday 15th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the SNP spokesperson.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I am grateful for advance sight of the statement.

Nobody’s identity should be up for debate, and nor should it be used as a political football. Dr Cass said in her report:

“Polarisation and stifling of debate do nothing to help the young people caught in the middle of a stormy social discourse, and in the long run will also hamper the research that is essential to finding the best way of supporting them to thrive.”

That polarisation is the last thing needed by young people in accessing care, their families and the NHS staff working hard to care for them. Does the Secretary of State agree that we must all remain respectful at all times when discussing these important issues, and that decisions on this and any other type of treatment should rightly be made by clinicians, not politicians?

Dr Cass explicitly makes the point that her report is not about questioning trans identities or rolling back access to healthcare for young trans people. Indeed, supporting and improving the gender identity healthcare system for all, including children and young people, is what we should be focused on. So can the Secretary of State confirm today whether any additional funding will be made available to ensure that young trans people can access the quality healthcare they need and deserve?

Finally, on conversion practices, the Government Equalities Office said last month in an answer to a written question:

“The Government expects to deliver a draft Bill that takes account of the independent Cass review”.

Can the Secretary of State provide an update on what conversations she has had with Cabinet colleagues on how the Cass review will influence the UK Government’s legislative proposals on banning conversion practices, and when can we expect them to be published?

[Victoria Atkins]

I encourage both the Scottish National party in Scotland and Labour in Wales—health is devolved in those countries, of course—to respond as quickly as possible to the findings of the review. The hon. Lady asks whether it is Barnett-ised. For these purposes, our work to ensure that the clinics meet the needs of our population in England is not additional money. We are re-prioritising within NHS budgets to ensure that the services are spread across the country. I encourage the Scottish nationalists to prioritise the needs of their children and young people in the same way.

I would also gently make the point that, when it comes to the atmosphere of this debate, I do not believe it has been helped by the SNP’s highly controversial Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021. I note, for example, the behaviour and engagement on Twitter of very high-profile people in Scotland, and the impact that it has had when people have dared to name activists in this arena. I would also ask the Scottish Labour party to explain why it helped the SNP to pass that Act, because to me this seems to be all about the atmosphere.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Kirsten Oswald

Tuesday 5th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

Not only am I delighted to accept my hon. Friend’s kind invitation, but I am also extremely grateful for her work in that area. Of course, we think that community diagnostic centres are an important and exciting part of healthcare in this country. We have 136 centres operational at the moment, and we know that they have provided 5 million additional tests since July 2021. That is the future and we very much support it.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

We know that socioeconomic inequalities drive health inequalities and that poverty increases adverse health effects. Research by the Trussell Trust shows that one in seven people faces hunger across the UK because they simply do not have enough money. Will the Secretary of State raise with her Cabinet colleagues the Trussell Trust joint campaign with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation calling for an essentials guarantee in universal credit to ensure that the basic rate at least covers life’s essentials so as to ensure that people can afford essentials such as food and heating and to mitigate against health inequalities?

[Victoria Atkins]

Of course, conversations continue between Ministers across Government in terms of helping not just with health inequalities but with inequality of opportunity. That is why I very much hope that the hon. Lady and her colleagues will welcome the thoughtful focus that both the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions have put into the back to work plan. We know that getting people into work can have enormous benefits, not just financially but, importantly, for their wellbeing. The idea behind the back to work plan is that we do it by working with people to draw out their full potential and help them to lead healthy lives.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Kirsten Oswald

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Victoria Atkins)]

The UK has grown faster than France and at a similar rate to Germany since leaving the single market. It remains challenging to separate the effects of Brexit and wider global trends on the UK economy, such as the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, adding pressures to trade, prices and the wider economy. We continue to support businesses trading with the EU and help them to seize new opportunities with fast-growing economies around the world, including through our free trade agreement negotiations.

[Kirsten Oswald]

Happy Europe Day, Mr Speaker. In recent months, we have seen tech companies attack Brexit. The world-leading chip company Arm opted to float stock only in the US because of how bad a place the UK is to do business, so we have culture, tourism, the NHS and now tech all suffering because of Brexit. How grateful does the Minister feel that the Leader of the Opposition has dropped his and his party’s principles and are supporting this costly Brexit?

