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Oral Answers to Questions
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)
1. What estimate she has made of changes in the number of Border Force personnel over the course of this Parliament.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
4. What estimate she has made of changes in the number of Border Force personnel over the course of this Parliament.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
I recognise that there is an urgent question on the tragic circumstances of Orlando later, but I am sure that the thoughts and prayers of the whole House are with the victims of this appalling terrorist attack and their families.
Over the course of the financial year, the number of full-time equivalent staff in Border Force is expected to remain flat. Budgets have not been finalised beyond the current financial year, so I am unable to provide an estimate of staffing levels for subsequent years.
Mr Spellar
I thank the Home Secretary for that reply and I endorse her sentiments about the appalling events in Orlando.
What impression of the UK does the right hon. Lady feel people get at our airports when faced with huge immigration queues, yet vast numbers of immigration officers’ desks are unoccupied? Does the Home Office not know what is going on, or does it not care? What is she going to do about it?
Mrs May
I am pleased to say that we have made a significant difference over recent years in how Border Force manages its workforce. When we came into power, we discovered that under the last Labour Government, the workforce schedules did not match the peak requirements of people arriving at the airports. We have changed that, and we have significantly increased the number of e-gates, which means that people do not have to go through the individually manned desks because they can go through the e-gates instead.
Diana Johnson
Ports such as Hull are being targeted by traffickers and illegal immigrants, as was shown in February when 18 illegal immigrants were found on the dockside in Hull. Many staff have contacted me to say that, as a result of the cuts, they are worried because they are unable to provide the level of service that they want to at the border. What extra resources will places such as Hull and other ports around the country get to help them to do the job they want to do?
Mrs May
We are very clear that Border Force has sufficient resources in place to carry out its mandated duties at ports across Humberside and to mount effective operations to identify and intercept smuggled contraband goods and clandestine migrants. What Border Force has done is to ensure that there is a greater flexibility in the workforce, so it can be managed rather better according to risk and need.
Damian Green (Ashford) (Con)
One thing that makes Border Force more effective in protecting the border in Kent is the ability to operate in Calais rather than in Dover as it used to do. Does my right hon. Friend agree that anything that gave the French the temptation to move our border back to Dover would serve to weaken our borders?
Mrs May
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. As not only a former Immigration Minister but a Kent MP, he is aware of the importance of our juxtaposed controls in France. I am very clear that those juxtaposed controls are a significant benefit. They help us to secure our border and we wish them to stay in place.
Martin Vickers (Cleethorpes) (Con)
Following on from the question put by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), I welcome the greater flexibility in Border Force’s approach, but businesses and residents in the Humber region are extremely concerned, following the report recently issued by the National Crime Agency. I recently met the Immigration Minister, who provided some reassurance, but can the Home Secretary give an absolute assurance that additional resources will be put into Humber ports, if required?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend makes an important point and I hope I can reassure him. We have announced that Border Force will be provided with £31 million over the next four years to deploy more staff to undertake counter-smuggling work at ports across the country. This will lead to the deployment of more Border Force staff at maritime ports, including those on Humberside.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
I congratulate the Home Secretary on passing another milestone and becoming the third longest-serving Home Secretary in history. The number three is very important, because it is the number of Border Force vessels available to patrol 7,223 miles of coastland, whereas the Italians have 600. Will she look further at the need to provide more resources? I know she has talked about the £31 million, but at this moment criminal gangs are targeting the English channel and going into small ports with their cargo. May we have action much sooner than in the few years that she mentioned?
Mrs May
I suspect that the right hon. Gentleman may very well be the longest-serving Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee. I apologise for not having looked in the record books yet, but perhaps that fact can enter them now.
In comparing the number of Italian vessels with the number of Border Force vessels, the right hon. Gentleman is not comparing like with like. In Border Force, we have given consideration to the suitability of vessels and what vessels are required, which is why there will be some changes. In the strategic defence and security review that was published last November it was announced that we would seek to ensure that all maritime assets could be deployed most effectively in dealing with risks and threats of this kind.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
Will the Home Secretary publish the internal review by the National Crime Agency which highlighted the weaknesses in patrols at our small ports and marinas? My constituency contains the closest channel port to London. Will the Home Secretary now, as a matter of urgency, tell the House what she will do to reconfigure the way in which Border Force patrols beaches and inlets, particularly those in the south-east of England, which are now very vulnerable to people traffickers coming here directly from the continent?
Mrs May
It is important to bear in mind that dealing with the potential threat of people trying to enter the United Kingdom clandestinely through smaller ports is not just about physical policing of the coastline, but about understanding intelligence, and, in particular, about the work that is being done to counter organised criminal gangs. The National Crime Agency has set up an organised immigration crime taskforce, which is working not just here in the United Kingdom but with its French counterparts and elsewhere on the continent to ensure that we can stop those movements before they reach our shores.
Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)
2. What discussions she has had with charities and non-governmental organisations on conditions in the camps at Calais and Dunkirk.
The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
While the management of the camps is a matter for the French Government, there is close engagement between the United Kingdom and France on all matters relating to the migration situation in Calais. Through the August 2015 joint declaration, the Home Secretary and the French Interior Minister set up a project that is being delivered by the French non-governmental organisation France terre d’asile to identify vulnerable migrants and direct them towards existing protection, support and advice.
Peter Grant
May I associate myself and my colleagues with the Home Secretary’s earlier comments about the dreadful killings in Orlando?
The Red Cross has issued the following recommendation:
“The UK Government should be proactive in identifying unaccompanied minors with a UK connection and help guide them through the process of finding protection in the UK”.
What exactly are the Government doing to comply with that, and what have the results been so far?
James Brokenshire
As I have said, France terre d’asile, to which the United Kingdom Government is giving financial support, is doing precisely that. It is going into the camps to identify young people and to ensure that we have a good understanding of the work that is being done there. Separately, our own advisers are going into the camps to provide appropriate advice. What is of key importance, however, is getting those young people into the French asylum system.
Keir Starmer (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
On behalf of Labour Members, may I echo the Home Secretary’s comments about Orlando?
Research published this week by UNICEF shows that children in refugee camps in Calais and Dunkirk are experiencing violence, sexual exploitation and abuse on a daily basis. Clearly, for those who are entitled to be reunified with their families, speed is of the essence, but UNICEF estimates that, at the current rate, it could take up to a year to process the children who are already in Calais and Dunkirk and who have a legal right to be reunited with their relations in the United Kingdom. What steps are the Government taking to address that, and can the Minister tell me how many Home Office staff are currently based in France and working to speed up the process?
James Brokenshire
I entirely agree with the hon. and learned Gentleman about the need to ensure that those cases are processed as quickly as possible. The most effective way to do that is to provide teams that link up with the best expertise on both sides of the channel, and that is exactly what we have done with the French authorities. The process will not take as long as he suggested. We are seeing cases being processed in a matter of weeks, which is precisely what we want.
Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)
3. What steps she is taking to ensure that illegal migrants cannot profit from working in the UK.
The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
The Government are committed to tackling illegal working. The Immigration Act 2016 makes illegal working a criminal offence in its own right, which ensures that wages paid to illegal migrants can be seized as the proceeds of crime, and assets may be confiscated on conviction. The Government are prioritising the implementation of that provision, which will take place on 12 July.
Jack Lopresti
Does my right hon. Friend consider that tackling illegal working has been made easier or harder by the 2014 judgment of the European Court, which forbids the United Kingdom from requiring migrants to have documentation issued by the British Government, although a High Court judge has said that documents issued by other EU member states are systematically forged?
James Brokenshire
I can reassure my hon. Friend on the steps that Border Force takes to check documentation and the fact that under this Government we have 100% checks of all scheduled passengers arriving here precisely to identify where fraudulent documents are used. The most important thing is the join-up across government in identifying where these activities are taking place, which is precisely what is happening.
Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)
On 11 May I wrote to the Home Secretary regarding an illegal worker in the care sector in the UK. I have not received a reply to that letter, but over a month later can the Minister or Home Secretary explain why that illegal worker is still working in the United Kingdom and why anyone seeking to report illegal workers is referred by the Home Office to Crimestoppers rather than the Department dealing with it itself?
James Brokenshire
I can certainly assure the hon. Gentleman of the steps that immigration enforcement is taking in a number of sectors where abuse has been highlighted, including construction and the care sector. I will certainly follow up on the point he raised about the letter he has sent to ensure that it is being appropriately followed up.
Mr Speaker
Mark Garnier. Not here. [Interruption.] I have no idea about the whereabouts of the chappie, but we must move on.
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
6. What steps her Department is taking to accelerate the family reunification process for unaccompanied children in Europe with family in the UK.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Refugees (Richard Harrington)
Ministers and senior officials have formally opened consultations with Greece, Italy and France to identify and transfer to the UK unaccompanied refugee children where it is in their best interests. We are also consulting local authorities, non-governmental organisations and UNHCR. In addition, we have worked with France to improve the operation of the Dublin family reunification process.
Angela Crawley
May I associate myself with the comments of the Home Secretary and other hon. Members on the homophobic, hate-based atrocity that has taken place in Orlando this week?
International Red Cross has stated its concern for children in Dunkirk. It has highlighted the length of the asylum process, the lack of official information and the domination of smugglers as factors that prevent the Dublin system from even getting off the ground. What progress is being made in overcoming these challenges to ensure that children are swiftly reunited with family in the UK?
Richard Harrington
I can assure the hon. Lady that we are doing all we can to get children in the asylum system and, once they are in the system, to make sure the procedure happens as quickly as possible. We are having regular meetings with the relevant NGOs, including quite a big one on Thursday, to find out how we can speed this up. The records show that the system is operating much faster and with many more numbers than in 2015, and we are doing our absolute best to speed it up as much as we can.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
What progress have we made in despatching the 75 experts to Greece, into the hotspots around Europe and also into Calais to ensure that there is robustness and confidence in the process of vulnerable children going into the system and then having their family reunion application processed, rather than going into the hands of the smugglers and traffickers?
Richard Harrington
On the officials due to go out to the hotspots, that is well under way. Many have already gone and a lot more will be going in the next few weeks. My hon. Friend has taken a keen interest in this and I am very pleased that, along with my right hon. Friend the Immigration Minister, we have worked together on many things. We take this very seriously. We are putting a lot of resource into it, and I hope in future to be able to report to the House the positive results that I know my hon. Friend wants.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
How many unaccompanied children from France have been admitted since the Minister took on this role?
Richard Harrington
The most recent figures published are that, I believe, more than 30 children from France have come over here—that is in the period up to April 2016—and I can assure the right hon. Lady that we are expecting this to increase very significantly. But we cannot take these duties lightly. For example, we have carefully read the survey, or census as it calls it, by terre d’asile on most of the Calais camp. It identified about 180 children of which 50 claim family reunion connections with the UK. We are doing everything we can to quantify exactly who are the ones with family reunification links with this country, and doing our best to speed up reunions. However, I am sure the right hon. Lady will agree that we have to take this seriously and make sure that they have proper connections with the UK, and if it is proved that they do, which is a very quick process, that they are brought over here very quickly.
Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)
20. Further to the question from the right hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), does the Minister think that 30 is an adequate number? How quickly does he think he can get the children who have been identified reunited with their families?
Richard Harrington
As I explained to the right hon. Lady, I think the number will be increasing significantly in the future. The most significant thing is the speed this takes once a child claims asylum; it takes a short period— in many cases, it is two weeks—and I am hoping to improve on that.
Maria Caulfield (Lewes) (Con)
8. What steps she is taking to ensure the security of the UK border at Newhaven port.
The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
Border Force officers in Newhaven maintain 100% checks of arriving passengers and undertake intelligence-led activity to tackle both people-based and commodity-based threats. They collaborate effectively with the police, the National Crime Agency and their French counterparts in Dieppe to identify and disrupt attempts to smuggle migrants and commodities into the UK illegally through that port.
Maria Caulfield
I thank the Minister for his reply. I recently met Newhaven Port Authority to discuss the future of the Newhaven ferry, and I was told that last year was its most successful ever, with a 50% increase in passengers and freight. That is welcome, but it is putting extreme pressure on the existing Border Force officials. Will the Minister reassure me that this Government are doing everything they can to ensure that this vital travel and trade link is kept secure?
James Brokenshire
I congratulate the port operators on the work they have done to see the success that my hon. Friend has highlighted, and I am sure her work has given them support, too. I assure her that Border Force’s model operates not only to ensure that we have the necessary core team to tackle business-as-usual activity, but to surge additional resource, in line with intelligence, where we have identified particular threats.
Mr Speaker
Newhaven is a considerable distance from the constituency of the hon. Gentleman, but I am sure his ingenuity will avail him.
Albert Owen
Principal ports—major ferry ports—such as Newhaven and Holyhead in my area are under extreme pressure because Border Force vessels are used in smaller ports in close proximity. May I help the Minister by suggesting that offshore vessels that are not used in the North sea on wind farms could be adapted by Border Force to close these gaps?
James Brokenshire
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his ingenuity in asking the question. The Home Secretary has already responded on the strategic review that is being undertaken, and we are looking at all available Government assets to ensure that we pull them together. The National Maritime Information Centre is designed to assist with that, and we will continue with that work.
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman is going to tell us about Stranraer I dare say.
Richard Arkless
The previous coalition Government removed the Border Force staff from my home port of Stranraer, in my constituency, a number of years ago. Given the increased threats that we face from contraband and puppy smuggling from the rest of the European Union, will the Secretary of State commit to re-examine that decision, so that we can have appropriate defences at our port in Stranraer?
James Brokenshire
The Home Secretary has already indicated that £63 million of additional resource is being made available precisely to focus on smuggling. I am happy to discuss further with the hon. Gentleman any particular issues he may have, but I can assure him about the intelligence-led approach that Border Force takes and how we will deploy resources dynamically to meet any challenges.
Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)
9. What steps she is taking to ensure that police forces implement reforms to increase their effectiveness.
The Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)
We have established and continue to strengthen the system whereby police and crime commissioners provide real local accountability on how chief constables’ forces perform. Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary inspects efficiency and the effectiveness of force activity, and the College of Policing creates an evidence base as to best practice and sets out professional standards.
Marcus Fysh
Will my right hon. Friend please comment on the reform of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, whose processes have caused some issues for officers in my constituency and whose effectiveness is vital for public confidence in the police?
Mike Penning
With the Policing and Crime Bill that is going through the House at the moment, we intend to instil that confidence in the IPCC not just by changing its name, but by strengthening its role. It is absolutely imperative that the public have confidence in the police, as the vast majority of them do a fantastic job.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
Will these reforms help solve unsolved crimes? Nobody who grew up in Dudley will forget the shocking murder of 13-year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater, and no one who watched last night’s documentary on the case will believe that the new evidence it revealed should not be looked at. Will the Minister and the Home Secretary ask the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to review the new evidence to see whether this case can finally be solved and whoever was responsible be brought to justice?
Mike Penning
No one will forget that terrible case, no matter how long ago it was, and our thoughts are still with the parents. It is not the role of the IPCC to instruct the police how to investigate, but we will look at the case and at the ongoing evidence. Perhaps the hon. Gentleman and I could meet to discuss it further.
Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)
Having pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Justin Skrebowski claiming diminished responsibility, Trevor Joyce was sentenced last week to life imprisonment. Justin’s brave widow, Gulsen Alkan, has already met Ministers in her campaign against knife crime, but this case also raises questions about how well mental health services work with the police. What steps are the Government taking to improve that, and will the Minister please meet us once more to prove that lessons can be learned from this case, and that such a horrific case can never happen again?
Mike Penning
I am pleased that the family has the courage to want to campaign on knife crime. It is very important that victims feel that they have the confidence to come forward. I am sure that either the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), or I will be more than happy to meet to discuss this matter. The issue around mental health is at the core of the Bill that is going through the House at the moment. The police must be used as a last resort when it comes to safety. We must make sure that we have a better understanding of mental health issues. Street triage and other such work that is going on at the moment has really helped us with the type of policing that we want to see in the 21st century.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
One thing that makes the police extremely effective is the co-operation that we receive from our European partners. What will the Minister say on 25 June if we are no longer eligible to be in Europol?
Mike Penning
We will work with our European partners and other partners around the world to ensure that our criminal justice system works.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
To be effective, the police need to be trusted by the community that they serve. Truth is built by being honest about the past. Will the Home Secretary finally do the right thing and grant the request of the Orgreave Truth and Justice campaign and nearly 100 cross-party MPs for a full inquiry into what exactly happened on 18 June 32 years ago in the battle of Orgreave?
Mike Penning
The hon. Lady raises a very, very important point, and, as Hillsborough has proved, the Home Secretary has a track record of looking at that sort of thing with a very open mind and in a way that perhaps no Home Secretary has ever done. We will look at Orgreave—indeed we are looking at it at the moment. Confidence in our police can be there only if we have a transparent system for dealing with complaints, and that is exactly what the Bill that is going through the House is all about.
Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)
10. What steps the Government are taking to tackle cybercrime.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
This Government take the threat of cybercrime very seriously, which is why, through the national cyber-security programme, we invested more than £90 million during the previous Parliament to build specialist capabilities and improve the law enforcement response at local, regional and national levels, and we will continue to invest. As my right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced last November, this Government have committed to spending £1.9 billion on cyber-security, which includes tackling cybercrime, over the next five years.
Alberto Costa
Leicestershire police, whose hard-working officers I shadowed on patrol last Friday, provide a range of cybercrime information on their website. Does my hon. Friend agree that effective partnership between the police and other agencies is key to maintaining adequate defences against the growing and real threats that cybercrime poses to our society?
Karen Bradley
My hon. Friend makes an incredibly important point. It is vital that we work with the police and others. Leicestershire police are a shining example of proactive working to ensure that people understand the threats, understand the risks and understand how to stay safe online.
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
Operation Vigo saw British nationals based in Spain who were mugging online British businesses and British pensioners brought to justice. Does the Minister agree that, whether it means combating rapidly growing cybercrime, counter-terrorism, human trafficking or the drugs trade, or ensuring that there is no hiding place in Europe for Europe’s most serious criminals, European collaboration, including with the European arrest warrant, is absolutely key?
Karen Bradley
I do agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is absolutely right. I visited Spain when that operation was tackling the boiler room fraud that was going on in Spain, and only because of that co-operation and bilateral work, using European Union mechanisms, were we able to have such success in that operation.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
There are currently 30 pieces of legislation being used against online crimes. There is clearly a need to consolidate and simplify offences, so that the legislation that is effective is more likely to be used to ensure justice. Will the Minister meet me to discuss this further? Important amendments tabled for debate this afternoon would provide part of the solution. We need far more co-ordination, and I am sure that the Minister would benefit from further discussions with other stakeholders on this issue.
Karen Bradley
My right hon. Friend and I had a conversation about this earlier with reference to the debate that will happen later, and I am more than happy to meet her, with my noble Friend Baroness Shields, who has responsibility for digital security on the internet.
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
According to Childnet, 82% of children between the ages of 13 and 17 have seen hateful things on the internet. In addition, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is saying that children as young as 11 have been victims of revenge porn, so what more can the Minister do, and what assurances can she give to the House that children will always be protected from the worst aspects of the internet?
Karen Bradley
The hon. Gentleman raises an incredibly important issue. The internet provides a fantastic opportunity for us all, and it is amazing that my children can play games with friends hundreds of miles away and across the world. That is an amazing opportunity, but there are risks and threats to being on the internet. That is why we are legislating to insist on age verification for pornographic websites, so that children do not have access to them, and that is why we are working with colleagues across the Government—with the Departments for Education and for Culture, Media and Sport, in particular—to ensure that we do everything we can, working with industry, to keep children safe online.
Kevin Hollinrake (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)
11. What progress the Government are making in tackling extremism and radicalisation.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
We have improved our understanding of extremism and radicalisation. We have built partnerships with over 350 community groups and introduced the Prevent duty, and trained over 450,000 people since 2011. I have excluded over 100 hate preachers and worked with social media providers to remove over 180,000 pieces of terrorism-related content online since 2010.
Kevin Hollinrake
I am grateful to the Home Secretary for that response. Ofsted admitted to me in a letter that it failed properly to inspect the Zakaria Muslim Girls High School in Batley in October 2015, run by a conservative Muslim sect, because the inspector felt unable to speak to pupils or staff—apparently, the inspector was told that it was Eid, when it was not actually Eid—despite the fact that the report commented on the school’s policies on radicalisation. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need to ensure that all Government agencies use every means at their disposal to drive out extremism from every corner of society?
Mrs May
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and the point of putting the Prevent duty on a statutory basis is to ensure that people in the public sector recognise their responsibility in dealing with extremism, in identifying extremism and ensuring that action is taken. We have seen from the Trojan horse example in education how important it is that all those responsible for ensuring that what is happening in schools is right and proper and that British values are being taught take that responsibility seriously and can fulfil it.
Ann Clwyd (Cynon Valley) (Lab)
Will the Secretary of State explain why the Government have placed female genital mutilation, forced marriage and honour-based violence in the UK counter-extremism strategy?
Mrs May
Yes. It is because we have looked at ways in which people can operate within communities to try to create an attitude, particularly towards women in those communities, that effectively treats women as second-class citizens, which is counter to the British values that we have in our society as a whole. We take issues associated with forced marriage, so-called honour-based violence and female genital mutilation extremely seriously, and we have taken action against these issues. We want to see more action being taken in order to bring more prosecutions in these areas, but it is important that we recognise that there are some attitudes that help to create divisions in society. We do not want those divisions; we want to ensure that there is proper respect, regardless of gender, faith, background, class or ethnicity.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
One of the best ways to stop extremism and radicalisation is to keep radicals and extremists out of the country in the first place. Often these people have a criminal record, although they may not necessarily show up on lists of terrorists. Can the Home Secretary confirm that when an EU citizen arrives at one of our borders, their passport is checked against the criminal record check bureau of their own country? Is that happening?
Mrs May
I have made it plain to my hon. Friend on a number of occasions that the information we have at our borders through our membership of Schengen Information System II in the European Union is an important strand of information which enables our border officials and others to make decisions about individuals who are coming across the border. I am sure that, as my hon. Friend says, he does not want people who are preaching extremism to come into the United Kingdom, so I hope that he will congratulate the Government on the fact that as Home Secretary I have excluded more hate preachers from this country than any previous Home Secretary.
Ms Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh (Ochil and South Perthshire) (SNP)
First, may I join others in condemning the despicable acts in Orlando? We should be clear that these are homophobic and criminal acts.
There is ongoing concern that rather than defeating Daesh, the military action in Syria has merely displaced criminals and terrorists to other parts of the region and in many ways encouraged people to engage in acts closer to home. What action has been taken to address these developments? Can we be reassured that action to tackle such behaviour will not wholly eclipse the good efforts of many to prevent extremism at source in this country?
Mrs May
The hon. Lady is right to say that there are many good efforts being made in communities to prevent extremism within communities. The Government want to support that and to give voice to those mainstream voices working to promote the values that we share across our society. In relation to the threat from Daesh and the threat from Islamist terrorism, we of course watch carefully how matters are developing. It is the case that the threat arises from specific groups, from people who are inspired by groups, not just Daesh but al-Qaeda as well, and people who may be inspired online on the internet. That is why it is so important that we deal not just with physical presence, but with the bigoted ideology that underlies the terrorist threat, because it is only by dealing with that ideology that we will be able to deal with the terrorist threat.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
In the light of last week’s conviction of the man who launched an unprovoked knife attack at Leytonstone tube station, and some unverified reports that the Orlando shooter suffered from bipolar disorder, we should be mindful of the Royal United Services Institute’s estimate that in 35% of cases of lone wolf terrorism, there was an indication of a mental health disorder. What action has the Home Secretary taken, and what information and guidance have been issued to GPs and other health professionals on assessing the risks of radicalisation of their patients?
Mrs May
I referred earlier to the Prevent duty, which covers the whole of the public sector. That is why we have been conducting significant training within the public sector, including in the health service, about issues associated with radicalisation. Alongside that, I am sure that, given her question, the hon. Lady will welcome the parity of esteem that the Government are now giving to mental health and physical health inside the NHS.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
12. What steps the Government are taking to reduce the number of violent acid attacks.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
I am very aware of the life-changing impact and distress to victims caused by acid attacks, and I am currently working with retailers to identify the best means of restricting sales of products with a high acidic content.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
Attacks involving acid are, by their very nature, particularly nasty offences. Will the Minister please assure the House that she will work with the Ministry of Justice to ensure not only that adequate resources are made available to tackle the problem, but that deterrent sentences are imposed that properly reflect the life-changing nature of these offences?