[Victoria Atkins]

Crikey, I am going to leave it to the Leader of the Opposition to flip-flop his way through that particular policy. What I can tell the hon. Lady is that we are the best place in Europe to invest in tech. We are only the third economy in the world with a $1 trillion tech sector; we are ranked as the world’s fourth most innovative economy; and we have created more unicorns than France and Germany combined.

Authorised Push Payment Fraud

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Kirsten Oswald

Wednesday 1st March 2023 Westminster Hall

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Victoria Atkins)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I commend the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) for securing this debate, which addresses an issue that she clearly cares about deeply. I know from my own constituency and from conversations with colleagues across the House that it is, sadly, one that we see across the country, which is why the Government also care deeply about it. It is a growing issue and demands urgent intervention.

As the hon. Lady set out articulately, authorised push payment scams are becoming increasingly sophisticated and often target the most vulnerable in our society. Because they are so sophisticated, they are also able to target professionals, businesses and so on—people who would otherwise consider themselves to be alive to these sorts of risks. It is a very clever form of fraud.

Under the European regulatory system that we have inherited, there is no statutory or regulatory requirement for banks to reimburse the victims of these scams. Although the creation of a voluntary reimbursement code has improved matters, reimbursement for victims has, as the hon. Lady set out, been inconsistent across banks and for victims, and only about half the stolen money is reimbursed. As a result, many victims are left facing significant losses; in the worst cases, they can lose their life savings. From the hon. Lady’s descriptions, we know the impacts that that can have on people and businesses. We are acutely aware of the impact of this type of fraud, so we are determined to help victims and to crack down on these scams and the impact that these fraudsters have on people and businesses.

Front and centre of those efforts is our action on victim reimbursement. As part of the Financial Services and Markets Bill, we are introducing world-leading legislation to protect people as a matter of urgency. Once passed, the Bill will remove legal barriers in retained EU law that currently prevent regulatory action on reimbursement by the Payment Systems Regulator. That will enable the regulator to mandate reimbursement for any payment system under its supervision. However, the legislation goes even further: it will also place a specific duty on the regulator to implement a reimbursement mandate for the faster payments system within six months. I hope that the hon. Lady and other hon. Members will be assured that there will be swift regulatory action once the Bill receives Royal Assent.

This issue does not just require timely action; it also demands effective action. We are confident that the regulator has the appropriate objectives, expertise and powers to design the details of mandatory reimbursement in a way that ensures strong and consistent protections for victims. In its recent consultation on the matter, it stated its intention to require firms to fully reimburse victims of all APP fraud occurring through faster payments, with very limited exceptions. That would ensure that victims are reimbursed in the vast majority of cases and at far higher rates than under the existing voluntary reimbursement codes.

[Kirsten Oswald]

I hear what the Minister says. What does she think about the people I described in my contribution, who will not be covered by the measures she outlined?

[Victoria Atkins]

I was going to attempt to answer the question posed by the hon. Lady later, but I will answer it now. Regarding current victims, the legislation is not retrospective—she will know that it is very rare for this place to pass retrospective legislation—but we expect banks to honour past voluntary commitments. That may well be something that the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, who has primary responsibility for this area, has put his mind to. I will ask him to write to her with his thoughts on it.

Given that the hon. Lady has intervened on me, I will respond to the interesting points she raised about social media and tech companies. I will do the same as on the previous point, and ask the Economic Secretary to the Treasury to write to her. From my own portfolio, I know some of the challenges with the use of social media when it comes, for example, to repayment agents who are not behaving as they should. As the hon. Lady says, the ability of fraudsters to present themselves as legitimate, by stealing people’s business logos or details, is highly sophisticated. It requires a joined-up reaction from across Government, law enforcement and so on.

That brings me to what we are doing across Government. Although this is an insidious form of fraud, it is not the only one our constituents face. We will therefore shortly publish a new, broad-based fraud strategy, which will detail how we will prevent fraud, so that people do not lose their life savings and money in the way the hon. Lady set out and we can crack down on these gangs.

In the meantime, the Treasury has worked diligently with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator on the roll-out of fraud prevention measures such as confirmation of payee, which the hon. Lady referred to, which can help and has been designed to stop some forms of APP fraud and accidentally misdirected payments. I know that the hon. Lady and other hon. Members will welcome the regulator’s action to mandate that service for the vast majority of faster payments transactions, and I highlight its intention to achieve near-universal coverage in the near future.