Karen Bradley
I assure my hon. Friend that I do work closely with the Ministry of Justice. In fact, my right hon. Friend the Policing Minister, who is also a Justice Minister, is on the Front Bench, and I can assure my hon. Friend that we work very closely on this issue. He is right to say that not only do we want the perpetrators caught and stopped but we want appropriate sentences for this behaviour.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
13. What steps the Government have taken to improve checks at juxtaposed border controls in preparation for the summer.
The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
We have invested tens of millions of pounds to reinforce border security at the juxtaposed ports, including through the installation of security fencing, floodlighting, anti-intrusion detection technology, and additional freight-searching contractors, dogs and security personnel. This has been complemented by increased French police numbers.
Henry Smith
I welcome the UK border enhancements over the coming summer period. Will there be an exchange of information about those leaving the UK as well as those entering it?
James Brokenshire
My hon. Friend makes an important point about the sharing of information and intelligence between the UK and France, and it is an essential point to stress in the context of organised immigration crime that may be taking place across the channel. We have significantly stepped up our activities with the French authorities, and that will have a continuing impact in the fight against those who are simply seeking to traffic people into this country.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
The school summer holidays are also known to some as the “cutting season”, when young girls can be flown from the UK to have female genital mutilation forced on them in other countries. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that Border Force is equipped to stop young girls being flown out of the UK to be mutilated?
James Brokenshire
The hon. Lady makes a compelling and important point—indeed, I understand that it may well be debated in this afternoon’s consideration of the Policing and Crime Bill. I will certainly continue to discuss the issue with colleagues across the Home Office, but I can assure her that steps are being taken to ensure that Border Force officers are trained and that we recognise this really appalling crime to a much greater extent.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
Given England’s inevitable progression towards the Euro 2016 final, will the Minister reassure me that the juxtaposed border controls will have the resources they need to deal with the number of fans who want to go to France, and to work with the French authorities to deal with the morons who have shamed our country over the last week?
James Brokenshire
I am sure that all of us would absolutely condemn the actions of anyone who has gone not to watch football but to become involved in violence. We also want to see all the home nations do well in the days and weeks ahead. However, my hon. Friend makes a point about security, and security is being maintained. We have stepped up security screening externally as well as internally, and the French authorities have maintained security at the juxtaposed ports at this increasingly challenging time for the French Government.
Ian C. Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
Please will the Minister join me, as a Member from Wales, in commending Wales as the first home nation to win its first game at the European championships? Does he believe that the exchange of information with our allies will be improved or worsened by Britain voting to leave the European Union on 23 June?
James Brokenshire
I think I commended all the home nations in my initial contribution. The point the hon. Gentleman makes is important: we benefit from being able to use European systems to screen people at the border and from being able to have Europol working with joint investigation teams and with police and law enforcement agencies across Europe. I absolutely believe that our position in terms of safety and security is strengthened by being part of those mechanisms and being part of the EU.
Callum McCaig (Aberdeen South) (SNP)
14. If she will make an assessment of the potential merits of applying different immigration rules to Scotland and other constituent parts of the UK.
The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
Our immigration system is designed to work for the whole of the United Kingdom. Applying different rules would lead to migrants applying in one part of the UK and then moving to another, as happened—as the Scottish Government’s own research shows—with the “fresh talent” scheme.
Callum McCaig
That is the scheme that the Government abolished. I thank the Minister, but that was an inadequate answer, quite frankly. I draw his attention to the fact that Australia and Canada have introduced substate immigration rules to ensure that migrants are encouraged to live where they are most needed. Will the Government look seriously at how this can be implemented in the UK, as the Justice Secretary has suggested today in Scotland?
James Brokenshire
Experience of the “fresh talent” scheme indicated that only 44% of applicants had remained in Scotland at the end of their two years’ leave on the scheme. We asked the Migration Advisory Committee to look at whether differentials would work in terms of the overall salary thresholds, but it advised that that would not be appropriate and, indeed, that it would lead to the setting of higher salary thresholds in Scotland as contrasted with the rest of the UK, therefore not achieving the objective for which I think the hon. Gentleman is trying to argue.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
Scotland needs different immigration rules because it faces very different demographic challenges from those in London and the south-east, yet the needs of London and the south-east determine British immigration policy. Why will not the Government exclude Scotland from the net migration target and work with the Scottish Government to pursue policies that are tailored for Scotland’s needs?
James Brokenshire
I do not agree with the hon. and learned Lady’s analysis. The shortage occupation list recognises the different skills shortages that may need to be addressed in Scotland. Under the Scotland Act 2016, the Scottish Government have new powers to make Scotland a more attractive place to come to, live in and work in, in order to boost the tax take and grow the population. I encourage the Scottish Government to use those powers.
Joanna Cherry
As the Minister very well knows, immigration is still a reserved matter. I am interested to hear that he accepts the principle that different rules can apply to different parts of the UK by highlighting differences in the shortage occupation list. Having accepted that principle, why will he not work with the Scottish Government to pursue other policies that are designed to meet the specific demographic challenges that Scotland faces?
James Brokenshire
I did not say what the hon. and learned Lady suggested. We always welcome the opportunity to continue discussions with the Scottish Government on these issues, recognising that immigration remains a reserved matter. We will look carefully at the Scottish Affairs Committee’s report and respond to it shortly. We are very clear that there needs to be a policy for immigration across the UK, and that is what this Government will continue to adopt.
Lucy Frazer (South East Cambridgeshire) (Con)
T1. If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
The violence in Marseilles surrounding England’s match against Russia was deeply disturbing. Seven English fans are still in hospital, two with very severe injuries, and our thoughts are with them. The French authorities had to deal with trouble involving England supporters on Thursday, Friday and Saturday around the city, and there were alarming clashes inside the stadium at the end of the match. The French and UEFA will rightly be asking themselves searching questions about how the segregation of fans within the Vélodrome stadium broke down. There will be lessons to be learned surrounding the wider policing operation. I am in no doubt that co-ordinated groups of Russian supporters bear a heavy responsibility for instigating violence.
We must also ensure, however, that we have our own house in order. Some among the England contingent in Marseilles behaved inexcusably. Anyone who has travelled to France to cause trouble has let down their nation and does a disservice to all genuine England fans. In co-operation with the French Government, we are going to do all we can to ensure that such scenes are not repeated. I have spoken to the Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve. Plans are in place to ensure that there are more British police spotters in Lens for the match between England and Wales. We have prevented nearly 1,400 people with a history of football-related violence from travelling, and an extension of the ban on alcohol sales around key matches announced yesterday is a positive step. Above all, I appeal to the English and Welsh fans travelling to Lens this Thursday. UEFA has made it clear that the penalties for bad behaviour for individuals and for the teams they support will be severe. I have every confidence that the fans will respond in the right spirit and we can all get back to enjoying the tournament.
Lucy Frazer
As a former barrister who specialised in insolvency law, I understand the civil remedies available to make recoveries from those involved in fraud. The economic crime prevention group has recovered £1.1 million and led to 10 disqualifications of directors since the insolvency pilot began in 2013. Does the Home Secretary plan to continue the pilot?
Mrs May
My hon. and learned Friend is right to point to the work that has been done so far by the ECPG, which is a joint public and private sector group across various agencies; indeed, the National Crime Agency is one of its sponsors. A report on the insolvency scheme to which she referred is due shortly, and the future of the project is being considered. The outcome of that report will be part of those considerations.
Mr Speaker
I gently remind Front Benchers that we must accommodate Back Benchers. I am not having the time eaten up by Front Benchers.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
The Home Secretary is right: the terrible scenes of violence in Marseille this weekend have soured what should have been a great celebration of football. As ever, the vast majority have been let down by a hard-core minority, and their actions are all the more inexcusable given the serious terror threat hanging over the tournament. Although, as the Home Secretary has said, the England fans are not blameless, it is also the case that they were the subject of extreme provocation and that there were severe failings inside the stadium and concerns about policing. Given that this is a complex matter and that we need to establish all the facts ahead of the England-Wales game on Thursday, will the Home Secretary commit to making a fuller statement at her earliest opportunity, to ensure people’s safety and that there is no repeat?
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman is right: we obviously want to ensure that there are no repeats of the scenes we saw in Marseilles. That is precisely why work is ongoing between the UK Government and the French Government to look at the steps that need to be taken, particularly in Lens, where the England-Wales match will take place, and Lille, where Russia will play very close to that time, and that work will continue.
Andy Burnham
Let me turn to Hillsborough and mention that I wrote to all parties in the House, asking for their support in making it a moment of real change. One of the reasons that the Hillsborough injustice stood for so long was the inadequacy of the original inquest, which imposed the 3.15 pm cut-off and at which families had to scrabble around to raise funds for their own legal representation. The truth is that similar injustices are still happening today. Bereaved families are all too frequently thrown into courtrooms, raw with grief, to face adversarial questioning from highly paid QCs hired by the police and other public bodies. Later today I will put a proposal to this House to create parity of legal funding for families on the simple principle that public money should fund the truth, not the protection of vested interests. Will the Home Secretary say why she is opposing that move and whether she is prepared to work with us to establish that important principle?
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman has rightly raised an issue that has been a matter of significant concern to the families who were victims of the terrible tragedy in Hillsborough. He is right to say that the original inquest system did not serve those families well. I am pleased that my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the former Attorney General, was able to reopen the inquest, with the results and verdicts that we have seen. I have asked Bishop James Jones, who chaired the independent panel that looked into the Hillsborough incident and who has also been chairing the family forums and has been my adviser on this matter, to work with the families, to hear directly from them their experiences. I expect experiences about the inquest process to be part of that, which is why I wish to look at this issue once we have the full picture from the families as a result of the review by Bishop James Jones. The right hon. Gentleman has raised a very important and valid point, but I think that we need to look at the issue in a wider sense and get all the experience from the Hillsborough families before we look at the inquest process.
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
T2. The four agriculture students from Cirencester who were accused of rape prove that one does not have to be a celebrity to suffer the trauma of a case going on in the full glare of publicity. What protection can the Home Secretary give defendants, as is the case with the accuser, so that there is some sort of equality?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend raises a very important point that he has raised with me personally on a number of occasions, and the case to which he refers has brought it into sharp focus. The usual practice is that the police do not identify people before charge. However, we had a long debate on this issue about five years ago and there are cases where the identification of somebody can bring forward other victims and enhance the case against them, so this is not an easy area in which to operate.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
T3. There have been grave reports by asylum seekers detained in immigration removal centres of sexual assault. What risk management measures have been put in place for vulnerable detainees, who may already have histories of trauma but who are detained alongside foreign national offenders who have histories of violence?
The Minister for Immigration (James Brokenshire)
We take our duties in relation to the operation of immigration removal centres extremely seriously. That is why, under the Home Secretary, we engaged in the Shaw review and report on how we can better identify those who are vulnerable. We will implement further changes in the months ahead to ensure that those issues are very much brought to the fore.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
T4. The internet has brought with it great opportunities but also, sadly, a much darker side and threats. What work is being done to ensure that paedophiles who operate anonymously online are brought to justice?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
My hon. Friend raises an incredibly important point. We need to make sure that there is no safe place for paedophiles to operate. I am sure she knows that all 43 forces have signed up to the child abuse image database that this Government introduced and that the Prime Minister instigated. It is really starting to get results in identifying and safeguarding child victims, finding perpetrators and making sure that they can be brought to justice.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
T8. Yesterday saw even more newspaper revelations about serious problems with COMPASS asylum accommodation contracts in Glasgow, yet emails from senior G4S staff and minutes of Home Office meetings suggest that these contracts are to be extended come hell or high water. Will not the Home Office at least have enough respect to wait for the Select Committee on Home Affairs to complete its inquiry before making any such decisions?
James Brokenshire
We are carefully considering the extension of the existing contracts in accordance with their terms. The introduction of the COMPASS contracts has improved the standards of accommodation, but where there are failings we will take action.
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)
T5. Last Monday, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) asked how many EU citizens had been deported during the last four years. Now, as I understand it, the question has been answered and we are told that only 102 EU citizens have been deported. Does the Minister acknowledge that the deportation of such a small number is rather poor?
James Brokenshire
I remind my hon. Friend that the Government have removed more than 30,000 foreign national offenders since 2010. The number of offenders from EU countries who have been removed has more than tripled from 1,000 in 2010-11 to more than 3,400 in 2015-16.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
The Home Secretary will have seen the recent reports that Eliza Manningham-Buller, when she was head of MI5, wrote to the then Prime Minister protesting about MI6 involvement in rendition. This becomes particularly concerning in view of the reasons given by the Crown Prosecution Service last week for declining to prosecute a senior officer of MI6. Will the Home Secretary confirm that that letter was written by Eliza Manningham-Buller, and will she commit to having it put into the public domain?
Kelly Tolhurst (Rochester and Strood) (Con)
T6. I have been contacted by a number of my constituents who have expressed concerns about the balance between privacy and security in the Investigatory Powers Bill. Will the Home Secretary explain how the implementation of the Bill will provide that balance but will also provide essential protections against terrorism?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend is right to mention this very important Bill. The measures in the Bill are essential to enable both law enforcement and our security and intelligence agencies to protect us from not only terrorism but serious and organised crime, paedophiles and others. I assure her that we are putting in place world-leading safeguards and oversight arrangements, which will ensure that the balance between privacy and the need to exercise these powers is properly kept.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mr Speaker
If she can ask her question in one short sentence, I shall call Carol Monaghan.
Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)
Will the Secretary of State work with organisations such as the Red Cross to explore alternative ways of submitting family reunion applications, to avoid dangerous journeys to third-party countries?
Mr Speaker
I am extremely grateful to the Minister. This shows what we can do when we try.
In respectful memory of the victims of the homophobic terrorist slaughter in Orlando, I should like to request of colleagues that at 3.30 we observe one minute’s silence. Thank you.
Mr Speaker
Colleagues and all of those observing our proceedings—thank you for that display of respect.
Orlando Attack: UK Security Measures
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Home Secretary to make a statement on the terrorism threat and on wider security measures in the UK in the light of the horrific attacks on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in Orlando, USA.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
The attacks in Orlando on Saturday night were utterly evil and the Government condemn them completely. At least 49 people were murdered and a further 53 people were injured, many of them seriously. Those people were enjoying a night out when the attacks took place, and our hearts go out to them, their families and their friends. This is the deadliest mass shooting in US history. It was an outrage committed to spread fear and born out of hatred. As President Obama has said, the US authorities are treating it as a terrorist attack and Daesh has claimed responsibility. It is clear that such an attack has its roots in a twisted ideology which counts homophobia as a cornerstone of its warped world view.
This was not just an act of terror, but an act of homophobic hatred and I want to make it clear to all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Britain and around the world that we will not tolerate such bigotry and violence. We will work closely with the United States and we will continue to offer them our assistance and support. We stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies and friends in the global fight against terrorism, fear and hatred. As the investigation into the attack continues, more information will emerge. However, we are not aware of any British nationals being caught up in the events on Saturday night. As should be expected in the light of this attack, UK police forces will be further reviewing plans for large-scale and other public events over the coming days and weeks. The police have not advised any organisers to cancel or postpone any LGBT-related events.
Hon. Members will be aware that since the start of 2015 we have seen 16 terrorist attacks in Europe including those in Brussels and Paris, as well as the atrocity in Tunisia, in which British people have been killed or injured. There have also been many attacks further afield, including in Bangladesh over the weekend. In the last 18 months, the police and security services have disrupted seven terrorist plots to attack the UK. All were either linked to or inspired by Daesh and its propaganda. The threat from international terrorism, set independently of Ministers by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, remains at severe, meaning that an attack is highly likely. In March, the murder of prison officer Adrian Ismay reminded us that the threat from Northern Ireland-related terrorism also remains.
Each time I come before the House following a terrorist attack, I do so in the knowledge that people have died and others are suffering. I know that this House, and people around the world of all faiths and none, will want to join me in condemning this attack. This Government are determined to defeat the insidious ideologies that drive extremists. Let us be clear. There can be no justification for the mindless slaughter of innocent people. There can be no hiding place for those who perpetrate these acts. And there is no doubt that we will fight and that we will prevail against the doctrines of hate and fear that lie behind such attacks.
Stephen Doughty
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question today. I thank the Home Secretary for her statement.
We think we are making progress, and then we are faced with horrors such as this—an unspeakable act of both homophobia and terror, of murder and of hate, and an attack on the LGBT community, who are now mourning their loved ones in Orlando, and on equal love and equality worldwide. Orlando, we stand with you in this House. I stand with you as a gay man, and I know that millions across this country, of all faiths and of none, will do the same.
For all our progress, far too many around this world suffer death and attack every day in the LGBT community. There have been other attacks in the United States, such as the attempted firebombing in Seattle in 2014 or the horrific death of Matthew Shepard. Many have been thrown off buildings in Syria, whipped and chemically castrated in Saudi Arabia, tortured in Iran or Cameroon, and attacked in Uganda or Ethiopia and by right-wing death squads in Brazil and Mexico, and across many countries in the middle east and Africa—let alone those denied basic rights in so many other countries, and even still in parts of our own.
While our gut instinct is often, quite frankly, to stand up boldly to the homophobes, the transphobes, the haters and the terrorists—to go out in Pride, to go to our clubs and to stand with our partners—many will, understandably, be worried about our own safety. From the horrific Admiral Duncan attacks to the many reported and unreported hate crimes against LGBT+ people in this country, we all know that it could have been us.
I therefore want ask the Home Secretary three specific questions. She has quite rightly acknowledged that homophobia, transphobia and hate appear to have played a key part in this horrific attack, alongside terrorist motives, so will she look carefully at the threats to our own communities from all sources, not least the increase in hate crimes in this country? In 2014-15, there were 5,597 hate crimes against people because of their sexual orientation and 605 against people because of their transgender status. Will she ask all police forces to work closely with their communities, and especially with Prides, to support community safety—not just at specific events, but in the daily fight against hate crime? Will she outline what steps she will take on a pan-European basis to tackle any current or emerging threats, not least to stop the trafficking of assault weapons or any other weapon we have rightly banned in this country but which, tragically, are available in the United States.
Every bit of hate we chip away and replace with love is helping to change our world for the better, so we must never forget that love wins in the end, even in dark, horrific times. We should go out proud and march in Pride, hold hands with our loved ones, kiss them, stand up against the haters, the killers and the bigots, and never forget the slain of Orlando or so many who have stood up bravely in the cause of equality and love throughout our history.
Mrs May
May I commend the hon. Gentleman for the remarks he has just made? He has spoken movingly on this issue, and I am sure the thoughts he has expressed are shared across the whole of this House. He is right: it is not just a question of standing in this Chamber and making statements; it is a question of how we approach these issues more widely, and of what we do in our day-to-day interactions with fellow citizens and other individuals.
The hon. Gentleman asked me three specific questions. Certainly, we of course look at all sorts of threats that could pose a risk to the lives of, or could endanger, our fellow citizens. In relation to hate crime, he is right that the figures have gone up. Certainly, a lot of that will be from increased reporting, and it is important that people have the confidence to feel able to report these crimes. On the other side of it, he mentioned police forces’ reaction and interaction with groups, and that is important. It is of course important that the police understand the issues and are able to deal with them appropriately when those crimes are reported to them, and I think progress is being made in that area.
Finally, the hon. Gentleman asked me about firearms. We have been working across the European Union on this issue. An enhanced weapons directive was discussed at the Justice and Home Affairs Council on Friday. We have been encouraging and working with Europol in relation to its work on the trafficking of firearms. The National Crime Agency had a very successful case last year involving the interdiction of firearms, and there have been significant sentences off the back of that case. But, of course, we have to do more. It is important that we work co-operatively with others in looking at where firearms might be originating from, and ensuring that law enforcement agencies are taking appropriate action.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
The freedom to be oneself has been hard won in this country over 60 years. As such, freedoms for LGBT people are symbolic of liberty in this country, as indeed is this place, and the armed forces, police services and security services who defend those liberties. Will the Home Secretary ensure that all those symbols of our freedom receive the necessary protection, because undoubtedly they are under threat, as symbols of everything that we have achieved as a country?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. All those right hon. Members and hon. Members across the House who have stood up and proclaimed themselves as gay are an important symbol of freedom. That has been a very important statement for people outside this House, as well. I believe that we have more openly gay MPs in this House than there are in any other legislative Chamber in the world. That is something to be proud of.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
The words of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) were powerful and intensely moving, and will reach well beyond this House. I echo everything that he has just said—and indeed that the Home Secretary has said—in condemning, on behalf of the Opposition, this sickening attack. The grief of the friends and families of those who died will be unbearable, and we send them our deepest sympathy and solidarity at this time.
This was an act of terrorism that targeted the gay community. As such, it brings back memories of the horrific bombing 17 years ago of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, in the heart of London’s gay village. That too targeted innocent people, and today we think of everyone affected by it.
If yesterday’s attack is eventually linked to Daesh, that will raise concerns among the LGBT community here and across the world about their safety. With that in mind, will the Home Secretary assure the House that the police and security services keep the safety of all communities, but the LGBT community in particular, under review? Will she tell us whether she has received any intelligence that something similar might happen here?
Over the weeks ahead, many Pride celebrations are planned across the UK, including large-scale events in London, Brighton and Manchester. People will rightly be concerned about the security of those events. They are planned and staffed by volunteers, and most Pride organisations pay for security themselves from the funds that they raise. Will the Home Secretary ensure that organisers receive updated advice, support and, where necessary, additional security, to provide reassurance that Pride events will be as safe as possible for all those attending this year?
It seems to be a facet of our times that rising hate, discrimination and inflammatory language are re-entering political discourse. Will the Home Secretary say whether she has seen a poster circulated this afternoon by Leave.EU, which sought to use events in Orlando for its own purposes? Will she join me in condemning that highly offensive piece of propaganda?
Terrorists want to divide our communities, and turn one set of people against another. Let everyone in this House say to them today that we will never, ever let them succeed in inciting hatred against the Muslim community or the LGBT community. We celebrate diversity and community in this country. We will not allow the haters and terrorists to foment division. Whatever it takes, we stand resolutely alongside the LGBT community and continue to fight hate and homophobia in all their forms.
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman rightly asked me about the police response. As I indicated in my response to the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), the police’s position at the moment is that they have no plans to cancel or postpone any LGBT events due to take place over the coming days and weeks. They will constantly assess that position, and if they need to give additional advice or take additional action, they will of course do so. Local police forces work very closely with Pride organisers to ensure that there is appropriate and proper security for Pride events.
The right hon. Gentleman also asked about the Leave.EU poster. I was shown a picture of it just before I came into the Chamber. I think it is utterly irresponsible. What took place is a terrible and horrific homophobic terrorist attack; attempts to link it into the issue of membership or otherwise of the European Union should rightly be condemned on all sides of this House.
Mr Nigel Evans (Ribble Valley) (Con)
My stomach turned when I saw the scenes emerging from Orlando, and the brutal slaughter of so many innocent people, and I think I speak for the whole House when I say that today we are all LGBT, irrespective of our sexuality. I am reassured by what the Home Secretary said about future festivities and Gay Pride, whether in London or other parts of the United Kingdom. Gay people need to feel safe when they go out in the evening or on festivities, and like many other MPs, I will be going to Soho later this evening to stand vigil in memory of those who were slaughtered.
The Home Secretary rightly spoke about sending a message throughout the world. A couple of years ago I asked for the Gay Pride flag to be flown above embassies and high commissions during Gay Pride Week, but that did not happen. Will she talk to Cabinet colleagues and the Foreign Secretary to see that that does now happen, so that we can send out a message of support for LGBT people throughout the world?
Mr Speaker
The hon. Gentleman will be reassured to know that the rainbow flag will fly about Portcullis House throughout the appropriate weekend. That was decided some time ago; it is not something that I needed to announce, but it is pertinent to the point he has raised.
Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)
On behalf of the Scottish National party, I extend my heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the dead and to the injured in Orlando, and I condemn this terrible outrage unreservedly. I congratulate the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) on securing this urgent question and on his moving words, and I thank the Home Secretary for acknowledging that these attacks were motivated by homophobia. Does she agree that it is important for everyone to acknowledge that these attacks were motivated by homophobia, both out of respect for the dead and injured, and in recognition of the very real threat of similar attacks on the LGBTI community?
I am proud to be a member of the LGBTI community. In years gone by, and when I came out 30 years ago, we used to be afraid of going into clubs and bars for fear of insults and violence from onlookers. We had hoped that those days were long gone, but this attack shows that there are still those out there who wish to attack our hard-won rights to coexist peacefully. As the Home Secretary will understand, we need to know that the authorities will take particular precautions to protect the LGBTI community from homophobic attacks, especially during the Pride season that is about to start across the United Kingdom. Will she reassure us that those precautions will be taken?