The Treasury continues to assess industry proposals for legislation to enable further delay to high-risk payments. The hon. Lady asked me about internal banking processes, and that is one way that we have looked to address that form of fraud.

The regulator has consulted on further measures to prevent payment fraud, including enhanced information sharing between payment providers so that scammers can be identified and shut down quickly. That is in addition to mandating confirmation of payee, which I have already described. That will enable payers to check that they are, in fact, sending payments to the right person.

In short, we very much understand why the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire has raised this important issue. We share her determination to tackle it, and look forward to working with law enforcement agencies, banks, the regulators and colleagues across the House to ensure that our constituents are protected from this invidious form of fraud, which I know we all want to see stopped.

Question put and agreed to.

Strategy for Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls

Debate between Victoria Atkins and Kirsten Oswald

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend, and I thank her for sharing her experiences. It is so important to share our experiences if we feel able to do so, because hopefully that will give confidence to younger women in particular, who may be facing these problems too. I also commend her for her campaign to bring about an offence in relation to cyber-flashing. We have said throughout the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that we will await the Law Commission’s findings, and that we will look at them carefully when it has reported. I am delighted to say that it has reported today, and we will look at the findings expeditiously. I very much hope that my hon. Friend’s campaign will come to fruition in due course.

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement. It is welcome to see the UK Government looking further at this issue. These past months, we have had many discussions in this place and more widely on the blight that violence against women and girls is on society, and the lives that it destroys, but this is not a new issue and the statement, welcome though it is, comes with a glaring and inexplicable gap. The UK signed the Istanbul convention almost nine years ago. Five years ago, Dr Eilidh Whiteford, a former SNP MP, brought forward measures obligating the UK to ratify the convention, but despite warm words, the UK Government remain one of the few EU Governments yet to ratify it, despite repeated pleas from these Benches, so the UK is still not legally bound by its provisions. Does this violence against women and girls strategy mean that this issue will finally be addressed and, if so, when? Warm words do not protect women, but ratifying the Istanbul convention would.

I welcome references to measures to increase prosecutions, but that is just spin unless there are also resources to handle that increase. Delays will simply mean more trauma for victims and less likelihood of convictions as existing delays stack up further. I also ask the Minister to clarify what the strategy will do to overcome the failure of the UK Government to improve support for migrant survivors in their Domestic Abuse Act 2021. What specifically will it do for foreign nationals and those with no recourse to public funds because of UK Government policy choices?

I hear what the Minister says on higher education, but we know that because the UK Government have not acted, abuses of non-disclosure agreements to cover up workplace discrimination remain hugely problematic, two years after the Women and Equalities Committee’s inquiry on the issue. What specifically will this strategy do for these women? When will the UK Government bring forward specific steps to deal with this in the employment context, including requiring companies to report on their use of NDAs? These issues could not be more important, and we need to match our words with action in this situation. We need to see action from the UK Government, but I fear that some of the elements of the strategy do not appear to offer the heavy lifting that is required to move far enough forward.

[Victoria Atkins]

May I reassure the hon. Lady? She knows that we have to report to the House each October on our commitments to the Istanbul convention. I am pleased to tell the House that we meet or exceed the expectations of the convention in all but three of the requirements in the convention. Two of the three requirements will be met by the end of this year. We had to pass the extraterritorial jurisdiction measures in the Domestic Abuse Act. That has happened and, with the help of the Scottish Government, they will apply across the United Kingdom. Legislation also needs to be passed in Northern Ireland, and I am told that that will happen by the end of this year. That leaves the support for migrant victims. As the hon. Lady will know, in the Domestic Abuse Act we set out a support for migrant victims scheme, which is due to finish next year, but we take these serious commitments very seriously, unlike other countries. Some other countries do not need to meet the requirements before they ratify, but we do, and I hope and expect, given the commitment in the strategy to ratification, that that is our intention.

We know there are some instances in employment situations where non-disclosure agreements are used legitimately. They must not—I repeat, must not—be used to conceal criminal behaviour, and we want to take this first step with higher education because we are particularly concerned about how some young victims are having to deal with these cases at university.