Mrs May
I entirely agree with the hon. and learned Lady, and it is important to recognise the homophobic nature of the attack that took place in Orlando. As I indicated earlier, it is right that the police consider security arrangements for the various Pride events that take place, and they will also assess at local level any other events that take place, or particular venues that are frequented by large numbers of people from the LGBT community. If additional action is necessary, they will of course take it.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
The attacks on Saturday were deplorable. Will my right hon. Friend reassure us that although we must remain alert to such attacks, we must not allow them to alarm us and we must continue with our daily lives? The greatest thing that terrorists are looking for is to unnerve us and to spoil what we take to be our normal routines of life.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we ceased to go about our business in the normal way, and if people from any community felt that they could not carry on living their life as they wished to do so, the terrorists will have won. That is why it is so important to be clear in our condemnation of these attacks, and—as has been shown across the House—clear in our intention to fight against the terrible ideology that is fuelling these attacks and to prevail against it.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
The whole House will want to associate itself with the comments of the Home Secretary and shadow Home Secretary. It is early days but claims have been made that the suspect in this terrible attack had been interviewed three times by the FBI. Does the Home Secretary agree that monitoring suspects is the highest possible priority for our security services but that they cannot do it on their own—they need the support of communities—and therefore any information about people behaving in a way that is not in the norm should be reported to the authorities and carefully monitored? The public might not know whether it is important, but the security services certainly will.
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely correct to say that we need to ensure that information from communities is made available to the authorities, where there are concerns about the behaviour of individuals. As we have seen from attacks in various parts of the world, this is not just about groups of people planning attacks; it can just be about an individual who might show signs, through their behaviour, of a changed attitude and approach. I encourage communities, where they have concerns, to make those views known to the authorities, so that, even if there is nothing of concern, at least it can be looked at and that that can be ensured.
Sir Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton) (Con)
As the first openly gay Conservative MP, may I welcome the absolute and total unanimity of the House in sending a message of support and sympathy to the victims and the people of Orlando? May we hope that America is listening and fully understands the genuine nature of what we are trying to say!
Mrs May
I absolutely commend my right hon. Friend for his remarks. He took an important step many years ago—I remember because I was party chairman at the time. It was a significant step for him, for the Conservative party and for politics in general in the UK. As he says, our thoughts are with the people of Orlando at this time.
Mr Speaker
If memory serves me, it was in July 2002, so the 14th anniversary thereof will soon be upon us.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
The intended targets of this vicious and homophobic attack might have been the LGBT community of Orlando, but we should regard it as an attack on us all. In a free society, when a group is attacked because they are different and a minority, it is an attack on us all, and that is how we should see it. This is a time for mourning, but that time will pass eventually, and when it does, should the opportunity present itself to the Home Secretary, I hope that she will say, as a candid friend to our friends in America, that they really need to look again at the availability of guns in their country.
Mrs May
The right hon. Gentleman is right that this was an attack on the values we all share and an attempt to create division and hatred in society and between communities. We must all resist and fight against that and ensure that communities can come together with one voice and condemn such attacks. I think he will find that many people will be raising the issue of gun control in the United States.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
One of the most poignant comments I have read on the atrocity in Orlando came from the mother of a young man who is currently unaccounted for. She said: “We have relatively few years on this planet. Why do we spend so much time hating each other?” This atrocity has a terrorist link, but so many attacks on us do not. Will the Home Secretary reassure me that she will work with colleagues in Government to do everything possible across government to stamp out homophobia and transphobia through things such as school anti-bullying programmes? It is so important.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend is absolutely right: this issue has a wider resonance, and we must do everything we can. Much has already been done but I suggest that we will never be able to say that we have done all the work we need to. Throughout the education system and in our attitudes and approaches as a Government and as politicians, we must show that we are all one community and that we must resist those who attempt to divide us and sow hatred, of whatever sort, in our communities.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I want to express the sympathies of the Democratic Unionist party; our thoughts and prayers are very much with those affected by this dreadful atrocity. I commend the work of those on the ground who offered first aid and tried to prevent more deaths. The FBI had marked Omar Mateen as presenting a low security risk, and did not know that he would carry out unspeakable murder. This is the latest example of people who are only noted on the radar but then go on to commit murder or join Daesh. Those known to the security services, but who are seen as a low-security risk, are, more than ever, resorting to wicked and evil criminality. Is it now time to review the security system, especially with respect to those who feature on the so-called lower levels?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman is right. The job done by the security services, day in and day out, is a difficult and complex one. By definition, they have to decide who presents the greatest risk of taking action, but the task is made more difficult by the fact that people simply sitting at home, looking at things on the internet, can then be inspired to go out and commit terrible atrocities. It is a job that our security services and law enforcement agencies do very well every day of the week. They keep us safe, and I think Members should thank them and show our gratitude to them for all they do.
Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)
I am sure the Home Secretary will agree that using this incident as means of debating border controls ignores the fact that this was an attack in the United States by a US citizen who was able to give vent to his murderous hatred because of the availability of firearms that results from the lack of US gun control. Does she agree that the key is to tackle the sort of ignorance that drives the prejudice that turns into hatred, and that our Government will continue to do that in this country?
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
On gun controls, are we not fortunate that legislation was brought in during the closing years of the last century, which has, to say the least, been very good for the country? I am glad that the Home Secretary mentioned Bangladesh. Is it not the case that in recent weeks, gays, atheists and free thinkers have all been murdered? While deploring the terrible atrocity that happened in the US on Sunday, we should not forget for a moment what has been happening in Bangladesh and other places—people murdered by Islamists just because those Islamists disagree with their sexuality or lack of religion, as the case may be.
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We have some of the toughest, if not the toughest, gun controls in the world. Those, of course, were born out of tragedy here in the United Kingdom. The hon. Gentleman is also right that although the size of the attack in Orlando was significant—the biggest loss of life in a mass shooting in the US—atrocities are also being undertaken elsewhere in the world in the name of this terrible warped Islamist ideology. That is why it is so important for us to defeat that ideology.
Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)
Homophobia can, sadly, be part of the daily reality for LGBT people at home and abroad. What makes this attack particularly upsetting is that it took place in a gay club—a place where LGBT people can feel safe to love the person they love quite publicly. As we approach Pride season, what reassurance can the right hon. Lady give my constituents that it is safe to take part in the celebrations of our diverse community? What conversations is she having with the Secretary of State for Education to tackle homophobia in schools and to have comprehensive sex and relationships education that says love is stronger than hate?
Mrs May
I can give the reassurance again that the police will, of course, be making very careful assessments of security issues relating to events in particular, but also venues, for people from the LGBT community. Obviously, if any specific action is necessary, they will take that action.
The Secretary of State for Education was present earlier, and will have heard some of the questions that have been asked. She is also the Minister for Women and Equalities and I know that she takes her responsibility for equalities very seriously. I used to have that responsibility myself, and I can assure the hon. Lady that in considering issues relating to those who wish to divide our communities and sow hatred, we work very closely with the Department for Education.
Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)
May I associate myself with the Home Secretary’s comments and those of other Members? As an out and proud gay woman, I know that the atrocities in Orlando were directed at members of the LGBT community—my community; our communities. This act of clear homophobic hate crime in Orlando must be challenged. It is a stark reminder of the prejudice and discrimination that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people continue to face. It serves to remind us how far we have come, and how far we still have to go. Does the Home Secretary agree that we must make every effort to challenge all forms of homophobic hate crime, and must agree that #loveislove?
Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)
In my constituency, Muslims do not murder gay people; they elect them.
I know that I speak on behalf of all the diverse faith communities in my constituency in expressing my solidarity with the LGBT community in Orlando. The truth is, however, that this attacker was not a lone wolf when it comes to hatred of LGBT people. It may be an uncomfortable truth for some people in this country and around the world, but the fact that he carried bullets does not mean that the prejudice that they carry makes them any better.
May I ask the Home Secretary to work with the Secretary of State for Education to ensure that the excellent work that is taking place in schools to tackle homophobic and transphobic bullying continues, and is built on further to ensure that all children, irrespective of their backgrounds and the types of school that they attend, are taught that in this country, in standing up for human rights, we do not tolerate or in any way accept discrimination against people on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We must ensure—and this is part of the work that the Government are trying to do in the Home Office, in the Department for Education and elsewhere—that we send that clear message about the values that underpin our society here in the United Kingdom and make it such a great place to live, one of which is absolute respect for everyone, regardless of their sexuality, background, ethnicity, faith or none. It is important for us to ensure that those are the values that are being taught.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
The Home Secretary has, I think, expressed the views of us all. The unanimity of the House has been impressive, and I think we should communicate that to all the people who have lost loved ones in this atrocity.
It is true that the motivation for the outrage was hatred and terror, but what enabled it to happen was the availability of guns. More American citizens have been murdered in mass shootings than all the Americans who were killed in wars between the end of the civil war and the war in Iraq. Will the Home Secretary personally commit herself to conveying to the American Government our fear that if they continue not to act, they will lose more of their citizens to this hatred and terror?
Mrs May
The right hon. Lady is absolutely right. Gun availability is an important part of the overall issue. As I said earlier, we hear many voices in the United States—sadly—on both sides of the argument, because there are those who strongly claim that the right to carry arms should enable guns of this sort to be more freely available and ever present. I should be happy to raise the issue with the American Administration, because I think it important that we can see the dangers. We have suffered a tragedy here that led to the tightening of our gun laws, and I think we are all grateful for the fact that we now have the toughest, or some of the toughest, gun laws in the world.
John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)
I am a gay man, and let us all say unambiguously what happened in Orlando yesterday: it was a premeditated slaughter of gay people because they were gay by a man who we are told had been outraged because he recently saw two men kissing. It was the worst mass killing of gay people in our lifetime. Does the Home Secretary agree that homophobia is not intrinsic to the human condition? It is too often taught in homes, in school classrooms and playgrounds and in places of worship. Anyone who has ever winced when they saw two men kissing, muttered loathing when they saw two women holding hands or who has invoked God in justification for a human prejudice is complicit in creating a climate of poisonous intolerance. Will the Home Secretary therefore agree that love and tolerance should serve as the epitaph for those who have died so monstrously?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman is right, and I think we should take that message of love and tolerance, and we should be very clear that we condemn these sorts of prejudices that, as he says, can be taught and encouraged and sadly in some places are being taught and encouraged. They are not part of the society that we wish to live in, the values we share and the tolerance and respect for others that we want to see across the whole of the United Kingdom.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
I want to place on record my condemnation of the terrible attacks in Orlando. It seems that ISIS is being pushed back in certain parts of the middle east and we are seeing fighters fleeing from its strongholds, a number of whom are coming across to Europe, and some may come back to the UK, Given that, is the Secretary of State satisfied that extra measures are in place to deal with this possible influx of additional ISIS fighters coming back to Europe and that co-operation is of a sufficient level with other European countries?
Mrs May
Yes, of course we look at people who are returning on a case-by-case basis to see what action is necessary. We increased the powers of the police in the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, not least with the temporary exclusion orders that enable the police to work with other countries, in Europe particularly, and with places in the UK where someone might be returning to from Syria. They help to manage the return of any such individuals, and we do co-operate very closely with EU colleagues on these matters.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
In the light of this horrific homophobic attack in Orlando, will the Home Secretary urgently support the call from across the House for compulsory sex and relationships education in all our schools, to educate everyone that love is love and it is okay to be yourself? No one should fear coming out or being themselves, especially after this horrific event, so does she agree that we need to take every opportunity to educate our children so that extremist prejudice does not take hold?
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
The Defence Secretary has written to me to say that 850 UK-linked individuals of national security concern have travelled to take part in the Syrian conflict and just under half have returned. In light of the Home Secretary’s answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), could she say how many of those over 400 citizens are on that managed return scheme she talked about, making sure we know who they are talking to and what they are doing?
Mrs May
I fear that there may be a misunderstanding of what the managed return scheme is about: that is about the managed return of an individual where it is felt necessary to manage their return across the border. The issue of what action is taken for an individual once they have returned to the UK, which is determined on a case-by-case basis, is a separate matter.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
I would like to associate myself with the collegiate views of this House. Given the atrocity in Orlando, home-grown terrorism has been recognised as a significant risk. Reports indicate that radicalisation may be occurring in UK prisons, with young men who have histories of violence. What policies are being introduced to address this very important issue?
Mrs May
My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Justice has initiated a review of the issue of extremism in prisons, and the Home Office will be working with the Ministry of Justice when it is possible to work on the recommendations from that review. We are all very clear that, in an environment where it is possible for terrorist offenders to come into contact with serious and organised criminals, it is important to ensure not only that that is managed very carefully, but that we deal with the potential for radicalisation and extremism.
Mike Gapes (Ilford South) (Lab/Co-op)
A number of countries have sent messages of solidarity with the United States and the people of Orlando, but some of those countries, including Egypt and Saudia Arabia, themselves have the death penalty for homosexuality and have arrested hundreds of people in the past two years. Is it not time that all those countries came into the 21st century and recognised that they have to match their words with deeds and legislation?
Mrs May
I am very clear in my views—and I am sure other Members of this House are clear in theirs—on issues associated with the death penalty, including the death penalty for the sort of issue the hon. Gentleman has raised. This is of course a matter for those countries themselves, but these subjects are regularly raised by British Ministers when they are in discussion with those countries.
Stewart Malcolm McDonald (Glasgow South) (SNP)
May I begin by thanking you, Mr Speaker, for the extraordinary leadership you have shown, not only on the back of these events, but more widely, with the way in which you have absolutely established yourself as a friend of the LGBT community? The ostentatious flair of my community may be slightly restrained for the next few days as we think of those who were needlessly taken from us, but despite that the rainbow flag still flies high and proud over Pride season. It flies high because too long has passed between now and the days gone by when we spent time living anonymously and in fear. Solidarity is stronger than fear, so will the Home Secretary join me in encouraging all our friends and allies around the country to go to a Pride march this summer, to give money to an LGBT charity, to stand up for the kid in your school who is being picked on? Those kinds of acts, I promise, you will not regret.
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, which goes to the heart of the initial comments made by the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), who said that it is not just about standing up and saying things—it is actually about doing as well. There are many ways in which people can show their solidarity with members of the LGBT community, and I would encourage them to do so.
Mr Speaker
I thank the hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), the Home Secretary, the shadow Home Secretary, the spokesperson for the Scottish National party and all colleagues for what they have said over the past 40 minutes or so and for the obviously sincere, eloquent and compelling way in which they have said it. I hope that in the light of the sentiments expressed by colleagues, they will approve when I say that, on their behalf and in all of our names, I intend to write to the Mayor of Orlando. In doing so, I write both to convey our profound shock and absolute sympathy, and to underline the fact of our complete solidarity with the LGBTI community in Orlando, with the LGBTI community across the United States, and indeed with all the people of the United States at this exceptionally difficult and trying time.
Point of Order
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ian Blackford (Ross, Skye and Lochaber) (SNP)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I am delighted to see the Minister for Immigration in his place, because I wish to refer to his response to an urgent question on 26 May. When he responded to me, he indicated in good faith that the Brain family had come to the United Kingdom after the post-study work visa had been removed. I wish to ask him to clarify his remarks, because the family were granted a visa to come to the United Kingdom on 20 December 2010—before the post-study work visa had expired. That is a crucial point, because I have always argued that the family should be given the right to work here while they fulfil the demands of the tier 2 work visa, and that point is instrumental to the case that they are bringing. I ask your forbearance, Mr Speaker, as I seek to bring this matter to the attention of the House and have the Minister correct the record, if he is prepared to do so.
Mr Speaker
I have sought to display my usual generosity of spirit to an exceptionally dedicated and assiduous constituency Member, which the hon. Gentleman undoubtedly is. However, I hope that he will take it in the right spirit if I say that that was not a point of order. Moreover, it was patently not addressed in any meaningful sense to, and could not be intended for, the Chair. It was really a request to the Minister on the Treasury Bench. Accordingly, it is best communicated directly to the Minister in writing or through a meeting, rather than across the Floor of the House. On this one occasion, and this one occasion only—I realise the seriousness of the matter—I will say that if the Minister wants very briefly to respond, even if only to indicate a willingness to engage, so be it, but he is under no obligation to do so. In future, the hon. Gentleman should give me notice of an intention to raise such a point of order, in which case I will wisely counsel him against doing so.
James Brokenshire
Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I am content to write to the hon. Gentleman in respect of the point that he has raised so that I am able to consider it properly.
Mr Speaker
I hope that the hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Ian Blackford) is satisfied for now.
Policing and Crime Bill
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
19:08 - The House divided: - Ayes: 155 / Noes: 264 - Question accordingly negatived.
19:20 - The House divided: - Ayes: 155 / Noes: 268 - Question accordingly negatived.
20:59 - The House divided: - Ayes: 12 / Noes: 262 - Question accordingly negatived.
21:13 - The House divided: - Ayes: 157 / Noes: 257 - Question accordingly negatived.
The Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims (Mike Penning)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Speaker
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Government new schedule 1—Schedule to be inserted as Schedule A3 to the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004.
Government new clause 30—Public records.
New clause 63—Police and Crime Commissioners: parity of funding between police and families at inquests—
“(1) A police and crime commissioner has the duties set out in this section when the police force they are responsible for is a Properly Interested Person for the purposes of—
(a) an inquest into the death of a member of an individual’s family, or
(b) an inquest into the deaths of members of a group of families,
under the Coroners Act 1988.
(2) The police and crime commissioner must make recommendations to the Secretary of State as to whether the individual’s family or the group of families at the inquest require financial support to ensure parity of legal representation between parties to the inquest.
(3) If a police and crime commissioner makes a recommendation under subsection (2) then the Secretary of State must provide financial assistance to the individual’s family or the group of families to ensure parity of funding between families and the police.
(4) The individual’s family or the group of families may use funding authorised under this section solely for the purpose of funding legal representation at the inquest.”
This new clause would put into law the principle of parity of funding between police and families at inquests. It would ensure that funding to a bereaved family, or a group of bereaved families, for purposes of legal representation during an inquest is an amount broadly equal to the level of funding that the police force receives. This new clause seeks to place an obligation on the PCC to recommend to the Home Secretary as to whether a bereaved family, or a group of bereaved families requires funding to support their legal representation at the inquest. The Home Secretary must provide such funding if it is recommended.
New clause 64—Police complaints and the media—
“(1) Subject to subsection (3), the Prime Minister must commission an independent inquiry into the operation of the police complaints system in respect of relationships between the police and media.
(2) The inquiry must include, but is not limited, to—
(a) how adequately police forces investigated complaints about police officers in dealing with people working within, or connected to, media organisations,
(b) the thoroughness of any reviews by police forces into complaints specified in subsection (a),
(c) in the cases where a complaint in subsection (a) led to a criminal investigation, the conduct of prosecuting authorities in investigating the allegation,
(d) the extent to which police officers took illegal payment to suppress investigations of complaints of relationships between police officers and people working within, or connected to, media organisations,
(e) the implications of subsections (a) to (d) for the relationships between media organisations and the police, prosecuting authorities, and relevant regulatory bodies, and recommended actions.
(3) The inquiry can only commence once the Secretary of State is satisfied that it would not prejudice any ongoing relevant legal cases.”
This new clause would compel the Prime Minister to instigate an independent inquiry such as Leveson 2 into the relationships between the press and police and the extent to which that has operated in the public interest.
New clause 65—IPCC functions following complaints about the police’s handling of an event which has led to large scale loss of life—
“(1) The Independent Police Complaints Commission (the ‘Commission’) shall undertake the functions set out in subsection (3) to (5) when—
(a) there has been an event which has led to large scale loss of life, and
(b) the conditions in subsection (2) have been met.
(2) Subsection (1) applies when, for that event—
(a) the Commission has received complaints of a serious nature about the actions of the police either before, during or in response to the event, or as part of a police investigation into the event,
(b) the Commission has been asked to undertake such action by fifty per cent plus one or more of the total of—
(i) representatives of those deceased due to the event, and
(ii) any injured survivors of the event.
(3) The Commission shall report to the individuals identified in section 2(b) during any police investigation into the disaster regarding the progress of the investigation, and how the individuals identified in section 2(b) can assist with it, including, if there are no lawyers representing the individuals identified in section 2(b), the implications of engaging lawyers at that stage.
(4) Following a further request to the Commission by fifty percent plus one or more of the representatives of those deceased due to the event, the Commission shall set up a panel (the “Commission’s Panel“) which shall register as a data controller under the Data Protection Act 1998 and review all documentation relating to the event, the deceased and the representatives and report thereon.
(5) In establishing the Commission’s Panel under subsection (4), the Commission must consult the individuals identified in subsection 2(b).
(6) The Secretary of State must lay a copy of the report in subsection (4) before Parliament.
(7) While a review under subsection (4) is in progress, the Commission’s Panel must report to the individuals identified in section 2(b) every three months on the progress of the review.”
Government amendments 85, 22 to 30, 86, 87 and 31.
Amendment 126, in clause 27, page 42, line 38, leave out from “(a)” to end of subsection, and insert—
“(iii) but the period between the allegation first coming to the attention of a person mentioned in paragraph (a) and any initiation of disciplinary proceedings does not exceed the period specified in the regulations.
(3A) The regulations under this section must specify that there is no maximum period time after which historic allegation of misconduct cannot be investigated for cases which meet the following conditions—
(a) the case involves allegations of gross misconduct,
(b) the case is certified by the Secretary of State to be liable to lead to serious loss of confidence in the police service and the Secretary of State determines that investigating and, if appropriate, hearing the case is necessary and proportionate.
(3AA) The provisions of this section apply where the alleged misconduct, inefficiency or ineffectiveness took place prior to this Act coming into force.
(3AB) Regulations under this section must include sanctions for disciplinary proceedings in respect of a person defined under subsection (3A).”
This amendment would provide for disciplinary proceedings to take place a specified period after the allegation first comes to light, instead of a limit based on when the person concerned left a police force. It would also provide for this time period to be extended in cases of serious misconduct. It would also allow for proceedings to apply to retrospective cases and provides for sanctions for disciplinary proceedings.
Amendment 127, in clause 31, page 48, line 24, after “the”, insert “Independent”.
This amendment would retain the word “Independent” in the Office for Police Conduct (the new title for the current Independent Police Complaints Commission).
Amendment 128, page 48, line 28, after “The”, insert “Independent”.
Please see explanatory statement for Amendment 127.
Amendment 129, page 48, line 33, after “the”, insert “Independent”.
Please see explanatory statement for Amendment 127.
Amendment 131, page 49, line 6, leave out subsection (6) and insert—
“(6) In subsection leave out “chairman of the Commission, or as another member of the Commission” and insert “Director General, or as another member of the Office”.
This amendment would ensure that both the Director General of the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and any member of the Office, must not have held any of the roles set out in Section 9(3) of the Police Reform Act 2002.
Amendment 130, page 49, line 14, after “the”, insert “Independent”.
Please see explanatory statement for Amendment 127.
Government amendments 32 to 61, 88, 63 to 84 and 14 to 17.
Government new clause 49—Retention of fingerprints and DNA profiles: PACE.
Government new clause 50—Retention of fingerprints and DNA profiles: Terrorism Act 2000.
Government new clause 51—Extension of cross-border powers of arrest: urgent cases.
Government new clause 52—Cross-border enforcement: powers of entry to effect arrest.
Government new clause 53—Cross-border enforcement: minor and consequential amendments.
New clause 12—Deaths in custody: mental health—
“(1) Section 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 is amended as follows.
(2) In Section 1(2)(c), at end insert ‘other than while deprived of their liberty under Schedule A1 to the Mental Capacity Act 2005.’”
New clause 22—Surrender of travel documentation—
“(1) This section applies where—
(a) a person is arrested under section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, or under article 26 of the Police and Criminal Evidence (Northern Ireland) Order 1989 (S.I. 1989/1341 (N.I.12) S.I. 1989/1341 (N.I.12), in respect of an offence mentioned in section 41(1) or (2) of the Counter Terrorism Act 2008,
(b) the person is released without charge and on bail under Part 4 of the 1984 Act or (as the case may be) Part 5 of the 1989 Order, and
(c) the release on bail is subject to a travel restriction condition.
(2) If police are satisfied that a person is in possession of travel documents, as a pre-condition of release from custody, the person must surrender their travel documentation.”
This amendment would require terrorist suspects to surrender passports and any other travel documentation as a condition of release from custody.
New clause 23—Powers to require removal of disguises—
“(1) The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 is amended as follows.
(2) Omit section 60AA (Powers to require removal of disguises) and insert—
‘Section 60AA Powers to require removal of disguises.’
(1) Where a constable in uniform reasonably believes that an offence has been, or is being, committed he may—
(a) require any person to remove any item which the constable reasonably believes that person is wearing wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing his identity;
(b) seize any item which the constable reasonably believes any person intends to wear wholly or mainly for that purpose.
(2) A person who fails to remove an item worn by him or her when required to do so by a constable in the exercise of his power under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding one month or to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale, or to both.
(3) The powers conferred by this section are in addition to, and not in derogation of, any power otherwise conferred.
(4) This section does not extend to Scotland.’”
This new clause would remove the requirement for prior authorisation in existing section 60AA so that where a constable reasonably believes that an offence has been, or is being, committed they may require the removal of items where they are used wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing identity.
New clause 24—Access to Independent Mental Health Advocates—
“(1) A person detained in a place of safety under section 135 or 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 shall have the right to an independent mental health advocate (see section 130A of the Mental Health Act 1983).”
This new clause would extend the right to an independent mental health advocate to those detained under sections 135 or 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
New clause 25—Child sexual exploitation: duty to share information—
“The local policing body that maintains a police force shall have a duty to disclose information about children who are victims of sexual exploitation or other forms of abuse to relevant child mental health service commissioners in England and Wales.”
This new clause would place a duty on local police forces to store information with their local commissioners of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) to improve local commissioning of mental health support for victims of child sexual exploitation.
New clause 26—Detention under the Mental Health Act 1983: training—
“(1) The chief police officer of every police force must ensure that provision is made for training police officers in the exercise the powers granted to them by sections 136 and 137 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
(2) The training provided under subsection (1) must include material on—
(a) diversity and equality, and
(b) cultural issues that police officers should be aware of when exercising power under the Mental Health Act 1983.
(3) The chief police officer of each police force must make an annual report to the Home Secretary on the provision they have made to comply with the requirements of this section.”
This new clause would require each police force to provide its officers with training on how to exercise power under the Mental Health Act, with particular reference to diversity issues.
New clause 29—Access to legal advice—
“(1) A person detained against their will in a place of safety under section 135 or 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 shall have the right to ask for and receive independent legal advice.”
This new Clause would ensure the individual detained under section 135 or 136 of the Mental Health Act has access to legal advice.
New clause 40—Disallowing use of tasers on psychiatric wards—
“A police officer may not use a taser or electroshock weapon during a deployment on a psychiatric ward.”
This new clause would prohibit the use of tasers by police officers on psychiatric wards.
New clause 42—Deployment of police officers on psychiatric wards: reporting—
“(1) Any incident of police officers being deployed on a psychiatric ward must be reported to the Home Secretary by the chief police officer of the relevant force within one week of the incident.
(2) The report under subsection (1) must contain the following information—
(a) the nature of the incident,
(b) the number of police officers who were deployed,
(c) the actions taken by the officers during their deployment, and
(d) the outcome of the incident.”
This new clause would require the Home Secretary to be notified whenever police officers are deployed on psychiatric wards.
New clause 43—Use of tasers on psychiatric wards: reporting—
“(1) Any incident of a police officer using a taser during a deployment on a psychiatric ward must be reported to the Home Secretary by the chief police officer of the relevant force within one week of the incident.
(2) The report under subsection (1) must contain the following information—
(a) the reason for the use of the taser,
(b) the action taken following the use of the taser, and
(c) the process that will be followed for reviewing the incident.”
This new clause would require the Home Secretary to be notified whenever a police officer uses a taser on a psychiatric ward.
New clause 45—Child sexual exploitation: assessment of needs for therapeutic support—
“(1) Where the police or a local authority have a reasonable belief that a child has been sexually exploited or subject to other forms of child abuse, the police or local authority must refer the child to a named mental health service.
(2) The named mental health service must conduct an assessment of the child’s needs and where appropriate make necessary arrangements for the child’s treatment or care.
(3) The Secretary of State must by regulations—
(a) define ‘named mental health service’ for the purpose of this section;
(b) specify a minimum level of “necessary arrangements” for the purpose of the section.”
This new clause would place a duty on the police or local authority to ensure that children who are believed to have experienced sexual abuse or exploitation are referred to an appropriate mental health service for assessment and appropriate support.
New clause 58—Prohibition on using a person’s home as a place of safety—
“(1) The Mental Health Act 1983 is amended as follows.
(2) In section 136, leave out subsection (1) and insert—
“(1) If a person appears to a constable to be suffering from mental disorder and to be in immediate need of care or control, the constable may, if he thinks it necessary to do so in the interests of that person or for the protection of other persons—
(a) remove the person to a place of safety within the meaning of section 135, or
(b) if the person is already at a place of safety within the meaning of that section, keep the person at that place or remove the person to another place of safety.
(c) For the purposes of this subsection, a suitable place as defined by section 135(6) shall not include a house, flat or room where a person is living.””
This amendment would prevent a person’s home from being used as places of safety for the purposes of section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
New clause 59—Detention under the Mental Health Act 1983: Access to an appropriate adult—
“(1) A person detained in a place of safety under section 135 or 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 shall have the right to an appropriate adult.
(2) For the purposes of subsection 1, ‘appropriate adult’ means:
(a) a relative, guardian or other person responsible for the detained person’s care;
(b) someone experienced in dealing with mentally disordered or mentally vulnerable people but who is not a police officer or employed by the police; or
(c) some other responsible adult aged 18 or over who is not a police officer or employed by the police.”
This new clause would extend the right to an appropriate adult to those detained under sections 135 or 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
Government new schedule 2—Cross-border enforcement: minor and consequential amendments.
Government amendments 89 to 95.
Amendment 123, in clause 75, page 92, line 1, leave out subsection (2) and insert—
“(2) In section 135 (warrant to search for and remove patients), leave out subsection (6) and insert—
“(6) Subject to section 136A, in this section “place of safety” means residential accommodation provided by a local social services authority under Part III of the National Assistance Act 1948, a hospital as defined by this Act, an independent hospital or care home for mentally disordered persons or any other suitable place.””
This amendment is consequential to amendment 124.
Amendment 124, page 92, line 33, leave out subsection (6) and insert—
“(6) After section 136 insert—
‘136A Prohibition on using police stations as places of safety
(1) A person may not, in the exercise of a power to which this section applies, be removed to, kept at or taken to a police station as a place of safety.
(2) The powers to which this section applies are—
(a) the power to remove a person to a place of safety under a warrant issued under section 135(1);
(b) the power to take a person to a place of safety under section 135(3A);
(c) the power to remove a person to, or to keep a person at, a place of safety under section 136(1);
(d) the power to take a person to a place of safety under section 136(3).
(3) In this section “person” means a person of any age.’”
This amendment would prevent a police station from being used as a place of safety for the purposes of sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
Amendment 125, in clause 76, page 93, line 25, leave out sub paragraph (i) and insert—
“(i) In a case where the person is removed to a place of safety, the time when the constable takes that person into custody (within the meaning of section 137 of the Mental Health Act 1983) in order to remove them to that place.”
This amendment would meant that the period of detention started at the point a person was detained rather than the time they arrived at a place of safety.
Government amendments 96 to 106, 109, 110, 117 and 118.
New clause 66—Guidance: unattributable briefings—
“(1) The College of Policing shall issue a code of practice relating to police-media relations.
(2) This code should set out clear guidance to ensure that all police media communications are reportable, quotable and attributable unless in exceptional circumstances.
(3) The code of practice shall be issued in line with requirements of section 39A of the Police Act 1996.”
This new clause would require The College of Policing to issue a code of practice relating to police-media relations. The aim of this clause is to ensure that all police media communications should be reportable, quotable and attributable unless in exceptional circumstances.
Mike Penning
May I start by saying, genuinely, that this Bill has progressed with the will, respect and the help of Members on both sides of the House? As there are several new Government amendments in this group, I thought it only right and proper that I address some of them. I will also address some of the amendments tabled by the shadow Secretary of State. We have had numerous meetings, and we have tried to work our way through all of this, so let us see whether we can carry that forward as best we can.
It is our intention to introduce a robust and independent inspection regime for fire and rescue authorities in England. New clause 48 and new schedule 1 will support that objective by strengthening the inspection framework currently provided for in the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004. The amendments provide for the appointment of a chief fire and rescue inspector, who will be required to prepare a programme for the inspection of fire and rescue services. The Secretary of State will have the power to require inspections outside the published programme if necessary.
Fire and rescue inspectors will be required to produce reports on their inspections, and the chief inspector will make an annual report to Parliament—something that does not currently take place. We will enable fire inspectors to carry out joint inspections with Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary. That will be particularly important where police and crime commissioners and metro mayors take on the responsibilities of fire and rescue authorities.
Finally, these provisions will ensure that inspectors have access to the information they need to undertake a rigorous and independent examination of fire and rescue authorities and the persons employed by them. That means that no door will be locked and all information will be available to the inspector.
Although we believe that the vast majority of inspections will be undertaken by consent, we need to be alert to the fact that additional powers might be needed. If inspectors do not feel that they are getting the access that they deserve and need to produce reports, they will have the power to ask for such things. These amendments will help fire and rescue authorities be more transparent and more accountable.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
May I say to my right hon. Friend that, as a former holder of this part of his post, I entirely welcome and support these amendments? The inspectorate is a thoroughly good idea, but may I raise one technical issue? There is provision for delegation to another public body. Many of us think that it would be much better if new schedule 1 were phrased so as to permit the use of external contractors to carry out certain elements of the inspection on behalf of inspectors where outside expertise may not be readily available in a public body. At the moment, the wording of new clause 48 and new schedule 1 does not appear to permit delegation to external contractors, who may well have expertise in operational audit, which is precisely what we need to make inspections robust and independent. Will he reflect on that?
Mr Speaker
Order. No one could accuse the hon. Gentleman of excluding from his intervention anything that he thought might at any time, in any way, to any degree be material, and I have a sense that when he practised law regularly he operated in a similar vein.
Mike Penning
I understand exactly where my hon. Friend is coming from, especially on the point about audit. However, at the moment, we do not feel that there is a need to use external specialists in that way; if we find out later that there is, the inspector could ask the Home Secretary for those specific measures. The fire service has enough expertise to ensure that the regime works. It will be completely different from the current regime.
Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way to another former Fire Minister. There used to be an honourable tradition that Fire Ministers were West Ham United supporters, but sadly that was broken by the right hon. Gentleman.
We have gone from the fire services inspectorate to the National Audit Office and then to nothing, and we are now going back to the fire services inspectorate. Has the Minister taken into account, for example, the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, which could give external advice to the new inspectorate, very much along the lines suggested by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill)? Will the new chief inspector also be the national adviser for fire? I would be grateful if the Minister explained a little of the background.
Mike Penning
I am conscious that I am in the hands of experts who were Ministers long before I was, but as an ex-firefighter, I was really quite surprised to see how the inspections took place when I came into the role. They did not take place as envisaged by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) when he introduced the relevant legislation. There was a genuine feeling that we had to address the costs and how the inspections were done. To be perfectly honest, the system has not worked. We cannot continue with the situation where one fire and rescue force inspects another and they tell each other what they can and cannot inspect.
This proposal is separate, which is why we have put the new inspector alongside Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary. They will tell us exactly what expertise they require. As ex-firefighters, the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and I can assume what they will need to look at, but I accept that some fire and rescues services will need to draw on financial expertise from other areas.
Robert Neill
I promise to try not to trouble my right hon. Friend anymore, but will he clarify something? I agree with his response to the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), but is he saying that if evidence is presented, Ministers will not rule out making an appropriate arrangement whereby commissioning can take place if the chief inspector thinks it appropriate in relation to any inspection without us being required to make further legislative arrangements in the House? I am sure he will understand that the need for further legislation would defeat our objective.
Mike Penning
Absolutely. I can say categorically that we do not want to handcuff the inspector. If an inspector needs to bring in further expertise, whether from UKAS or others, they will be able to bring that to the attention of the Ministers responsible. There will not be a requirement to come to the House.
This is a really positive move for the fire service, and the chiefs have welcomed it. They have been supportive in the meetings that I have had with them. I am not sure whether they all support the proposal, because the ones who do not support it might not have been banging on my door quite as hard as the ones who do. Naturally, I will come back to the issue in responding to the debate if we have time.
I will touch briefly on DNA and fingerprint retention, which is an extremely important and sensitive topic. New clauses 49 and 50 will help the prevention and detection of crime by enabling DNA profiles and fingerprints to be retained on the basis of convictions outside England and Wales, in the same way as the material could be used if the offence had taken place in England and Wales. We are trying to protect the public. The measures, which have been requested, will apply specifically to offences committed outside England and Wales that would be offences in England and Wales. The amendments made by new clauses 40 and 50 to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Terrorism Act 2000 will enhance the effectiveness of the national DNA and fingerprint databases and help our police keep us safe, which we all want, especially in the light of the heightened threat.
New clauses 51, 52 and 53 and new schedule 2 will strengthen the existing cross-border powers of arrest provided for in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 and appear to be supported across the House.
I want to listen to the shadow Home Secretary’s comments, so I will touch only briefly on the new clauses that he has tabled, which we have discussed together with the shadow Policing Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). I know that the Home Secretary, too, has discussed them with the shadow Home Secretary. It may assist the House if I say a few words about them now. As I said earlier, we welcome the constructive approach from the Opposition, and in particular from the Hillsborough families and the campaign group. We would not be discussing these issues now without their bravery, for which I praise them. The work carries on; it will not stop, whatever happens today.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
The Minister mentioned the Hillsborough families, some of whom are here today to hear his words. Will he give categorical assurances to them and to other campaigners on historical injustices that that sort of thing could never happen again once new clause 63 becomes law?
Mike Penning
No Minister could stand at the Dispatch Box in any Parliament in the world and give such a categorical assurance. We have moved an enormous way forward, through the perseverance of the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary. Although we are trying as hard as we can, without consequential effects on other legislation, to make sure that a terrible situation such as Hillsborough never happens again, I cannot categorically give the hon. Gentleman the assurance he asks for. I know that that will disappoint him, but he will understand where I am coming from. All through today’s debate and beyond, when the Bill goes to the other House, I will be as helpful as I can.
We recognise the strength of feeling on these issues, and particularly the public concern to ensure that police officers who commit the most serious acts of wrongdoing can be held to account for their actions, no matter when they come to light. We are talking here not about criminal actions, for which criminal proceedings can be brought against individuals, but about disciplinary action against a police officer.
Having looked carefully at the new clauses tabled by the shadow Home Secretary, and following discussions that I have had with the shadow Policing Minister, we will table an amendment in the House of Lords to allow, in exceptional circumstances, an unlimited extension of the 12-month time limit that we propose in the Bill. It is understood that that does not apply to every offence. We will work with the shadow Home Secretary and his team—and, I hope, the Hillsborough families and Bishop James—on the drafting of the relevant regulations so that we can make sure that they do what it says on the tin. We will keep the 12-month rule, but in exceptional circumstances, based on regulations, we will be able to look at historical cases—not criminal cases—and take action against a former police officer. The 12-month time limit will remain, but we will work on the regulations. That is a significant move on our part.
The measure will apply to police officers serving with a police force at the point at which the provisions come into force. In line with established principles, we do not believe that it would be appropriate to apply such a provision retrospectively. However, this is a significant move so that, as the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) suggests, families will have further protection in future.
On new clause 66, which is about the police and the media, I assure the House that the consultation that is going on with the College of Policing, which we have discussed with the shadow ministerial team, is actively looking at the guidance on the issue. I am not going to predict exactly what the college will come forward with, but it would not be actively looking at the issue if it was not there, and we will wait for the college to come forward.
Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)
I would like to begin by agreeing with the Minister that some good progress has been made in the course of our deliberations on the Bill. There have been improvements, which we will discuss later, on tackling child sexual exploitation and on the police bail regime—particularly as it applies to those suspected of being involved in terrorism activity. As he has just indicated, there has also been progress on police misconduct, which I will come to.
However, the Bill presents an opportunity to do much more to improve police accountability, and that is an opportunity that we in the House now need to grab. Today, I want to present a package of proposals that respond to the historic verdict of the Hillsborough inquest, which finally concluded, after 27 years, that, as the families had known from day one, the loss of their loved ones was not an accident and they had been unlawfully killed, but that that fact had been covered up for all those years.
This package seeks to rebalance this country and to make it fairer. It seeks to rebalance it away from the establishment and in favour of ordinary families. It is a package that will stand as a permanent tribute to the dignity and determination of the Hillsborough families. Knowing them as I do, they would want nothing more than that no other family in the future should go through what they have gone through.
Let me take the House briefly through this package of proposals. New clause 63 would give bereaved families equal funding for legal representation at inquests where the police are involved. It seeks to establish the crucial principle that there should be parity between the two sides. The reason that is important is that it says very clearly that the public interest lies in finding the truth. That is how public resources should be directed: they should not be directed towards creating an unbalanced contest at an inquest, with public money used to protect vested interests in the public sector.
Norman Lamb (North Norfolk) (LD)
I am happy to confirm that the Liberal Democrats will support this proposal. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, had it been in place at the time of the first inquest, the truth might have emerged at that stage, and the families would not have had to go through such a dire long wait to get to the truth?
Andy Burnham
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his support. He is absolutely right. I will come on to explain precisely how this would have helped to even the playing field and give the families the chance to get truth at the first time of asking. The original inquest catastrophically failed on that account, and that needs to be very clearly understood as we consider this amendment.
Amendment 126 seeks to close the long-standing loophole of retirement being used by police officers as a route to evade misconduct proceedings. New clause 64 seeks to hold the Government to their promise to the victims of press intrusion to hold a second-stage inquiry looking at the culture of relations between police and the press. New clause 66 seeks to legislate for a code of practice with regard to the media relations policy of each police force, and to spell out that attributable briefing by police forces, which was so damaging in the case of Hillsborough, is not permitted unless it is in the most exceptional circumstances. Amendments 127 and 128 seek to strengthen the Independent Police Complaints Commission. New clause 67, which will be considered later, seeks to strengthen the offence of misconduct in public office.
Let me start with the area where there is greatest consensus—police misconduct. I listened carefully to what the Minister said, and I am grateful for the movement that he indicated to the shadow Policing Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), in Committee whereby there should not merely be an arbitrary 12-month period after retirement, because, as we know, police wrongdoing may come to light much later. We are glad that the Government have indicated that they are prepared to move on this matter in the other place and table an amendment to that effect. While I will not press my amendment to a vote, I would still like to press the Minister a little further on this point. He is saying that this should be applied only in the most exceptional circumstances, but that potentially rules out many people who might be guilty of gross misconduct but would not be caught by his “exceptional” test. He needs to reassure the House on this point.
Mike Penning
That is why I offered to work closely with colleagues across the House on the regulations, which will be very important. We do not include everybody, because then there is no point in having exceptional cases, but it is very important to understand what “exceptional” means.
Andy Burnham
That is a good offer and I thank the Minister for it. I think we can move forward on that basis. I hope we all know what we are trying to achieve—that is, if serious wrongdoing comes to light about an individual who is beyond 12 months retired, it must be possible for misconduct or disciplinary proceedings to be initiated against them. Our amendment says that there should then also be sanctions that are able to be applied against that individual. I say to the Minister that we will want to insist on that point as well.
If we can agree to move forward on that basis, that is a considerable example of progress that matters greatly to the Hillsborough families, who, as they were continuing their 27-year struggle, felt very aggrieved when they saw individuals who had retired on a full pension and who they felt were beyond reach and could not be held to account. I believe that this should apply retrospectively. Misconduct is misconduct whenever it occurred, and people should be held to account for their actions.
Steve Rotheram
I thank the Minister for coming partly towards the position that we believe should be taken, but can we clarify one point? We are talking about serious wrongdoing—malfeasance and gross misconduct —by police officers. We have mentioned Hillsborough, so many people will spin that with regard to the conduct of officers—ordinary officers—at that disaster in 1989. There are no accusations against many of the ordinary officers, who performed heroically: it was the senior officers who let people down, and then, in some cases, took the opportunity to get away scot free through the cop-out of using ill health—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. If the hon. Gentleman wishes to make a speech, he can stand up to indicate when he wishes to do so, but this an intervention, and interventions must be a little shorter.
Andy Burnham
It was a long intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker, but it was a good one. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) makes a very important point. I do not think that any attempt is being made to blame ordinary policemen and women. That is not the purpose of the amendment. It is important for me to say very clearly to those police officers who are out there keeping the streets safe that this is not an attack on them. The package is about not allowing the misdeeds of the past to taint the present and those police officers who are working today. That is such a crucial point, because if we do not deal properly with such allegations, we allow the situation to contaminate the present and to corrode trust in today’s police service. None of us in this House wants that, so my hon. Friend is absolutely right to make that point, which cannot be stressed enough.
Mike Penning
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for being so generous in giving way. The hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Steve Rotheram) is absolutely right. If we had not included the point about exceptional circumstances, those sorts of people could have been captured, and that is not what we want. We are not looking at an officer who commits a speeding offence just before he retires; we are looking at those people who should be brought to justice, and that is exactly what we should be doing.
Andy Burnham
That is right. This is about people who have been guilty of serious misconduct in public office, and it is crucial that they cannot use retirement as a means of evading accountability for that misconduct. The change to which the Minister appears to be agreeing closes a long-standing loophole and frustration for members of the public. It exposes the police to a considerably more challenging regime, but rightly so. Any profession needs to be held accountable to the highest standards. We will work with the Minister to get it right. I believe that we can do so, but I stress that this is about upholding the reputation of the vast majority of police officers, who serve the public with distinction.
The issue of police-press relations is the biggest area of unfinished business, although, in fact, we have not even really started to make any changes with respect to putting right the wrongs of Hillsborough. As we know, the briefing of the press in those first days after the tragedy caused incalculable harm and damage, not just to the families who had lost loved ones, but to the thousands of people, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton, who had returned from the match in a state of trauma, only to read a couple of days later that the police were blaming them for the deaths of their friends and family.
That is why feelings are so strong, not just in Merseyside but across the country. It simply cannot be right that a police force is able, unattributably, to brief malicious and unproven information to a newspaper. We need a stronger and more transparent regime for press relations, so that false impressions cannot be put out there with the intention of setting a narrative about a particular incident. Families who are fighting for justice often find that it is very difficult to overturn the false version of events. That was certainly the case for the Hillsborough families.
Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)
I totally agree with the points that my right hon. Friend is making. Does he agree that among the problems with Hillsborough were not only the off-the-record briefings that took place later, but the on-the-record briefings to get the narrative right from the beginning?
Andy Burnham
I agree on both levels. This was a cover-up perpetrated on the record, off the record and in the Committee rooms of this House. It went to the very top—even to 10 Downing Street, where the head of press at the time briefed that a “tanked-up mob” caused the disaster. This cover-up went to the highest level. What chance did ordinary families have when faced with the might of the establishment seeking to perpetrate a lie on that scale? It has been a 27-year fight, as we now know.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
That promise was made not just to the victims and their families but to the Chairs of three Select Committees in the Prime Minister’s room before the inquiry was announced. My right hon. Friend is absolutely right to say that it is important that we get Leveson 2—perhaps not with Leveson, because he has moved on to do other things, but with somebody else. There is nothing wrong with the Government beginning the process, choosing a chair of the committee and getting the mechanics together. We do not really have to wait until the end of the criminal proceedings.
Andy Burnham
I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend. There is a huge amount of unfinished business. These issues are present in so many of the injustices that we have seen, where there has been inappropriate contact between police and press. We await the conclusions of the Daniel Morgan panel, for instance, which might best illustrate some of these issues.
That is true of other events as well. We remember the way in which the media were manipulated in the case of the Shrewsbury 24, for example. There have been many examples of this over time. Indeed, part 1 of the Leveson inquiry found unhealthy links between senior Met officers and newspaper executives, which led to the resignation of the then Met police chief and others. The issue cannot be left there. Public officials and police officers have also been convicted of offences related to these matters.
The Minister really needs to provide an explicit answer on this specific point today. He cannot wriggle out of this commitment. It is not the kind of commitment you can wriggle out of, given everything that those people have been through. A promise should be a promise, when it is made to people who have suffered in the way that many of the victims of press intrusion have suffered. I know that the Hillsborough families feel exactly the same. They were the victims of the biggest example of inappropriate police briefing of newspapers—and it was not just one newspaper. People think it was just one newspaper that reported the lies, but many of them reported the lies that were given to Whites news agency in Sheffield, and those lies went round the world. Only this week, I had an email from someone in the United States saying that they were astonished to find out the truth when they watched the recent BBC2 documentary on Hillsborough, and that for 27 years they had thought that the events were the result of hooliganism. It is impossible to exaggerate the harm that those lies caused.
I say to the Minister tonight that we need a better answer. If he were to stand up now at the Dispatch Box and say clearly to the House that there will be a second-stage inquiry into the culture of relations between the police and the press, I would be the first to say that we would not press our new clause 64 to a vote. However, there is growing suspicion among organisations—Hacked Off, obviously, but others too—and campaigners for justice that they are slowly being let down and that this matter is being slowly slid into the long grass. We have had anonymous briefings from people close to the Culture Secretary and others in Government to suggest that it has already been canned. Well, we on the Labour Benches are not prepared to accept that, so I say clearly to the Minister that unless he can provide a much more direct reassurance, we will push the matter to a vote this evening to force the Prime Minister to honour his own promise—it is not our promise; it is his promise—to the victims of press intrusion and hacking.
Steve Rotheram
In March 2013, the Prime Minister said that Leveson 2 should go ahead without further delay. The Secretary of State told the Select Committee that he was awaiting a further Government statement. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the three years that have passed since the Prime Minister’s promise have been far too long for many of the victims of press intrusion?
Andy Burnham
I would certainly say so. I cannot understand why there is any doubt about this, given the clarity of the Prime Minister’s statements, which I have read out, and given that the Chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), has just said that the promise was made not only to the victims but to senior parliamentarians. I do not see how this commitment can be negotiable.
Andy Burnham
Well, there you go. That says it all really. The right hon. Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale) seems to be in a different mode these days. One wonders what deals have been done by the Government if they are preparing to unpick this agreement, and we will watch them very carefully.
The Minister makes a fair point that there are ongoing investigations. I take his point that some of the investigations will have a material impact on issues that we are considering. We are not saying that we want the inquiry to start right now. We accept that there are matters to be concluded in the courts before it can proceed. What we are after is the removal of any doubt that it will proceed at the appropriate moment and that the promise the Prime Minister gave to those victims will be honoured. That is what we are seeking to establish tonight. That is what we are asking the Minister to lay down very clearly.
This goes beyond party politics. The victims and their families have suffered enough, and Members on both sides of the House owe it to them to make good on the promise that was given to them. That is why I look forward to Members from both sides of the House joining us in the Lobby tonight, because it clearly looks as though the Government are not going to give way.
Marie Rimmer (St Helens South and Whiston) (Lab)
These families have suffered enough—we in this Chamber are united on that—so does my right hon. Friend agree that a statement from the Minister today saying that the second inquiry will go ahead would put an end to their suffering? They have suffered enough. Let this be the end.
Andy Burnham
My hon. Friend puts it very well. That is what I have seen when working with the Hillsborough families, as have others when they have been fighting for justice. Those people are affected not just by the original trauma they suffered, but by how the system grinds them down afterwards, making them fight for everything, not giving them an inch and slowly draining the life out of them. How cruel is that? It is just wrong—is it not?—that the government machine thinks it can operate in that way. As I will move on to say, I spoke today to a family about going to meetings with 14 lawyers sitting around the table and just a couple of family members. That is just not right. We all know it is not right. Any of us who have been Ministers will have seen that style of meeting, and it is just not right. It is time to change it. We should not make these families fight for everything, but support them, and tip the scales in their favour and away from the powerful. Why not do so?
Mike Penning
May I just tell the right hon. Gentleman that I do not know what has happened with other Ministers, but I have never sat in such a meeting and anyone who has had a meeting with me as a Minister will know, as right hon. and hon. Members know, that that is not the way I operate and that I never have operated in that way?
Andy Burnham
I have a lot of time for the Minister, as he knows, but such people are listening to this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) is not in her place, but if the victims of contaminated blood are listening to this debate, they will immediately recognise what I am saying. If the victims of organophosphates—sheep dip—poisoning are listening today, they will understand what I am saying. If the people waiting for the announcement about the battle of Orgreave investigation are listening, they will understand what I am saying. There are so many people who have not been given justice by the system, and that just is not right. It really is not right, and that is why I keep saying that we must make Hillsborough a moment of change when we can tip the scales in favour of ordinary families and away from the establishment.
Richard Arkless (Dumfries and Galloway) (SNP)
In an attempt to act as a peace broker, given that the positions of both sides have been made perfectly clear, may I ask whether the shadow Home Secretary will accept a commitment to proceed with Leveson 2 after the investigations have taken place and whether, if that is acceptable, the Minister could make such a commitment today?
Andy Burnham
That is a good point. It would be good enough if we got a cast-iron commitment. Ministers have reintroduced a doubt—in media briefings, they have said, “Oh, it probably won’t go ahead now”—and have muddied the waters. If they clarified that tonight, that would be good enough. If they said, “It will go ahead after the proper time has elapsed, given the criminal proceedings that are still outstanding”, that would be fine and everyone would understand it. If they gave that commitment tonight, there would be no need for a vote because we would have done our job, but if they cannot give such a commitment, that would be revealing in itself. If the Minister cannot stand at the Dispatch Box and give such a clear commitment, or rather reaffirm it to the people to whom Ministers have already made it, that would be revealing in itself and we would be right to force a vote in those circumstances. In that case, people will not be strung along and left hoping that there will be a Leveson 2 one day; we will have forced the issue so that Ministers are held to account for their promise. That is what we are doing tonight. Ministers have the chance to do the right thing: to stand at the Dispatch Box and say, “Yes, we will do it. We will honour what we said.” If they do not do so, we will ask Members of decency and integrity on both sides of the House to stand with us and to go through the Lobby with us tonight to hold Ministers to account for the promise they made.
Finally, let me turn to our new clause 63 on parity. The new clause seeks to establish the principle of parity of legal funding for bereaved families at inquests involving the police. In introducing it, I want to say that it is very important that people do not see Hillsborough as a one-off belonging to a bygone era. To be honest, many bereaved families still face a very similar experience when they go to an inquest. They often find themselves pitched into an adversarial and aggressive courtroom when they are still raw with grief. They are unable to match the spending of the police or the public sector in what they spend on their own legal representation. Those families find their lives picked apart. They are made to look like they are perpetrators, not victims. That is a very common experience. Many people who suffer it do not have the huge support that the Hillsborough families had. They are ordinary families battling away on their own, with no one else coming to support them. That is why the principle of parity is so tremendously important.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend’s remarks will be heard by Rachel Gumbs, the daughter of Philmore Mills, who died in hospital while being restrained by the police. Another constituent has raised an issue relating to his mum. Her children were abducted by their father, and she has spent nearly two decades without being able to contact them. My constituent is in litigation against the police, and feels a similar kind of bereavement, as he has been kept away from his brothers and sisters. He hopes that the approach we are discussing could enable people like him, who are taking cases against the police, to get access to some kind of resources. Would that be possible?
Andy Burnham
That is exactly what lies behind the new clause. My right hon. Friend has just made my point. We will all have examples from our experience as constituency MPs. We know families who have been at inquests that have been highly unsatisfactory experiences, and where they did not get legal support. I will come to a few examples, to show how unfair it is. The public sector spends taxpayers’ money like water on hiring the best QCs to line up in the courtroom and defend its reputation. Ordinary families are scrabbling around, re-mortgaging their houses and doing whatever they can to try to put up some kind of fight against that. How wrong is that?
Public money should pay to establish the truth. That means that there should be parity between the two sides in that process. It should not be the case that the public sector packs a courtroom with highly paid QCs. That is such an important principle to establish coming out of Hillsborough—to be honest, if there is to be one lasting legacy from Hillsborough, that should be it. I was tempted by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) to make this point before. The Hillsborough families were represented by Michael Mansfield at the recent inquest. If that had been the case back in 1990, there is no chance on God’s earth that the cruel and inhumane 3.15 pm cut-off time would have been allowed to stand. Have we ever had a situation in this country before where bereaved families have been told that they cannot have information about what happened to their loved ones in their dying minutes? That was the case here. Have we ever had a situation before where only after 27 years are families finally told who gave their loved ones the kiss of life and carried them over the pitch? What an affront to natural justice that is. Yet it was allowed to stand, because those families did not have someone who could challenge it.
A few weeks ago, Margaret Aspinall, chair of the Hillsborough Family Support Group, came to Parliament to deliver a very personal reflection on what it was like all those years ago. I am very grateful to all right hon. and hon. Members who attended; I am sure they will agree that it was an intensely moving occasion. Margaret described the indescribable pain and hurt she felt when she was sent a cheque of just over £1,000, which was supposedly compensation for the life of her son James. She said she had to put it towards the legal fund that the group was asking members to contribute to. In itself that was not enough because she had the cost of travelling to the inquest in Sheffield every day. She was living on the breadline and having to borrow money from her family and her mum to make it all work. How can it be right that families in such circumstances, who have not done anything wrong, find themselves in that situation? It cannot be right that they should be scrimping, saving and doing all those things, when taxpayers’ money is being paid for the other side to do them down.
Mr Charles Walker (Broxbourne) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right to highlight the inequality of arms between families and the state, and he will know that INQUEST has campaigned tirelessly on that issue. He should also consider the time that it takes for an inquest to happen, and how those delays are recorded. An inquest may not happen for five or six years, in which time all sorts of untruths can flourish, but it will be recorded in the statistics as having taken only a year.
Andy Burnham
That is right, and as has been hinted at, that delay is often used to grind people down even further. It really does not work, and Parliament must decide whether we are prepared to let people carry on going through such an entirely unsatisfactory process. I do not think we should.
In people’s experiences today we can see parallels with those of the Hillsborough families. To give a current example, a young boy, Zane Gbangbola, died in 2014 in the floods in his home in Surrey. The family contest that hydrogen cyanide was brought into the house from a former landfill site that had not been properly sealed. It is a high-profile case, yet the family have been turned down three times for legal aid. This ordinary family were just going about their business, and all of a sudden their son is dead and Mr Gbangbola is permanently in a wheelchair. The inquest starts today, and the only reason that the family have quality legal representation is because they were given an anonymous £25,000 donation on Friday. That cannot possibly be right.
Andy Burnham
That is extraordinarily unfair, although this Government have made things even more unfair with their cuts to legal aid. People are not getting through and they are not getting funding when they apply in the way that they would have done in the past. They are unrepresented at these inquests, which cannot be right.
Mr Kevan Jones
I accept that cases such as Hillsborough required a lot of input from lawyers. Asking as someone who has a knee-jerk reaction that we should not be feeding lawyers, is it possible for the Chief Coroner to lay down rules in some of these cases so that if a public authority comes forward with banks of lawyers, the other side should be given legal representation, or the public authority told that those lawyers are not needed?
Andy Burnham
The amendment is designed to develop the same effect and to state that there should be parity of legal funding. That is an incentive for the public sector not to spend too much on its own. If it has to fund families as well, that might bring down the legal bill—it might not add any further costs.
Mr Jones
We now have the Chief Coroner. In the past a lot was wrong—I sat on the Coroners and Justice Bill Committee, and changes could still be made to the coroners service in this country. Some recognition of the parity that my right hon. Friend refers to would be welcome, but as I know from local government and other sectors, the knee-jerk reaction these days is to get a lawyer involved and, in some cases, I am not sure that we necessarily need that.
Andy Burnham
We need inquisitorial inquests rather than adversarial inquests. In the case of Hillsborough, the Lord Chief Justice made a specific ruling when he quashed the original inquest. He hoped, given that the police had clearly tainted the evidence, that the new inquest would not degenerate into an adversarial battle, but—I am afraid to say—that is exactly what happened. At public expense, one individual in particular, hired to represent the former officers, a Mr John Beggs, went into the courtroom and repeated all kinds of lies and innuendo about supporters of Liverpool football club. My hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) and I were there; we witnessed it—and it was a particularly unpleasant thing to witness. It is even more galling to think that we were paying for that.
It is not just the cost but how people are questioned that is gross and unjust. I will give one final example to illustrate. The House will know that, after a long fight by her family, an inquest was recently held into the death of Cheryl James, who died at the Deepcut barracks in Surrey. The QC acting for Surrey police was the same Mr John Beggs. I know, from speaking to Cheryl’s father, that the family were deeply hurt by an intrusive and aggressive line of questioning that focused on several very personal questions. They were particularly hurt by one untrue allegation levelled at them. According to Mr Beggs, Mr James, in making inquiries to Surrey police, had distracted the latter from the Milly Dowler investigation. Can Members imagine how he felt when he heard that? In trying to get to the truth about what happened to his daughter, he found himself the subject of an outrageous, appalling slur, which the Dowler family, such is their decency, stepped in to correct.
It should not be like this. It must not be like this. It is well known that police forces are instructed to hire this individual if they feel in a tight spot, and they pay huge amounts of public money to do so. It should not be allowed to carry on. We should call time on it today.
Mr Kevan Jones
My right hon. Friend is making a very good point—that kind of adversarial inquest is wrong—but, to repeat, could not the Chief Coroner lay something down in guidance to coroners to stop such behaviour? Not only is it not good for families; it does not help get to the truth either.
Andy Burnham
No, it does not. My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I cannot see why that should not happen. Equally, I cannot see why the Government would not accept the Bill, proposed by Lord Wills in another place, to create a national office to support bereaved families so that each family does not have to reinvent the wheel and go through all the learning needed to get ready for an inquest. That is another good proposal.
To finish, we are seeking to establish a simple principle. In the words of Mr James, this is about “parity of arms”—if it has to be like that. If there is to be an adversarial battle in the courtroom, we should at least give bereaved families the same ability as the public sector to defend themselves. That is an unanswerable principle, and I am sorry the Government have decided they cannot support it tonight. I know they are saying they are waiting for the conclusion of Bishop James’s report, but this is bigger than Hillsborough—it is very much evident in Hillsborough, but it is much bigger—and concerns a number of families facing a similar injustice today.
Is it not the case that public money should fund the establishment of the truth and, in particular, help people to get to the truth at the first time of asking, so that the truth can be used by public bodies to learn—to look at where they went wrong and see how they can improve? Instead, they do the opposite. They go into those courtrooms to defend themselves and reputations, spending large amounts of taxpayers’ money in doing so. I hope that the Government would agree with the spirit of what I am saying tonight. If they do, I would hope for a clear commitment this evening that they support the aim of parity of funding for families at inquests. From there, I hope we might be able to move forward. From what I can gather, however, the Government have not done enough, and unless the Minister is able to provide this level of reassurance, we will press the new clause to a vote.
Several hon. Members rose—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Natascha Engel)
Order. We have about an hour and a half before the winding-up speeches start, and there are eight Members wishing to speak. If we can keep to about 10 or so minutes, everyone should be able to contribute.
Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
I would not criticise for a moment the shadow Home Secretary for speaking for 45 minutes. He had a lot to say and spoke with great passion. He knows a lot about the bereaved Hillsborough families and all the associated issues, so I do not want to criticise him. If I may, however, before coming on to talk about new clause 23, I would like to say something gently to the right hon. Gentleman.
I do not know the Silk—I have never met him—to whom he twice referred and accused of unattractive conduct. That Silk was speaking on instructions, and I assume that, in line with the traditions and professional standards of the Bar, he did not set out deliberately to attack people. He was acting for the two relevant public authorities on the two separate occasions. It was his duty to put the cases for those clients. The cases might well have been unattractive and might well have come across as deeply upsetting to the people who were cross-examined, but it was his professional duty to act in that way. Another barrister might have done it differently or another client might have given different instructions, but it is a bit mean, if I may say so, to call out a particular barrister here in the House of Commons.
Sir Edward Garnier
I do not want to be distracted when we have so little time. I just wanted to defend the method by which members of the profession have to represent their clients. That aside, there is little on which I wish to criticise the shadow Home Secretary.
In the short time available I want to speak to new clause 23, which removes the requirement for prior authorisation in section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, so that
“Where a constable…reasonably believes that an offence has been, or is being, committed he may…require any person to remove any item”
when it is used
“wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing identity”.
The context in which I tabled the new clause—with about 22 other right hon. and hon. Members—goes back, as I said, to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. Section 60 states:
“If a police officer of or above the rank of inspector reasonably believes…that incidents involving serious violence may take place in any locality in his police area, and that it is expedient to give an authorisation under this section to prevent their occurrence, or…that persons are carrying dangerous instruments or offensive weapons in any locality in his police area without good reason, he may give an authorisation that the powers conferred by this section are to be exercisable at any place within that locality for a specified period not exceeding 24 hours.”
That section gave the police a geographically limited and time-limited power to do certain things. That was extended in 2001 by the addition of section 60AA, which gave the police a power, in that geographical area and for that limited time, to require the removal of disguises. Provided that there was prior authorisation, provided that that authorisation was written, and provided that it was for 24 hours unless extended by another officer for a further 24 hours, within that limited location, the constable in uniform was enabled to
“require any person to remove any item which the constable reasonably believes that person is wearing wholly or mainly for the purpose of concealing his identity”
and to
“seize any item which the constable reasonably believes any person intends to wear wholly or mainly for that purpose.”
So it was not until 2001 that the 1994 Act was amended to allow the police, in certain limited circumstances, to be authorised to deal with disguises.
As the House will recall, in August 2011 there were widespread riots throughout the country, following which the Government issued a consultation paper to consider whether three things needed to be looked at: the use of the word “insulting” in the 1994 Act, new powers to request the removal of face coverings, and new powers to impose curfews. The Government thought it appropriate to consult about new powers relating to such matters as disguises, saying:
“The…consultation aims to progress the commitment made by the Prime Minister following the recent disorder in respect of new powers to request the removal of face coverings. After the ransacking and arson by looters wearing masks to conceal identification, the Government announced that the police would be given extended powers to demand the removal of face coverings under any circumstances, where there was reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.”
Interestingly, the Government did not respond to the consultation other than in relation to “insulting words or behaviour”; the law was amended in that regard. In respect of the power to require the removal of face coverings, the law remains as it was in 2001. As I have said, that power is geographically limited and time-limited, and requires prior authorisation.
I have had the benefit of two meetings with my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims, who generously allowed me, and two of my hon. Friends, to try to persuade him that the law needed to be changed. On that occasion there were only eight officials in the room, but he seemed to be unpersuaded, on the basis of the advice that he had been given by officials and police officers, that a change in the law was necessary. Indeed, I think it was suggested to me that our new clause would weaken the powers of the police to remove disguises.
We need to recognise that the people who attend demonstrations wearing balaclavas or other face coverings are not doing that simply to prevent their identities from being discovered. Clearly, if a demonstration involves unlawful activity and the police are able to film it, or it is covered by local authority CCTV cameras, there is no better way for people to avoid detection, or avoid being caught, than disguising their faces. In most, although not all, criminal cases, the identity of the perpetrator is a fairly central part of the prosecution case. I am reasonably sure that in the olden days when robbers used to run into banks with shotguns and hold them up, normally wearing stockings over their faces, they were not wearing silk stockings on their heads because they liked the feeling of silk on their faces; they were wearing those silk stockings—or even tights, in which case it would be nylon on their faces—in order to prevent themselves from being discovered.
The same thing, I suspect, goes for people who are intent on pretty unattractive behaviour in the streets here in London, and in Manchester at last year’s Conservative party conference, where people in masks spat at delegates going into the conference hall, but they also do it to intimidate. There is nothing more intimidating than seeing somebody covered like that coming at you or demonstrating with a view to causing trouble. Yes, of course, there are laws already on the statute book or, no doubt, under common law which make it possible for a police officer to arrest somebody wearing a face mask if they are committing an offence. But in the event that there is a large-scale demonstration and there are not enough police officers to make it safe or practical for the police officer to go in, and therefore the police need to rely upon video evidence or film evidence of the perpetrator, it strikes me as unreal for a police officer to rely upon the existing power, which is geographically limited and time-limited, in order to deal with the matter.
Mike Penning
I am just conscious that I may not have enough time to cover everything in my winding-up speech. My right hon. and learned Friend indicated earlier that I was not persuaded. I did listen to the police officers, but a review of the PACE code A is coming through for stop-and-search later this year. We will insert face coverings into that review so we have a better understanding, and if a change is necessary, that will take place. I think that is a significant concession.
Sir Edward Garnier
That is a change of attitude, and I am grateful for it, but I am not sure that a review is what we need; what we need is action. My understanding is that the police do not want this change because they think—at least some of them do—that the power they have is adequate for what they need to do, but it is not, because these events are happening. People are being terrified, and people are being inhibited from going about their lawful business in the countryside and in urban areas, and it is not good enough for us to rely on a change in the PACE code or following some review.
The Government did not reply to their own consultation in 2011, and I do need to press them a little harder to ensure that this matter is properly ventilated. One of my jobs as a Member of Parliament is to express the concerns of the public from my constituency, and from other parts of the country as well, who are dissatisfied about the level of policing for this sort of behaviour.
Mike Penning
I am sure that my right hon. and learned Friend realises that a review of PACE is nothing to do with what the police want. We did a review of stop-and-search because it was being inappropriately used by the police, and that is why we changed the rules. If we find during the PACE review that the legislation is not being used in the way our constituents would expect, PACE will be changed. That is why we are doing the review. PACE reviews do not come up very often; this is a golden opportunity.
Sir Edward Garnier
I look forward to seeing the terms of the review, and I trust the Minister when he says it is going to be useful, but right now constituents in rural and urban areas are very distressed at the way in which face masks are used to terrify and to hide the identity of criminals. The sooner this matter is debated—with reasonable time to conclude it—on the Floor of this House or in the other place—
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)
I am one of the co-signatories of my right hon. and learned Friend’s new clause. The problem with the situation at the moment is that the constable on duty may require a face covering to be removed but he does then require post-authorisation from a senior officer on duty. In the Blackpool case and in my own case on the badger culls, where someone was parked in a car late at night for several nights with masks on deliberately to intimidate the residents inside the nearest farmhouse, I am not sure whether the constables on duty knew whether they would or would not get that prior authorisation or post-authorisation, and my right hon. and learned Friend’s new clause will make this crystal clear if it becomes part of the Bill.
Sir Edward Garnier
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s support, and I hope our new clause will make it easier for the police to do what the public require them to do, which is arrest frightening people who are intent on doing criminal things.
Richard Arkless
I rise to speak for the Scottish National party principally in order to place on the record our unending admiration for the right hon. Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham) and other Members on both sides of the Chamber who have fought this righteous fight for so many years and for so many people who have been lied to and been subject to the most horrendous cover-up. I echo pretty much all the words the right hon. Gentleman said at the Dispatch Box earlier.
Football is very important to people in Scotland, as the right hon. Gentleman will understand; every weekend we send more people to football games per head of population than anywhere else in the UK does. Everybody in Scotland can understand the fear of their loved ones not returning from watching what is just a game of football; we had the Ibrox disaster in 1971 and there is still a scar deep in the Scottish consciousness. We are completely committed in principle to helping the right hon. Gentleman with whatever he needs to try to get justice for those people. Unfortunately, the police system in Scotland is devolved so we are perhaps not able to offer any support this evening, other than in principle, but I would like to place that on the record, and wish him and his colleagues all the best in the fight for justice.
Mr Charles Walker
I wish to speak to new clauses 26, 29, 42 and 43, all of which stand in my name. I will try to be brief. First, I thank the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), for all the time she has taken over the past few weeks to discuss my concerns with me. I also wish to thank the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims, who has made himself available to me, and the Home Secretary. As hon. Members will know, there is significant concern about the interaction between policing and mental health services, and I wish to turn my attention to that issue.
New clause 26 would place an obligation on chief constables to ensure that their police officers were properly trained in diversity and equality in relation to mental health issues, and specifically issues that relate to ethnic minorities. I have worked closely with Black Mental Health UK over the past five years, and it has raised concerns directly with the Home Office and Members for a number of years. I want to read out a paragraph from its briefing. It states:
“The joint Home Office and Department of Health review of sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 acknowledged that ‘in particular Black African Caribbean men—are disproportionately over-represented in S136 detentions compared to the general population’ and that ‘Black African Caribbean men in particular reported that the use of force was more likely to be used against them by the police.’”
These are legitimate and real concerns, they have been subject to academic research and they need to be addressed.
Nearly three years ago, the Home Secretary co-hosted a fantastic conference at the QEII Centre with Black Mental Health UK, and my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims spoke at it. Great strides are being made, but we need to ensure that further progress happens in the months and years ahead. New clause 26 would therefore require chief police officers to make an annual report to the Home Secretary on what progress has been made in relation to diversity and equality training. I will not push it to a vote tonight, as I have had assurances from Ministers that the matter will be looked at seriously.
James Cleverly (Braintree) (Con)
This issue goes to the heart of the concept of policing by consent. I do not think that anybody who has had any involvement in policing will be unaware of the friction that exists between policing and many members of the UK’s black communities. Does my hon. Friend agree that an explicit step in the direction he suggests will go a long way towards building bridges between UK policing and a very significant minority group in the UK?
Mr Walker
I agree with my hon. Friend, which is why I am delighted that my concerns have received such close attention from Ministers and will continue to receive attention. I look forward to further updates. The Government are working very closely with Black Mental Health UK and its director Matilda MacAttram, and I hope that those conversations will continue.
I said that I would try to speak for only five minutes, but I might have to stray a little bit over that, Madam Deputy Speaker.
New clause 29 relates to access to legal advice before someone is detained under the Mental Health Act 1983. I know that the Opposition have tabled new clause 24, on advocacy, but mine is a probing new clause. The removal of someone’s liberty should never happen lightly. Again, there is great concern among the African-Caribbean community and Black Mental Health UK that a young black male is more likely than other people to have their liberty removed. New clause 29 is a genuine request to address a genuine concern, but I am not sure whether it is deliverable.
At the point of sectioning, the situation is almost always highly stressed. The needs of the individual who is ill should be central to that sectioning. There is very real concern about this situation. I am interested in the Opposition’s new clause 24 in relation to advocacy. Advocacy is often talked about but has not been delivered in the way that it should be. Again, my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench are aware of that issue.
New clauses 42 and 43 relate to the deployment of police officers on wards and the use of Tasers. I am well aware that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) will be speaking to new clause 40 on Tasers. I cannot be absolutist in my approach. I know that Black Mental Health UK never wants to see police officers used on mental health wards, and I share that view, but there will always be occasions where that possibility remains. When police officers are deployed to mental health wards, there should be an almost immediate notification to the police and crime commissioner and the Independent Police Complaints Commission that that deployment has taken place. I know that Home Office Ministers are working closely with the Department of Health on collating better statistics about the use of force and restraint, but we cannot wait 365 days before receiving that information. When police are deployed on mental health wards, that information needs to be made available immediately. Again I have received assurances from Ministers that work will be done on that matter. I know that time is short, but when the Minister sums up, I hope that he will again reassure me and Matilda MacAttram that that work will be done.
Finally, I turn to the use of Tasers on mental health wards. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk will argue, with great justification and passion, that Tasers should never be used on mental health wards. My heart is with him, but my head says that there may be some highly charged situations where a Taser needs to be used. Right now, we know that Tasers are being used, but we are not collating or collecting the information, and there is no way for the House to know what is going on, or for concerned individuals to find out what is going on. When a Taser is used—I hope that they will never be used—a report needs to be made within a week to the police and crime commissioner and the IPCC. I am not suggesting for a minute that any police officer will take the action of using a Taser lightly, but we must remember that we are talking about Tasers and force being used in safe hospital environments. Again, I have received assurances from Ministers in relation to the issue, and I hope that the Minister will refer to those assurances in responding to the debate.
Finally, I draw the Minister’s attention to a trial in Los Angeles, where Tasers are linked to body cameras by Bluetooth, so that the camera starts recording immediately when a Taser is drawn. It does not need to be manually started by the police officer. Perhaps the Home Office would like to look at that.
I apologise for having spoken for a little longer than I said I would, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Keith Vaz
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), who has raised so many important issues. He and the House have insufficient time to discuss all these issues, so I want to confine my remarks to just a couple of aspects of this group of amendments, the first of which relates to the Government’s decision to accept the recommendations of the Home Affairs Committee to place an initial 28-day limit on pre-charge bail.
I am sorry that the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims has left the Chamber, because I wanted to pay tribute to him for being one of the very few Ministers we have encountered who writes back to the Committee and says that the Government will adopt some of our recommendations. He did so in respect of a 28-day limit on pre-charge bail, an issue that we have raised on a number of occasions. Most recently, in our report on police bail, we considered the case of Mr Paul Gambaccini and the need to prevent police bail from going on and on without limit. The limit is very welcome and very important.
I want to concentrate next on new clause 22, which relates to the surrender of travel documentation. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) will speak to that new clause when he makes his winding-up speech, but I support it very strongly. It will go a long way towards addressing in the law our concern about terrorist suspects who can leave the country because they have not given up their passports or even been asked for them.
In the Home Affairs Committee’s review of counter-terrorism, we took interesting evidence from the sister of Siddhartha Dhar. Mr Dhar fled the United Kingdom while on police bail and despite being asked politely by the police to send in his passport. In fact, he never received the polite letter that the Metropolitan police sent to him asking him to hand in his passport, because he left the country when he was released from custody. He was already in Syria when that letter was sent.
What the Government propose in the Bill is welcome, but new clause 22 goes a little further. I very much hope that the Government will change their mind and accept it, because it is in keeping with the evidence given to us by the head of counter-terrorism, Mark Rowley, who said that when someone surrenders a passport immediately, the police and the security services know where that passport is and that, if someone breaches that requirement —in other words, if they do not hand over their passport—they should be in breach of their bail conditions.
Mike Penning
I understand that, in my absence, the right hon. Gentleman might have said something nice about me, so it was probably a good job that I was not here.
Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that the police have the power now to go with an individual when granting bail and physically take their passport or travel document before they release them?
Keith Vaz
They do indeed, but they did not do so in the case that I mentioned, which is the problem. We do not know how many other such cases there have been. We know about that case because it came into the public domain, and Mr Dhar ended up on a YouTube video telling us what he was doing. There might be other cases, but people are not very open about admitting mistakes. I accept that the power the Minister mentions may have been used before, but enshrining it in legislation as proposed in new clause 22 would be helpful.
Robert Neill
It is appropriate that I follow the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, as I am conscious of the fact that my predecessor as Chair of the Justice Committee was present when those assurances were given. I do not doubt the good intentions of the Minister and I am prepared to cut the Government slack over the matter, but there is an important point that the right hon. Gentleman has just made: it is not purely the high profile cases that are of concern to many professionals in the criminal justice system.
The shadow Home Secretary spoke movingly and passionately about the impact of Hillsborough and other such scandals, but of equal concern to lawyers such as me—I have had 25 years in the criminal courts—is the long-term day-to-day cosiness of relationships that, I am sorry to say, develop between police officers, not necessarily at the highest level but at an operational level, and reporters. Unless something is done to deal with that, there is a risk of miscarriages of justice. However these things are done, they do not come purely on the back of headline catching; there is a more insidious culture in some ways, which can be dealt with only through very firm management by the leadership of the police service, and if that is lacking it needs to be looked at appropriately.
I accept the concern about outstanding cases, but there is no doubt that this issue is potentially important. Any practitioner at the Bar will know of any number of occasions where the local press—this is not just about the nationals—has been aware, surprisingly, that a particular person was going to be arrested or that a particular search was going to be carried out. I am afraid that that cannot happen accidentally, so there is an issue here of general concern.
Let me turn briefly to new clause 23, to which I am a signatory. Again, I accept that the Minister wants to take the issue forward, but I agree with the sentiments expressed by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). There is inevitably a reluctance among officials—I used to find that as a Minister—and senior officers to complicate regulations if they think that what they have got will do. I do not doubt that the advice the Minister has been given was given in good faith, but I say as a London MP who speaks to officers on the beat—on the frontline—in my constituency that their concerns about the inadequacy of the current provisions are genuine, and their experience perhaps does not mirror the advice the Minister may be getting from some of the top brass in the service. That advice may also not always mirror the concerns of my constituents, who go up to London to work and who are sometimes caught in these particularly unpleasant and intimidating demonstrations. My right hon. and learned Friend therefore makes an important point in his new clause.
Let me turn now to the main issue I wanted to raise, which I hinted at in my two interventions on the Minister: new clause 48 and the fire inspection regime. As I said to the Minister, who was generous in his responses to me, I welcome the change. In some ways, I wish I had been able to bring it in when I was the Minister responsible for the fire services, but the political and administrative climate was not there for it to be done, so I genuinely congratulate him on introducing it. He has more front-line experience of the fire services than I do, having actually done the job of putting fires out. My involvement with the fire services goes back to my involvement with the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) some—I hate to say it—30 years ago, when I was the leader of the London Fire and Civil Defence Authority, immediately after the abolition of the Greater London Council. I would like to say that I lied about my age to join up, but that was not quite the case. However, I have been involved with the fire services in one way or another ever since.
At the time, we had the old-school inspectorate. Then we moved to an arrangement with a chief adviser. I think we all hoped that peer review and the work of bodies such as the Chief Fire Officers Association and others would achieve improvement from within. However, the Minister is right to have concluded that that arrangement is not delivering all that we want, and the recent evidence in the Public Accounts Committee report sets that out very clearly. It is therefore right to move to the inspectorate, and I warmly support it.
The reason I have raised what seems an arcane and technical point is this. I have taken on board what the Minister has said, but I want to amplify why I think it is right. One problem with the old inspectorate was that it tended to be a bit of an old boys’ club for retired senior officers. Almost invariably, the inspectors and the assistant and acting inspectors came from a very narrow group of retired senior officers, and there was a bit of a revolving door. There were therefore real questions about the inspectorate being up to the minute in its knowledge and about the degree of independence that it would bring. An inspector can have to say pretty hard things to a chief officer and his management team, and that is not too easy if someone has come fairly recently from within the ranks of a fairly close-knit service.
That is why there should, where appropriate, be greater flexibility to bring in a contractor with expertise in the appropriate fields. That may not be for the whole of an inspection, but it could be for a specific part. The obvious example is in relation to financial matters, but this would also work in relation to things such as the assurance of operational resilience, because there is now expertise in the private sector, as well as in the public sector, that can appropriately be brought to bear.
James Cleverly
In the new environment where we are encouraging greater collaboration between the blue-light services, might the fire inspectorate not also want to lean on senior members of the other uniformed blue-light services to add their expertise and to support the inspectorate as part of this multi-agency working?
Robert Neill
My hon. Friend is also the former chair of a London fire and emergency planning authority, and he makes an important point. All of us who have taken an interest in fire services over the years favour greater collaboration between the blue-light services, and I know that that is where the Minister wants to go. We all want a formula that will achieve that, but my concern is that the current wording of the Bill might make that harder, although I have absolutely no doubt that that is not the intention of Ministers. The reason I raise this concern is that, as it reads, proposed new subsection (A5), which will be placed in section 28 of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004, does not seem to cover the use of contractors.
Mike Penning
I will look very carefully at this issue during the Bill’s passage from this House, should it get a Third Reading this evening, to the Lords. If I need to clarify the position, I will do so by means of a Government amendment in the Lords.
Robert Neill
I am immensely grateful to the Minister for that. That shortens greatly what I have to say. To fortify my right hon. Friend in what he says, let me say that the Public Accounts Committee found evidence that the Chief Fire Officers Association and the Local Government Association did not regard the peer review process as an adequate self-improvement tool. If he is happy to continue to talk to those with an interest in the sector and to deal with what might be an unintended lacuna, I and many others who wish him well in this endeavour, and who wish the fire and rescue services well, will be very happy to work with him to achieve that objective.
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
New clause 12, which stands in my name, would amend section 1 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. It would scrap the distressing rules that provide that dementia sufferers who die in care homes while subject to a deprivation of liberty safeguard are classed as being in state detention.
I first took this issue up after being contacted by families who told me of their distress at having to wait to bury their loved ones because inquests are required into the deaths of dementia sufferers who are subject to a DoLS, irrespective of the circumstances of their death.
Councils were inundated with DoLS applications from care homes after a Supreme Court ruling in 2014, which effectively lowered the threshold for what constitutes deprivation of liberty in care. Guidance issued by the Chief Coroner to local coroners following the Supreme Court judgment said that all persons who died subject to a DoLS order must be the subject of a coroner’s investigation, whether or not their death was from natural causes, because such persons are deemed for the purposes of the 2009 Act to be in state detention.
The new clause was suggested by the Chief Coroner himself in response to, and in recognition of, the distress caused to relatives. The Chief Coroner indicated to the Law Commission and the Government that a simple amendment to the 2009 Act might solve the problem of unnecessary cases being reported to the coroner, at least in the short term. The amendment proposed by the Chief Coroner said:
“For the purposes of this Act, a person who dies while subject to an authorisation granted under Schedule A1 to the Mental Capacity Act 2005 depriving that person of his or her liberty and detaining him or her in a hospital or care home does not die while in custody or otherwise in state detention.”
Constituents have contacted me, including one woman who wrote after her mother died in a nursing home. She told me:
“My mum suffered from dementia and other health problems and we sat with her for four days and nights before she passed away. Within one hour of her death, uniformed police arrived and we were asked to leave the room.”
Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)
I have had a very similar case of a constituent whose mother was in a nursing home and died. Almost immediately, the police came, and for 10 days had hold of her body. Does that not cause great distress to people at a time of mourning, and is it not why we really need to tighten up the rules regarding deprivation of liberty?
Ann Coffey
My hon. Friend is right. Many people across the country have experienced that kind of unnecessary distress and trauma.
Since the tabling of this amendment on 25 May, the Law Commission issued its interim statement, “Mental Capacity and Deprivation of Liberty”, which said that there is a compelling case for replacing DoLS and that the Coroners and Justice Act should be amended to remove the proposed new scheme from the definition of “state detention”. I quote:
“The current law—which requires an inquest where a person dies while under a DoLS even if the cause of their death was entirely natural—was seen to be causing unnecessary work for corners and upset to families. We received reports, for example, of police arriving at the deceased’s deathbed; one consultee reported their impression of a ‘crime scene’; another referred to issues over whether the deceased’s body should be taken to the official mortuary rather than by the family’s preferred funeral director.”
The Law Commission has therefore recommended that the Coroners and Justice Act be amended when the new system is introduced. I am proposing that we take the opportunity to amend it now, through this Bill. The Law Commission’s report is an interim one, so we will have to wait for the final report, and then for legislation to be drafted and enacted. That could take up to two years, during which many more families will continue to suffer distress.
We talk a lot about supporting carers. I know from my own personal experience how distressing it can be to watch a loved relative struggle to cope with dementia and their families struggle to support them. It is heartless then to put relatives who have cared to the limits of their emotional capacity through this further trauma at the time of the death of their loved one.
I am not going to press the amendment, but I hope that the Minister has heard what I have said and that he will talk to his colleagues in the Department of Health.
Mike Penning
That is exactly what we are doing. We are looking at this across Government, not only in the light of the Law Commission’s partial report. Work has already taken place. I thank the hon. Lady for saying that she will not press the amendment. It is a probing amendment, and she is probing in exactly the right direction.
Ann Coffey
I thank the Minister for that positive reply. When the Bill goes to the Lords, I look forward to seeing the Government’s response in amending it.
James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)
I rise to speak to the new clauses tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) and by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mental health, I start my remarks with the caveat that the changes the Bill makes to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 are very substantial and significant. Over the past few years, there has been considerable improvement in the way in which police forces and police officers deal with people in mental health crisis.
New clauses 42 and 43, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, relate to police officers being deployed in psychiatric wards. New clause 42 raises some important questions about occasions when police officers are requested to take action within health-based settings, particularly acute psychiatric settings. That speaks to an important developing relationship between the police and the health service. Sometimes, because of the particular nature of an individual’s condition, or other circumstances, it may be appropriate for police to be deployed in psychiatric settings, but that should happen only in very exceptional circumstances. We might need to look at how acute psychiatric units go about risk-profiling patients who are currently in acute psychiatric settings in order to ensure that it is very rare and exceptional for police officers to be called on to take action within those settings. I broadly support the intentions of the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend, who has done a lot of very important work in this area, of which he is a champion.
I also have a lot of sympathy for my hon. Friend’s new clause 43, which is about Tasers. I agree that only in the most exceptional circumstances should Tasers be used within acute psychiatric settings and that we should have very clear guidance and guidelines as to the appropriate time for the deployment of that kind of force.
New clause 58, tabled by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk, who has not yet had an opportunity to speak to it, raises important issues in relation to implementing the changes to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act. It refers to the controversial idea of a person’s private dwelling being characterised as a place of safety. This speaks to the relationship between policing and the health service in terms of the operation of places of safety. We need to think about how we can provide a broader range of alternative places of safety, some of which might be based not in the national health service but in the voluntary sector or in crisis houses, and about the capacity of the system to provide appropriate places of safety.
Mike Penning
This is a really important point. To be brutally honest, unless we say, “No, we will be the port of last resort”, we will continue to be the first place that people come to, and that then pushes other Departments into getting their act together to do something. The police are now having to say, as we are saying in the Bill, that they will not hold people in police cells inappropriately, as they have been doing for too many years. That will force other Departments to do exactly what my hon. Friend is talking about.
James Morris
I thank the Minister for that intervention. There may be a role for police and crime commissioners to explore the need to work more closely with the health service and others to provide the capacity for appropriate places of safety such that police officers do not have to make the sorts of decisions implied by new clause 58.
The overall changes to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act are essential and quite transformative. We have to be very clear about what we mean by the exceptional circumstances in which people are detained, perhaps moving to a system where it becomes inappropriate in all circumstances even for adults to be detained in police cells. I recognise that there may be a need to define the exceptional circumstances in which that might happen. The proposed changes are positive. The new clauses I have discussed raise important questions that the Minister should consider in summing up.
Norman Lamb
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris). I also welcome the contribution made by the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker), who does an awful lot of campaigning on this issue.
I have tabled a number of new clauses and amendments. The first issue I want to deal with is whether we should disallow the use of Tasers on psychiatric wards. Before I get into the detail, I, like other speakers, want to acknowledge the inspiring leadership of many police leaders who, through force of strong moral leadership, have managed to change practice in many parts of the country. We owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.
On the issue of Tasers on psychiatric wards, the hon. Gentleman referred to Black Mental Health UK, an important campaigning organisation. As he said, it has drawn attention to the fact that
“in particular Black African Caribbean men”
are
“disproportionately over-represented in S136 detentions compared to the general population.”
That, incidentally, is a conclusion from the joint Home Office and Department of Health review of sections 135 and 136. It has also been reported that the police are more likely to use force against black African-Caribbean men.
I want to challenge the assumption that force is necessary at the level with which it is used at the moment. Black Mental Health UK refers in its briefing for this debate to the United Nations committee against torture, which has stated that Taser X26 weapons provoke extreme pain and constitute a form of torture and that in certain cases they can also cause death. Although they are termed non-lethal, almost 10 known deaths have been associated with the use of Tasers in the past 10 years.
I want to get a debate going on the subject. I am delighted that the Home Secretary herself has said:
“I have been hearing stories, for example, of Tasers having been used in mental health wards and you think, ‘Hang on a minute, what is happening here?’”
That is what we should all be doing: we should be questioning whether that is appropriate, and that is why I tabled new clause 40.
My amendment 124 would, in effect, prohibit the use of police cells as a place of safety for adults. I welcome the fact that the Government are implementing, through this Bill, the joint review’s recommendation to end the use of police cells for children and young people. However, the inspiring leadership of many police officers, working closely with mental health services, means that, in all but the most extreme cases, the use of police cells for such purposes has ended in some parts of the country. In London, for example, hardly any adults go into police cells as a result of section 136, and the same is true about the west midlands over the past two years. If those areas of the country with impressive leadership can do it, we should challenge every part of the country to do so, and the Bill should lead the way.
I welcome the fact that the Minister himself said on Second Reading:
“Unless we actually put a stop to that”—
the use of police cells—
“and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ we will not get the provision we need from other agencies.”—[Official Report, 7 March 2016; Vol. 607, c. 102-103.]
That is absolutely right. We cannot use the fact that the NHS is under pressure as an excuse not to do this. If it is wrong, it is wrong, and it needs to be challenged.
My new clause 45 would ensure that, in every case where there has been evidence of child sexual exploitation, the victims are referred for a mental health assessment. “Future in mind”, the report that I published in March 2015 following a taskforce that we set up to consider children’s mental health services, set out the need for trauma-focused care and for sexually abused and exploited children to receive
“a comprehensive specialist initial assessment, and referral to appropriate services providing evidence-based interventions according to their need.”
The new clause seeks to implement that recommendation.
In its briefing for this debate, the Local Government Association supports the intention, but again raises concern about investment. Are we really saying that the lack of availability of mental health services is a reason not to ensure that every child who has suffered sexual exploitation gets the chance to receive a proper assessment? Surely we have to set what is right in legislation and then ensure that we provide the facilities to make it happen. Anything short of that is not acceptable.
Mr Kevan Jones
Does the right hon. Gentleman share my concern about detention at home, which I raised in Committee? Although it is welcome that this Bill will try to reduce the number of people going into police cells, the de facto position may be to take people home because of the lack of beds elsewhere, even though that might not be the best place for the individual concerned.
Norman Lamb
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. The fear is that that will become the default position in some localities because of the lack of resources available. That would be a big mistake. In circumstances where section 136 is used, surely the person should be taken to a health-based place of safety. A real effort is under way around the country—it is showing signs of success—through the use of approaches such as the street triage service, to reduce substantially the use of section 136 at all and to deal with issues in a more informal way. However, where it has to be used, we must make sure that the person is taken to the right place.
James Morris
Does the right hon. Gentleman accept that perhaps we need to think about the definition of “health-based place of safety”? The definition is in the control of the national health service, but perhaps it needs to be broader so that it can mean a voluntary organisation or elsewhere. That would be one way of improving our capacity.
Norman Lamb
I noted the hon. Gentleman’s remarks in his speech a few moments ago and he is absolutely right. A crisis house or a place of safety provided by a particular community for one of its people may well be the best place for them to go. We should be willing to open up the definition in an appropriate way.
New clause 59 centres on the right of those detained under sections 135 and 136 to an appropriate adult. Anyone detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 has a right to an independent mental health advocate, except when the detention is under sections 135 or 136. In such circumstances, the person may be very vulnerable, so surely the Bill should embrace the idea, as Mind has argued, that they should have a right to an appropriate adult.
Finally, I want to address the issue of when the clock should start. I welcome the fact that the Bill reduces to 24 hours the maximum length of time for which someone should be held under section 136 while the assessment takes place. There is a critical question, however, about when the clock starts. If there is pressure on resources and facilities, someone could be kept in a police van and driven around a city—that does happen sometimes. That time, under the Government’s proposed definition, would not count. Some hours could pass before the person arrived at the place of safety. Mind’s argument, which is contained in amendment 125, is that the clock should start when a person is detained rather than when they arrive at a place of safety.
Mike Penning
One of my concerns about that is that we set a target of taking the individual who needs that help somewhere quickly, rather than taking them to the right place for their needs.
Norman Lamb
I am grateful to the Minister for that intervention, and I understand that we have to balance all these things. I am trying to ensure that legislation puts pressure on agencies to provide sufficient resource to meet a clear need. That is not the case at the moment.
I conclude by saying that the amendments and new clauses in this group are all designed to improve the rights of people with mental ill health, who are too often let down by the system at the moment.
Geoffrey Clifton-Brown
I wish to address new clause 23 and take the Minister on a very short metaphorical journey with me, although perhaps nowhere near as far as new clause 23 seeks to go. I am sorry if I am trying the patience of the Minister and the House, because the Minister has been exceptionally courteous today, as he has been to me on previous aspects of the Bill.
Let me explain the mischief of face coverings, with which the House is well acquainted. In my intervention on my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier), I mentioned two events: the Conservative party conference in Manchester, and an incident in my constituency in which, during the badger cull, two people in masks parked outside a farmhouse several evenings in a row as it was getting dark, deliberately intending to intimidate. A similar thing happened at the Blackpool conference. I was there when people, women in particular, were intimidated by people in masks. If only the police had been able to ask those people to take off the masks, I think the intimidation would have stopped almost on the spot. I suspect that in those two incidents, the mere act of the constable on duty asking those people to take off the masks would have stopped the mischief there and then.
That is the journey on which I want to take my right hon. Friend the Minister. It is perhaps not the entirety of new clause 23, but let us simply look at section 60AA of the Public Order Act 1994, which requires a constable on duty to obtain prior written consent before a mask is taken off—[Interruption.] The Minister is going to intervene. May I just explain where I am coming from on this? Very often, a constable will get on the radio and obtain verbal consent, and the written consent is given afterwards. Technically, a crime is being committed because they have not got prior written consent.
Let us do away with the whole issue of written consent. We train our constables to a very high level, and we put a great deal of trust in them. Let us trust them in individual situations. If they think that face masks are a problem, we should give them the power to demand that the face masks be removed immediately. It may even be possible to do this by secondary legislation. Section 60AA—[Interruption.] Does my right hon. Friend the Minister want me to give way? If he does as I suggest, I think we will achieve what we want to achieve.
Mr Kevan Jones
I want to speak to new clause 24, which stands in my name and those of several of my hon. Friends. I will also refer to the amendments tabled by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb) and the hon. Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker).
The hon. Member for Broxbourne raised the fact that the state’s power to deprive someone of their liberty is one of the most draconian acts at its disposal. As the right hon. Member for North Norfolk said, someone who is detained under the Mental Health Act 1983, other than under sections 135 or 136, is entitled to a mental health advocate. If they are detained under sections 135 or 136 of that Act, they are not. The only way in which they could access legal advice, as I think the hon. Member for Broxbourne said, is if they are detained at a police station.
Quite rightly, the Government want to prevent people from being taken to police stations in the first place—I give them credit for this—because a police cell is clearly not the correct place for someone who is in mental health crisis. The important thing is that such individuals need some advocacy. At the moment, if an individual is not taken to a police cell or a police station, they will not have access to independent legal advice or any type of advocacy. New clause 24 is designed to get some parity with the rest of the 1983 Act, in which people do have advocacy. I am pleased that the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), who responded to a similar amendment in Committee, has just taken her seat. She has promised to look at this issue.
I do not intend to press the new clause to a vote, but it is important that we put in place a system under which people who are detained under sections 135 and 136 of the 1983 Act can, at least, access some advice. I agree with the point made by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk in new clause 59, which is designed to do a similar thing by ensuring that individuals have access to an adult who could speak or advocate on their behalf. I have had discussions with the Minister, and she has given undertakings to look at how that could be done.
I agree with the hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris) that many of the things in the Bill are not necessarily the responsibility of the police. They have stepped up to the mark, in many cases, to fill a gap created by a lack of funding or support. In some cases, because of the disjunction between mental health services, local authorities and others, the police are seen as the last resort. He is right to highlight that.
That brings me on to new clause 26, which has been tabled by the hon. Member for Broxbourne, and which I welcome. There is good practice already in many police forces, which undergo mental health training—in Durham, the chief constable has instigated a whole force review to make sure that people have access to mental health training—but it is important that we have consistency. Police forces will be empowered and given greater expertise if they know how to use not just sections 136 and 137 of the 1983 Act, but other sections. I pay tribute to police forces up and down the country, because there is some good practice.
In Committee, we referred to the concordat, which is a good move forward in ensuring that there is a joined-up approach at local level between police forces, local authorities and the health service. I tabled an amendment in Committee to put that concordat into some sort of statutory framework. I know that the Minister is exploring with colleagues at the Department of Health how we can get some agreement, or some sort of reporting, on what is happening at a local level.
The right hon. Member for North Norfolk has the done the House a great service by tabling new clause 40 because it concerns a subject that is not being talked about. I totally agree with him; I can envisage no circumstances in which it would be necessary to use a Taser on a mental health ward. The right hon. Gentleman praised Black Mental Health UK, which has done a lot of work on the issue. When I met Black Mental Health UK, I was struck by the stark fact that something has to be done. I know that the Home Secretary and the Minister have looked at the figures, and the only mathematical conclusion we can reach is that people from black and Afro-Caribbean communities are being detained under the 1983 Act disproportionately compared with any other section of the community. Those figures cannot just be the result of chance. I urge the Government to look seriously at the matter and think about how we can put mechanisms in place to ensure that that is not the case.
On new clause 43, I agree with the hon. Member for Broxbourne that if the use of Tasers is not going to be prohibited, we should at least have statistics to show when and where they are being used. New clause 58 is similar to an amendment that I tabled in Committee. I give credit to the Government for their efforts to ensure that people in mental health crisis do not end up in a police cell, but unless we have very close monitoring and reporting, we might end up in the de facto position that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk has just mentioned in relation to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act.
Mr Charles Walker
The hon. Gentleman is making a fantastic speech. Is it not remarkable just how far this House has come in the past four years? In this debate, we are putting the interests of mental health patients at the centre of what we are discussing, and he should take great credit for that personally.
Mr Jones
I should not be the only one taking credit for that. The hon. Gentleman should do so as well, as should many other people in the House. To give credit to the Government, they have taken this issue seriously and both the Ministers who served on the Committee are committed to ensuring that we get the best outcomes for people in mental health crisis in the criminal justice system.
We should soon have a situation in which police cells will not be the first resort, as they have been in the past. I am not criticising the police for taking people to the cells; they were often the only places available. However, we need to monitor closely what happens to people when they are detained under sections 135 and 136 of the Act. I would not want keeping people at home to become the de facto position. That might be helpful for the statistics on keeping people out of police cells, but people’s homes might not be the best possible place for individuals in crisis. The hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis made the point that they do not necessarily have to be placed in a health facility. The hon. Member for Broxbourne has said on numerous occasions that this country needs a network of places of safety for individuals in mental health crisis. Those places could be run by health authorities, by charities or by others, but we need such a network because neither a police cell nor, in some cases, a hospital is the best place for certain people in crisis.
I am glad that the proposed changes to the Bill are being taken seriously by the Government. I pay tribute to the way in which both Ministers have addressed these matters in Committee. Even though some of the proposals are not going to be put in the Bill, I believe that the Ministers, working with colleagues in the Department of Health, will be able to achieve a situation in which people in mental health crisis do not end up in the criminal justice system. That should be our aim.
Jim Fitzpatrick
It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). I shall not be referring to the mental health provisions in the Bill, but I commend colleagues who have already spoken about that and who have been personally responsible for taking this issue so far and for encouraging the Government to listen to the arguments that they have been putting forward for years. I also commend the Government for their response to the debates that took place in Committee and, more generally, for their attitude towards mental health. I also want to commend the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), for the way in which he spoke to his new clauses almost as part of the campaign on Hillsborough. He spoke passionately and powerfully and I hope that the Government will respond positively to his requests for the new clauses to be accepted, if only in principle. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the debate.
I want to speak briefly to new clause 48 and new schedule 1, which propose the re-creation of a national fire service inspectorate in England. My friend the Minister is, like me, a former firefighter. When I ask him to do things in our exchanges on fire brigade matters, he sometimes throws back at me the fact that I did not do them when I was Fire Minister and asks why should he do them now. I want to ask him why he is recreating the fire service inspectorate when we did away with it and put other arrangements in place. I will be interested to hear his explanation. I welcome the fact, as the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) and others have done, that the Government recognise there is a vacuum and that something has to be created to fill the gap. Whether that is an inspectorate as set out in the new clause or whether that wording changes when the Bill goes to the House of Lords, the fact that the Government are moving in this direction is welcome.
In Westminster Hall last week, we discussed with the Minister the increasing number of calls related to flooding that the fire service now deals with, the transition towards dealing with more medical emergency calls and the arrangements with the national health service for the fire service to do more social care visits alongside fire safety visits. These changes all demonstrate the fact that the fire service is moving into different territory, and that different skills are being developed which require different resources as well as the staff to carry them out.
As I mentioned in Westminster Hall, criticisms are being levelled at the fire service, parts of which are being blamed for the reductions in the service. The fire and rescue service has been a victim of its own success in recent decades, having cut the number of calls and fires and reduced the number of deaths and serious injuries. That has resulted in the loss of fire stations, fire appliances and firefighters. The Minister will remember that I stated in that debate that there are nearly 7,000 fewer firefighters in the UK now than there were in 2010. That fact has raised a number of eyebrows, and questions are being asked about attendance times being met and resources being available. People are now asking whether the service is still equipped to do the job that it needs to do.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman has great experience in the fire and rescue service in a number of capacities. The operational issues that he is rightly raising are important, but will he acknowledge the Public Accounts Committee’s finding that in the wake of the abolition of the Audit Commission, the governance, scrutiny and oversight of many fire and rescue services and the cosy relationship between the authorities and those services were unsatisfactory in terms of providing value for the taxpayer’s pound?
Jim Fitzpatrick
Absolutely. I agree with the hon. Gentleman. That point was also raised by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, and I am sure that the Minister will also put forward an argument for putting in place a means of making those measurements.
Having said all that, I am curious about the lateness of the arrival of the new clauses. The Minister referred positively to the consensus in Committee and to the ability of both sides to help each other out to make progress on the Bill. I commend the shadow Fire Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for arguing for a provision to assess the ability of the fire service to carry out its functions. To the Minister’s credit, he has now tabled the new clause and the new schedule to address that issue.
I mentioned in an intervention my curiosity about whether the Government had considered the United Kingdom Accreditation Service as a potential vehicle to carry out the function that is being proposed here. The Minister knows that I had 23 years in the fire service, 13 of which were spent as an operational firefighter, and I participated in drills in the fire station as set out by Her Majesty’s inspectorate. I have to question the value of those drills, because we would train for weeks to get them right but they still did not always go entirely right. I question the value of putting in that amount of rehearsal. I wonder whether all that practice actually made the whole exercise worthless.
We decided to abolish Her Majesty’s inspectorate because of the scepticism and cynicism surrounding it—the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to an old boys’ network earlier—and I would have hoped that the Government would now be proposing something new. However, they seem to be proposing a re creation of what went before. Having moved it to the Department for Communities and Local Government and then back to the Home Office, there seems to be replication so that, along with Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons, we will now have Her Majesty’s inspectorate of fire services.
I look forward to hearing more from the Minister and to listening to the debates in the other place, where I suspect the Bill will get more scrutiny than it has in this place. Public confidence in the fire service is high and has always been high, but the fire service needs professional underpinning and validation not only for public confidence and value for money, but for the safety of firefighters who put themselves on the frontline to protect the public. I look forward to a more extensive debate when the Bill goes to the other place, and to some comments from the Minister when he sums up. This is a positive step forward, but we need to make sure that the fire service can demonstrate to its own satisfaction, to our satisfaction and to that of the public that it is equipped, resourced and able to do the job we all admire it for doing and want it to carry on doing in the future.
Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)
May I first apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker? Although I was in the Chamber for the Minister’s opening speech, I had to chair a Delegated Legislation Committee—you were kind enough to put me on the Panel of Chairs—so I am sorry that I have not been present for the whole of this debate.
I want to speak to new clause 23, which was so ably introduced by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). I understand that it will not be pushed to a vote, that there will be a review in relation to PACE and that the Minister has listened carefully to all the arguments that have been made. If we are to have a review, there is an opportunity—I will use my brief remarks to talk about it—to have a debate in this country about face coverings generally. Many people in our country feel that it is quite un-British, and is not necessary for any reason, except in exceptional circumstances.
I do not want to suggest that we should take heavy-handed, universal action to prevent people from covering their face in this country, because that is also in a sense un-British. Fundamentally, as a nation, we actually believe in the freedom of people to live their lives in the way that, for whatever reason, they want, so long as they do not alarm or intimidate others. I know that other countries—for example, France and I believe Belgium, which are perfectly moderate, sensible, freedom-loving countries—have decided to ban face coverings in public, but we probably do not want to proceed in that way in this country.
If we are to have a review, I believe that this is an opportunity to have a debate. I certainly join my hon. Friends who have expressed concern about certain situations in which people feel intimidated, such as in the environs of a hunt, an animal research laboratory, or a demonstration outside Parliament. People are of course entitled to demonstrate—nobody is denying that—but it is very intimidating for the police and the public to see people engaged in demonstrations with any kind of face covering.
I understand that it is perfectly possible under present arrangements for the authorities to issue written instructions so that a police constable can require people to remove their face coverings and all the rest of it, but I would like us to go further. I suggest that the way to deal with this problem is to say—in a particular situation that might be threatening, intimidatory, violent or confrontational on both sides—there should certainly be a right for a police constable to require somebody to remove a face covering. It should be possible for a chief constable to have such a right, as well as to lay down general prohibitions against face coverings.
It should also be possible—there should be a public debate about this, because I know that there are different points of view—for the Home Secretary to issue a ban against face coverings in certain situations or in particularly sensitive geographical places, such as the central areas of the cities of London and Westminster, the central part of our capital city, which is sensitive for all sorts of reasons, or in hospitals, schools, law courts and doctors’ surgeries. I know not everybody in the House will agree, but many members of the public are concerned about this.
Mike Penning
It is real privilege to sum up the debate on this group of amendments. I thank the shadow Policing Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), for giving me more time—he could easily have risen to speak to the amendments. I am pleased that I have a bit of time to talk through some of the points that have been raised, and I have already given some indication of what I will say in interventions on right hon. and hon. Members. I have been told off by the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, but that is understandable. It was not the first time, and it will not be the last time.
I want to say a little about the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) and the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) on the new inspectorate. At the outset, may I say that my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst was brutally honest when he said he would have liked to have made this change, but was prevented by circumstances when he was the Minister? Perhaps the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse—my predecessor in many different capacities, including as a firefighter—was also prevented from doing so by different circumstances when he was Minister.
We must learn from our mistakes—to be brutally honest, we all make mistakes in life—so the first thing to say is that it is absolutely correct that the inspectorate will not be an old boys’ network. It will be based on Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, and on police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy reviews. Firefighters will not have weeks to practise their escape drills, which I remember so vividly from when I was in the job. For people of a certain age, such escapes were done on the old ladders, which were on big wheels that could get firefighters to places some of the modern ladders will not reach.
Importantly, the inspector will have the power to bring in the experts he or she thinks fit to do inspections. The inspector should not be an ex-chief fire officer from somewhere, which is similar to the arrangements in Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary. I know that will ruffle a few feathers within the network, with people saying, “We’re experts, we know best”, but it is important for the inspector to come in and ask, “Why? Why do you do it that way?” and then to bring in other expertise. I think that is the way to do it.
I think the former Fire Minister, the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse, will find that when we started to talk about this issue—it was raised in Committee by the shadow Fire Minister, the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)—I had only been in the job for two weeks, because the role of Police and Fire Minister was very new. However, I knew what I wanted to do, as did the Home Secretary, and I freely admit that a little bit of encouragement from the shadow Minister has helped us on our way. There are areas in which we will be able to work much more along the lines of how Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary does its inspections, so that people are not prepared for the day having known about the inspection for weeks in advance, as happened in my time.
I want to speak to some of the Government amendments that I did not have the opportunity to talk about earlier, and I will turn to some of the excellent contributions made during this debate. One of the most important areas of agreement that I have reached, with the Home Secretary’s permission, is in relation to the 12-month rule for officers who have retired or left the force. Since long before I held my current position, it has always struck me as strange that, criminal proceedings apart, an officer of no matter what rank could step down and start their pension almost the day before they became subject to investigations within the police force. In some cases that does not happen. I have the duty of signing documents that revoke police officers’ pensions when they have broken the rules so badly that they lose their pension. I do that quite regularly. It is difficult to sign something that will dramatically change someone’s future, and I do not in any way do so lightly. I often quiz my officials about whether it is the right way to go, not least because a good proportion of the contributions to the pension were that person’s own contributions, not the state’s contributions. However, the rules are quite specific in those cases.
Although we did not want to leave things completely open—I know the shadow Home Secretary will understand that—we thought there was a real opportunity to leave a great legacy on behalf of the Hillsborough victims. The change to the 12-month rule will be for exceptional circumstances. It is difficult to put them into primary legislation, so we will do it by regulations. I hope that the shadow Front-Bench team will work with us on those regulations, along with other parties in the House. They will be one of the biggest legacies of what we are doing.
I am sorry that we do not quite agree with Her Majesty’s Opposition on two issues. On Leveson 2, the Home Secretary has set her position out in front of the Home Affairs Committee, and I have set it out too. I am categorically not saying that it is not going to happen, but no decision will be made until after the criminal investigations. That is the position that the Home Secretary has set out—it is way above my pay grade—and that is how it will stay.
Norman Lamb
I do not want to compete with the SNP in offering to be honest broker, but could the Minister not say that when the cases have concluded the Government will reaffirm the commitment to Leveson 2? It would be straightforward to say that now, and it would be widely welcomed.
Mike Penning
The point has been made on numerous occasions. The Home Secretary has said, and I have said, that we will wait for the inquiries and proceedings to finish and then announce our position on Leveson 2.
Andy Burnham
The Minister has made the position clear, but in doing so he will not have pleased many people who are campaigning for justice for people who have suffered press intrusion. Will he be explicit that what he has just outlined is in fact a weakening of the Government’s position? A couple of years ago, the Prime Minister promised that there would be a stage 2, but tonight we are being told that that is now up in the air and up for grabs.
Mike Penning
I have been absolutely explicit, as has the Home Secretary. There is no weakening and no change. We will wait for the conclusion of the proceedings. If the shadow Secretary of State wants to push the issue to a Division I will have to accept that, but he has to accept that all the way through the process I have been clear, as has the Home Secretary—as I said earlier, no Home Secretary has gone further for the victims of Hillsborough than this one—that we are not ruling anything out but will wait until after the conclusion of the criminal cases that are taking place.
We also disagree on another area—it is a shame, but I respect the view of others in the House, and if we have to go through the Lobby we will. Bishop James Jones is carrying out his review as requested, and we are not going to pre-empt what he will say in that review. There are assumptions about what will be in it, and some will be right and some will be wrong.
Whatever happens in any Division, things will not stop there. If the Opposition win, so be it. If we win the Divisions tonight, we will still wait for the conclusions of the investigations, the court cases and Bishop Jones’s review. Our position will stay exactly the same.
Andy Burnham
The issue of parity of legal funding at inquests at which the police are represented goes beyond Hillsborough. It affects many families fighting many injustices. It goes beyond the work of Bishop James Jones. Could we at least have a commitment that the Government will work with us to seek that parity and equality of legal funding at inquests? That commitment would mean something.
Mike Penning
All the way through, we have worked with Her Majesty’s Opposition and done everything we can. I know this might be playing at semantics, but I slightly disagree with the right hon. Gentleman. Bishop Jones’s work will make a huge difference for future cases, because of the experiences of what people have so sadly gone through for 27 years. His review is not just about Hillsborough; it will give guidance to Governments of whatever colour in the future. That is why we have decided to wait for all of his review’s recommendations. It will affect people now and in the future. I understand the points being made, though, and perhaps we can come to an agreement on this issue. We will continue to work together on it beyond this debate, no matter what the results of the votes, because it is the most important thing to be done.
I will address some of the contributions that have been made about mental health. The hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) talked about the issue extensively in Committee. When I was Minister with responsibility for disabilities I had long and fruitful meetings with the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), the Minister in the coalition Government with responsibility for mental health, and we agree on 90% on this issue—we speak from the same platform in many ways. Many changes to how the police deal with and look after—I stress look after—people with mental health issues came about because of his work as a Minister. He pushed the Department of Health to places that I am sure, at times, it did not want to go to. Perhaps I have done the same in my new role with the police, with the Home Secretary’s support, by saying that some things are still fundamentally wrong in the 21st century.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) said earlier, my heart tells me that the use of a Taser within a secure mental health facility must be wrong, but my brain and my experience tell me that in exceptional circumstances—it must not be the norm—it could happen. I have met several of the lobbyists who have been referred to, who have campaigned very hard on the issue. The Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), is going to take work forward on it, as promised in meetings with colleagues from across the House.
We are in a really exciting position. This is not just about mental health issues but about social services more broadly, particularly with regard to children. I have been with police on a Friday evening, long before I got this role, getting something to eat before going out on patrol. The constables would be given notes, particularly from the sergeant and sometimes from the community inspector, asking us to go and visit Mary, or John, because social services had said that they had not seen them for a couple of days, and as they were vulnerable people we had a duty. Well, sorry, but social services had that duty first. We—I use the word “we” because I am very passionate about this—must be the last resort. The police cannot be the first port of call.
Work on the issue has been going on for the past couple of years. It is being done in different ways around the country, but street triage has transformed the use of powers under sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. This next point is not simply one of semantics: the use of section 135 or 136 is an arrest. People are not being sectioned; they are being arrested. There is sometimes confusion about that. The power an officer is using at that point is a power to protect and arrest. We need to make that clear. We have seen different uses of sections 135 and 136 in different parts of the country. It has dropped dramatically—the use of section 136 in particular—because of the work taking place. I completely agree that more needs to be done, but we are in a position where we can drive that work forward only because, frankly, we have said that enough is enough.
I understand the reasons behind many of the amendments that have been tabled, particularly on the use of Tasers. I understand the risks that the right hon. Member for North Norfolk alluded to, but Tasers have saved lives. I talked earlier about what my heart tells me and what my brain tells me. I used to volunteer in a mental health hospital before and during my time in the Army, because my mother worked as a mental health nurse. I asked mum—she is retired now—“Is there a case in which you would have to use this sort of force?”, and she said, “Sadly, in exceptional circumstances there is.” However, she also emphasised the quality of training in mental health facilities and how someone can be restrained safely.
Mr Charles Walker
I am sure I heard my right hon. Friend correctly, but to confirm, is he saying that Ministers will work with interested parties—for example, with me or the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb)—to ensure that the recording and reporting of such incidents is much better, and that we will report progress back to the House periodically, perhaps through letters to the Library?
Mike Penning
I was trying to get to exactly that point. That is a role for police and crime commissioners. If we devolve the powers in question, it will give more powers to PCCs, and rightly so. If we believe in and are aiming for localism, PCCs should know what is going on in their part of the world, and that information should be made available to the public and not left opaque. That will take work—I am delegating more work to my colleagues on the Treasury Bench, and to others across the Government, because this is not just a Home Office matter. Someone said earlier that this measure should not be in the Bill, but it is there because it needs to be.
Norman Lamb
In monitoring the use of Tasers, will the Minister ensure that we consider the ethnic dimension of who they are used on, and that that information is made publicly available and there is transparency?
Mike Penning
That is vital. When I was the Minister responsible for disabilities, one issue under discussion was the disproportionate number of black men who are tasered in mental health facilities. Indeed, there is a disproportionately high proportion of black men in mental health facilities, as we know there is in prisons and throughout the criminal justice system. We cannot just say, “Let’s get on with it”; we must do something about that, including by raising people’s educational standards, aspirations and so on.
The other important issue that the right hon. Gentleman raised concerns people who have been abused, whether it is sexual abuse or other types of abuse. We must ensure that they get the right care early on, and we must not assume that that abuse will show up in someone’s first medical analysis. I know that from friends who suffer from post-traumatic stress—I have friends who served in the Falklands who are only now showing the signs.
Norman Lamb
I accept that problems might show up only later on, but if the Minister does not accept that my new clause would provide for an automatic referral, will he accept that the Government should make clear that it should be standard process that a child is referred for an assessment of their mental health needs, as the Children’s Society suggests?
Mike Penning
This is probably way beyond my portfolio, but as a father I would ask, if someone is assessing a child who has been abused, how can they not assess them for mental health damage that may have occurred? That is the natural thing to do—I will probably get shot for saying that, but at the end of the day that is probably the moral position. How that is done is for the right hon. Gentleman’s former Department and social services to address.
I turn to facial coverings and new clause 23, which was tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) and other colleagues. I think we have reached a consensus. I arranged for Assistant Chief Constable Paul Netherton to lead on the issue for the whole country within the police. Very unusually for a senior police officer, or indeed for any police officer, he said, “Don’t give me any more powers. I am happy with the powers we have,” In our meetings, however—I am happy to share this with the House—it was conceded that the way the current legislation is being interpreted through guidance is an issue. There is also some confusion about the powers under section 60AA of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which concerns the need for a written authority. In reality, the police get on their radios and say, “This is the situation. I want to remove it. I think that an offence is going to take place.” The request is instantly given, and it is signed later on. That is not breaking any law; that is how the procedure works on a daily basis.
The Home Secretary and I both understand that there are real concerns about whether the measure is being implemented in a way that ensures public confidence as well as that of the police. Rather than change the law against the advice that I am getting from the police, we have proposed a review into the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 code A. That does not happen often, but this autumn a review will take place into stop and search. The powers in the Bill are similar to those stop-and-search powers, and we will ask for them to be included in that code. That significant change will alleviate some of the concerns, but we must ensure that we provide those powers.
Sir Edward Garnier
I would not want the Minister to think that I am ungrateful for what he is suggesting—I would never be that. However, it would be helpful if he would write to me setting out precisely what he is proposing and stating the likely amendments to PACE. He mentioned a review of PACE, but he did not necessarily mention an amendment to that Act. If he would be clear on paper, that would be useful.
Mike Penning
Not only will I write to my right hon. and learned Friend, but I will put a copy of the letter in the Library of the House. There are cross-party concerns about some of these issues. I listened carefully to his point, but that issue is not part of the Bill and is, as he said in his speech, for later. He may think that I am trying to kick the issue into the long grass, and that is exactly what I am doing for the purposes of this Bill.
I hope that the way in which I and the Under-Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands, dealt with the debate in Committee has helped the Bill to progress positively. It is a long time since I received such encouragement for a Bill—other than for the Mesothelioma Act 2014, which I took through the House with a little bit of disagreement. I am adamant that this Bill, and the measures it contains, will be a legacy for the Hillsborough families and the campaign that they have taken forward for 27 years. I am sorry that we cannot agree on everything, but as I have indicated, even if we disagree tonight, we will probably agree tomorrow.
Question put and agreed to.
New clause 48 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Schedule 1
Schedule to be inserted as Schedule A3 to the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004
“SCHEDULE A3
English Inspectors
Interpretation
1 (1) This paragraph applies for the purposes of this Schedule.
(2) References to an English inspector are to an inspector appointed under section 28(A1).
(3) References to the inspection function are to the function conferred on the English inspectors by section 28(A3).
(4) References to a person providing services to a fire and rescue authority are to a person providing services, in pursuance of contractual arrangements (but without being employed by a fire and rescue authority), to assist the fire and rescue authority in relation to the exercise of its functions.
(5) “Public authority” includes any person certain of whose functions are functions of a public nature.
Delegation
2 An English inspector may arrange for the inspection function to be exercised (to such extent as the inspector may determine) by another public authority on behalf of the inspector.
Working with Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary
3 An English inspector, when exercising the inspection function, must co-operate with Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary.
4 An English inspector may act jointly with Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary where it is appropriate to do so for the efficient and effective exercise of the inspection function.
Assistance for other public authorities
5 (1) The chief fire and rescue inspector for England may, if he or she thinks it appropriate to do so, provide assistance to any other public authority for the purpose of the exercise by that authority of its functions.
(2) The chief fire and rescue inspector for England may do anything he or she thinks appropriate to facilitate the carrying out of an inspection under section 10 of the Local Government Act 1999 (inspection of best value authorities).
(3) Anything done under this paragraph may be done on such terms (including terms as to payment) as the chief fire and rescue inspector for England thinks fit.
Powers of English inspectors to obtain information etc
6 (1) An English inspector may serve on a relevant person a notice requiring the person—
(a) to provide the inspector with any information or documents that the inspector reasonably requires for the purpose of the exercise of the inspection function;
(b) to produce or deliver up to the inspector any evidence or other things that the inspector reasonably requires for that purpose.
This is subject to sub-paragraphs (6) to (8).
(2) In sub-paragraph (1), “relevant person” means—
(a) a fire and rescue authority in England;
(b) an employee of a fire and rescue authority in England;
(c) a person providing services to a fire and rescue authority in England;
(d) an employee of a person providing services to a fire and rescue authority in England.
(3) A notice under this paragraph must—
(a) specify or describe the information, documents, evidence or other things that are required by the inspector;
(b) specify the period within which the information, documents, evidence or other things must be provided, produced or delivered up.
(4) A notice under this paragraph may specify the form and manner in which any information, documents, evidence or other things are to be provided, produced or delivered up.
(5) An English inspector may cancel a notice under this paragraph by written notice to the person on whom it was served.
(6) A notice under this paragraph must not be used to obtain information, or any document or other thing, from a person if—
(a) the information, or the document or other thing, was obtained by that person (directly or indirectly) from a body or other entity mentioned in sub-paragraph (7), or
(b) the information, or the document or other thing, relates to a body or other entity mentioned in that sub-paragraph.
(7) The bodies and other entities referred to in sub-paragraph (6) are—
(a) the Security Service,
(b) the Secret Intelligence Service,
(c) the Government Communications Headquarters, or
(d) any part of Her Majesty’s forces, or of the Ministry of Defence, which engages in intelligence activities.
(8) A notice under this paragraph must not require a person—
(a) to provide information that might incriminate the person;
(b) to provide an item subject to legal privilege within the meaning of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (see section 10 of that Act).
(9) In this paragraph—
“document” means anything in which information of any description is recorded;
“English inspector” includes—
(a) a person appointed under section 28(A5) as an assistant inspector or other officer;
(b) a person authorised by an English inspector to act on behalf of the inspector for the purposes of this paragraph.
Powers of English inspectors to obtain access to premises
7 (1) An English inspector may serve on a person a notice requiring the person to allow the inspector access, which the inspector reasonably requires for the purpose of the exercise of the inspection function, to—
(a) premises that are occupied for the purposes of —
(i) a fire and rescue authority in England,
(ii) a person providing services to a fire and rescue authority in England, and
(b) documents and other things on those premises.
(2) A notice under this paragraph must—
(a) specify or describe the premises to which the inspector requires access;
(b) specify the time when access is required (which may be immediately after the service of the notice).
(3) Where there are reasonable grounds for not allowing the inspector to have access to the premises at the time specified under sub-paragraph (2)(b), the requirement under this paragraph has effect as a requirement to secure that access is allowed to the inspector at the earliest practicable time specified by the inspector after there cease to be such grounds.
(4) An English inspector may cancel a notice under this paragraph by written notice to the person on whom it was served.
(5) In this paragraph “document” and “English inspector” have the same meanings as in paragraph 6 (and, for that purpose, the reference in paragraph (b) of the definition of “English inspector” in paragraph 6(9) to paragraph 6 is to be read as a reference to this paragraph).
Failure to comply with notice under paragraph 6 or 7
8 (1) If a person who has received a notice under paragraph 6 or 7—
(a) fails or refuses without reasonable excuse to do what is required by the notice, or
(b) (in the case of a notice under paragraph 6) knowingly or recklessly provides information in response to the notice that is false in a material respect,
the chief fire and rescue inspector for England may certify in writing to the High Court that the person has failed to comply with the notice.
(2) The High Court may then inquire into the matter and, after hearing any witness who may be produced against or on behalf of the person, and after hearing any statement offered in defence, deal with the person as if the person had committed a contempt of court.
Sensitive information: restriction on further disclosure
9 (1) Where an English inspector, in exercise of the inspection function, receives information within sub-paragraph (2), the inspector must not disclose the information, or the fact that it has been received, unless the relevant authority consents to the disclosure.
(2) The information is—
(a) intelligence service information;
(b) information obtained from a government department which, at the time it is provided to the inspector, is identified by the department as information the disclosure of which may, in the opinion of the relevant authority—
(i) cause damage to national security, international relations or the economic interests of the United Kingdom or any part of the United Kingdom, or
(ii) jeopardise the safety of any person.
(3) Where an English inspector discloses to another person information within sub-paragraph (2) that the inspector received in exercise of the inspection function, or the fact that the inspector has received such information in exercise of the inspection function, the other person must not disclose that information or that fact unless the relevant authority consents to the disclosure.
(4) A prohibition on disclosure in sub-paragraph (1) or (3) does not apply to disclosure by one English inspector to another.
(5) In this paragraph—
“English inspector” includes—
(a) a person appointed under section 28(A5) as an assistant inspector or other officer;
(b) a person authorised by an English inspector to act on behalf of the inspector for the purposes of paragraph 6 or 7;
“government department” means a department of Her Majesty’s Government but does not include—
(a) the Security Service,
(b) the Secret Intelligence Service, or
(c) the Government Communications Headquarters (“GCHQ”);
“intelligence service information” means information that was obtained (directly or indirectly) from or that relates to—
(a) the Security Service,
(b) the Secret Intelligence Service,
(c) GCHQ, or
(d) any part of Her Majesty’s forces, or of the Ministry of Defence, which engages in intelligence activities;
“Minister of the Crown” includes the Treasury;
“relevant authority” means—
(a) in the case of intelligence service information obtained (directly or indirectly) from or relating to the Security Service, the Director-General of the Security Service;
(b) in the case of intelligence service information obtained (directly or indirectly) from or relating to the Secret Intelligence Service, the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service;
(c) in the case of intelligence service information obtained (directly or indirectly) from or relating to GCHQ, the Director of GCHQ;
(d) in the case of intelligence service information obtained (directly or indirectly) from or relating to Her Majesty’s forces or the Ministry of Defence, the Secretary of State;
(e) in the case of information within sub-paragraph (2)(b)—
(i) the Secretary of State, or
(ii) the Minister of the Crown in charge of the government department from which the information was obtained (if that Minister is not a Secretary of State).
Provision of intelligence service information to English inspectors
10 (1) A person who provides information that is intelligence service information to an English inspector exercising the inspection function must—
(a) make the inspector aware that the information is intelligence service information, and
(b) provide the inspector with such additional information as will enable the inspector to identify the relevant authority in relation to the information.
(2) In this paragraph, “English inspector”, “intelligence service information” and “relevant authority” have the same meaning as in paragraph 9.””—(Mike Penning.)
Like the provision made by amendment NC48, this new Schedule is about the inspection of fire and rescue authorities in England. It makes provision in relation to English inspectors about delegation, joint working with her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary and the giving of assistance to public authorities. It also confers power on English inspectors to obtain information from fire and rescue authorities (and their employees) and from persons providing services to fire and rescue authorities (and their employees) and to obtain access to premises occupied for the purposes of fire and rescue authorities and persons providing services to them.
Brought up, read the First and Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Clause 30
Public records
“(1) In Schedule 1 to the Public Records Act 1958 (definition of public records), in Part 2 of the Table at the end of paragraph 3, insert at the appropriate place—
“Office for Police Conduct.”
(2) The records that become public records for the purposes of that Act as a result of the amendment made by subsection (1) include all records of the Office for Police Conduct of the kind mentioned in paragraph 3(1) of Schedule 1 to that Act (whether created before or after the coming into force of this section, and whether created under that name or under the name of the Independent Police Complaints Commission).
(3) If the amendment made by subsection (1) comes into force before subsection (1) of section 31 comes into force, the reference in that amendment to the Office for Police Conduct is, until subsection (1) of that section comes into force, to be read as a reference to the Independent Police Complaints Commission.”—(Mike Penning.)
This new clause provides for the records of the Office for Police Conduct to become public records for the purposes of the Public Records Act 1958.
Brought up, read the First and Second time, and added to the Bill.
New Clause 63
Police and Crime Commissioners: parity of funding between police and families at inquests
“(1) A police and crime commissioner has the duties set out in this section when the police force they are responsible for is a Properly Interested Person for the purposes of—
(a) an inquest into the death of a member of an individual’s family, or
(b) an inquest into the deaths of members of a group of families,
under the Coroners Act 1988.
(2) The police and crime commissioner must make recommendations to the Secretary of State as to whether the individual’s family or the group of families at the inquest require financial support to ensure parity of legal representation between parties to the inquest.
(3) If a police and crime commissioner makes a recommendation under subsection (2) then the Secretary of State must provide financial assistance to the individual’s family or the group of families to ensure parity of funding between families and the police.
(4) The individual’s family or the group of families may use funding authorised under this section solely for the purpose of funding legal representation at the inquest.”—(Andy Burnham.)
This new clause would put into law the principle of parity of funding between police and families at inquests. It would ensure that funding to a bereaved family, or a group of bereaved families, for purposes of legal representation during an inquest is an amount broadly equal to the level of funding that the police force receives. This new clause seeks to place an obligation on the PCC to recommend to the Home Secretary as to whether a bereaved family, or a group of bereaved families requires funding to support their legal representation at the inquest. The Home Secretary must provide such funding if it is recommended.
Brought up, and read the First time.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:
Government new clause 54—Powers to seize invalid travel documents.
Government new clause 55—Anonymity of victims of forced marriage.
Government new clause 56—Licensing functions under taxi and PHV legislation: protection of children and vulnerable adults.
Government new clause 57—Powers of litter authorities in Scotland.
New clause 3—Digital Crime Review—
“(1) The Secretary of State shall have a duty to provide for a review of legislation which contains powers to prosecute individuals who may have been involved in the commission of digital crime in order to consolidate such powers in a single statute.
(2) In the conduct of the review under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must have regard to the statutes and measures that he deems appropriate, including but not limited to—
(a) Malicious Communications Act 1988, section 1,
(b) Protection from Harassment Act 1997, section 2, 2a, 4, 4a,
(c) Offences against the Person Act 1861, section 16, 20, 39, 47,
(d) Data Protection Act 1998, section 10, 13 and 55,
(e) Criminal Justice Act 1998, section 160,
(f) Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, section 30(1), (3),(5),(6), 78(5),
(g) Computer Misuse Act 1990, as amended by Serious Crime Act 2015 and Police and Justice Act 2006,
(h) Contempt of Court Act 1981,
(i) Human Rights Act 1998,
(j) Public Order Act 1986, section 4, 4a, 5, 16(b), 18,
(k) Serious Organised Crime Act 2005, section 145, 46,
(l) Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006, section 48,
(m) Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2014, section 32, 34, 35, 36, 37,
(n) Protection of Children Act 1978,
(o) Obscene Publications Act 1959,
(p) Crime and Disorder Act 1998, section 28, 29-32,
(q) Criminal Justice Act 2003, section 145, 146,
(r) Communications Act 2003, section 127, 128-131,
(s) Data retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, section 4,
(t) Sexual Offences Amendment Act 1992, section 5,
(u) Counter Terrorism and Security Act 2015,
(v) Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, section 33(5), 29(6),
(w) Criminal Damage Act 1971, section 2,
(x) Sexual Offences Act 2003, section 4, 8, 10, 62,
(y) Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001, section 43,
(z) Magistrates Court Act 1980, section 127,
() Suicide Act 1961, section 2(1) as amended by Coroners and Justice Act 2009,
() Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, section 63,
() Theft Act 1968, section 21, and
() Criminal Law Act 1977, section 51(2)
(3) It shall be a duty of the Secretary of State to determine for the review any other statute under which persons have been prosecuted for a crime falling under section 1 of this Act.
(4) In the conduct of the review under subsection (1), the Secretary of State must consult with any person or body he deems appropriate, including but not limited to—
(a) the Police,
(b) Crown Prosecution Service,
(c) judiciary, and
(d) relevant community organisations.”
New clause 4—Surveillance and monitoring: offences—
“(1) A person commits an offence if the person—
(a) uses a digital device to repeatedly locate, listen to or watch a person without legitimate purpose,
(b) installs spyware, a webcam or any other device or software on another person’s property or digital device without the user’s agreement or without legitimate reason,
(c) takes multiple images of an individual unless it is in the public interest to do so without that individual’s permission and where the intent was not legitimate nor lawful,
(d) repeatedly orders goods or services for another person if the purpose of such actions is to cause distress, anxiety or to disrupt that person’s daily life,
(e) erases data remotely whilst a digital device is being examined by the police or any other lawful investigation,
(f) monitors a digital device registered to a person aged 17 or less if the purpose of that monitoring is to obtain information about a third person,
(g) monitors any other person’s digital device if the intent of the monitor is either to damage or steal data from that person, or
(h) creates a false persona on line without lawful reason if the purpose of such a creation is to intend to attempt to defraud, groom, impersonate or seriously damage the reputation of any other person.
(2) A person guilty of an offence under subsections (1)(a) or (b) is liable on conviction to a term of imprisonment not exceeding 12 months or a fine.
(3) For the purpose of subsection (1)(a) “repeatedly” shall be deemed as on two occasions or more.
(4) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (1)(d) is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding the statutory limit.
(5) A person guilty of an offence under subsections (1)(e), (f), (g) or (h) is liable on conviction to a term of imprisonment not exceeding 12 months.
(6) The Secretary of State shall introduce restrictions on the sale of spyware to persons under the age of 16 and requests all persons who are purchasing such equipment to state their intended use of such equipment.”
New clause 5—Digital crime training and education—
‘(1) It shall be the responsibility of the Home Department to ensure that each Police Service shall invest in training on the prioritisation, investigation and evidence gathering in respect of digital crime and abuse.
(2) It shall be the responsibility of the Home Department to ensure that all Police services record complaints and outcomes of complaints of digital crime and abuse.
(3) It shall be the responsibility of the Secretary of State for the Home Department to publish annual statistics on complaints and outcomes of digital crime and abuse.”
New clause 6—Offence of abduction of a vulnerable child aged 16 or 17—
“(1) A person shall be guilty of an offence if, knowingly and without lawful authority or reasonable excuse, he or she—
(a) takes a child to whom this section applies away from the responsible person; or
(b) keeps such a child away from the responsible person; or
(c) induces, assists or incites such a child to run away or stay away from the responsible person or from a child’s place of residence.
(2) This section applies in relation to a child aged 16 or 17 who is—
(a) a child in need as defined in section 17 of the Children Act 1989; or
(b) a child looked after under section 20 of the Children Act 1989; or
(c) a child housed alone under part 7 of the Housing Act 1996; or
(d) a child who is suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm subject to section 47 1(b) of the Children Act 1989.
(3) In this section “the responsible person” is—
(a) a person with a parental responsibility as defined in the Children Act 1989; or
(b) a person who for the time being has care of a vulnerable child aged 16 and 17 by virtue of a care order, an emergency protection order, or protection from section 46 of the Children Act 1989; or
(c) any other person as defined in regulations for the purposes of this section.
(4) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—
(a) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both such imprisonment and fine; or
(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding seven years.
(5) No prosecution for an offence above shall be instituted except by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.”
New clause 10—Prevention of child sexual exploitation and private hire vehicles—
“(1) The Local Government (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1976 is amended as follows.
(2) After section 47(1) insert—
“(1A) A district council must carry out its functions under this section with a view to preventing child sexual exploitation”.
(3) At end of section 48 (1) insert—
“(c) a district council must carry out its functions under this section with a view to preventing child sexual exploitation”.
(4) Section 7 of the London Cab Order 1934 is amended as follows.
(5) After section 7(2) insert—
“(2A) Transport for London must carry out its functions under this section with a view to preventing child sexual exploitation.””
(6) Section 7 of the Private Hire Vehicles (London) Act 1998 is amended as follows.
(7) After section 7(2) insert—
“(3) The licensing authority must carry out its functions under this section with a view to preventing child sexual exploitation.””
This new clause would place local authorities under a duty to consider how they can prevent child sexual exploitation when they issue licences for taxis and private hire vehicles.
New clause 13—Grooming for criminal behaviour: offence—
“(1) A person aged 18 or over (A) commits an offence if—
(a) A has met or communicated with another person (B) on at least two occasions and subsequently—
(i) A intentionally meets B,
(ii) A travels with the intention of meeting B in any part of the world or arranges to meet B in any part of the world, or
(iii) B travels with the intention of meeting A in any part of the world,
(b) A intends to say or do anything to or in respect of B, during or after the meeting mentioned in paragraph (a)(i) to (iii) and in any part of the world, which if done will—
(i) encourage,
(ii) persuade, or
(iii) intimidate
B with the effect that B commits a criminal offence from which A will,
or intends to, profit.
(c) B is under 16, and
(d) A does not reasonably believe that B is 16 or over.
(2) For subsection (1)(b)(iii) to apply, A does not have to profit directly nor be the sole beneficiary of a criminal offence committed by B.
(3) In subsection (1) the reference to A having met or communicated with B is a reference to A having met B in any part of the world or having communicated with B by any means from, to or in any part of the world.
(4) A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable—
(a) on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or both,
(b) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years.”
New clause 14—Grooming for criminal behaviour: prevention orders—
“(1) A court may make an order under this section in respect of a person aged 18 or over (A) where—
(a) A has committed an offence under section (Grooming for criminal behaviour); or
(b) the court is satisfied that A’s behaviour makes it necessary to make such an order, for the purpose of protecting one or more persons aged 16 or under from being encouraged, persuaded or intimidated by A into committing a crime from which A intends to profit.
(2) A chief officer of police may by complaint to a magistrates’ court apply for an order under this section in respect of a person who resides in his police area or who the chief officer believes is in, or is intending to come to, his police area if it appears to the chief officer that—
(a) the person has committed an offence under section (Grooming for criminal behaviour); or
(b) the person’s behaviour makes it reasonable to make such an order, for the purpose of protecting one or more other persons aged 16 or under from being encouraged, persuaded, facilitated or intimidated into committing a crime from which others will, or intend to, profit.
(c) the person has acted in such a way as to give reasonable cause to believe that it is necessary for such an order to be made.
(3) An application under subsection (2) may be made to any magistrates’ court whose commission area includes—
(a) any part of the applicant’s police area, or
(b) any place where it is alleged that the person acted in a way mentioned in subsection (2)(b).
(4) A grooming for criminal behaviour prevention order (GCBPO) that includes one or more requirements must specify the person who is to be responsible for supervising compliance with the requirement who may be an individual or an organisation.
(5) Before including a requirement, the court must receive evidence about its suitability and enforceability from—
(a) the individual to be specified under subsection (1), if an individual is to be specified;
(b) an individual representing the organisation to be specified under subsection (1), if an organisation is to be specified.
(6) Before including two or more requirements, the court must consider their compatibility with each other.
(7) It is the duty of a person specified under subsection (4)—
(a) to make any necessary arrangements in connection with the requirements for which the person has responsibility (the “relevant requirements”);
(b) to promote the compliance of the GCBPO subject with the relevant requirements;
(c) if the person considers that the GCBPO subject—
(i) has complied with all the relevant requirements, or
(ii) has failed to comply with a relevant requirement,
to inform the prosecution and the appropriate chief officer of police.
(8) In subsection (7)(c) “the appropriate chief officer of police” means—
(a) the chief officer of police for the police area in which it appears to the person specified under subsection (1) that—
(i) the GCBRO subject lives, or
(ii) one or more persons aged 16 or under as mentioned in subsection (1)(b) lives;
(b) if it appears to a person specified under subsection (4) that the GCBPO subject lives in more than one police area, whichever of the relevant chief officers of police that person thinks it most appropriate to inform.
(9) The subject of a GCBPO, in addition to any specific restrictions and requirements detailed within the order, must—
(a) keep in touch with the person specified under subsection (4) in relation to that requirement, in accordance with any instructions given by that person from time to time; and
(b) notify the person of any change of address.
These obligations have effect as requirements of the order.”
New clause 15—Sentencing guidelines review: children—
“(1) With an year of the day on which this Act is passed the Sentencing Council must conduct a review of it sentencing guidelines as they relate to crime against children and crimes where the victim is a child.
(2) The Sentencing Council must publish the findings of its review and lay a copy of that report before Parliament.
(3) In conducting this review the Sentencing Council must consult—
(a) the Secretary of State for Justice,
(b) and any other bodies it thinks relevant.
(4) For the purpose of this section “child” has the same meaning as in section 105 of the Children Act 1989.”
This new clause would require the Sentencing Council to review the sentencing guideline for offences committed against children.
New clause 16—Soliciting via telecommunications order: applications, grounds and effect—
“(1) A chief officer of police may by complaint to a magistrates’ court apply for an order under this section (a “soliciting via telecommunication order“) in respect of a telecommunications service provider if it appears to the chief officer that a phone number (“the relevant phone number”) administered by a telecommunications service provider is being used for the purposes of advertising a person’s services as a prostitute.
(2) The chief office of police may make an application under subsection (1) only if the relevant phone number has been advertised in the chief officer‘s police area.
(3) Such an order requires the telecommunications service provider to take all reasonable steps to prevent calls to the relevant phone number being connected.
(4) It shall be an offence for a telecommunication service provider to fail to comply with terms of an order issued under this section.
(5) An organisation found guilty of an offence under subsection (5) shall be liable on summary conviction to a fine no greater than £50,000.”
This new clause would enable the police to request that a magistrate issues an order to mobile phone providers that they block a number if that number is on cards advertising prostitution and create an offence if they fail to comply with a fine of up to £50,000.
New clause 18—Cruelty to persons under sixteen: penalty—
“(1) The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 is amended as follows.
(2) In section 1(1)(a) leave out the words “ten” and insert “fourteen.””
To increase the maximum tariff for child cruelty from 10 years imprisonment to 14 years.
New clause 33—Police observance of the Victims’ Code: enforcement—
“(1) The Parliamentary Commissioner Act 1967 is amended as follows.
(2) In section 5(1B) omit paragraph (a) together with the final “or”.
(3) After section 5(1B) insert—
“(1BA) Subsection (1C) of this section applies if a written complaint is made to the Commissioner by a member of the public who claims that—
(a) a police officer
(b) a police service employee other than a police officer
(c) another person determined under section (1BC)
has failed to perform a Code duty owed by him to the member of the public.
(1BB) For the purposes of subsection (1BA) a Code duty is a duty imposed by a code of practice issued under section 32 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 (code of practice for victims).
(1BC) The Secretary of State may by regulation amend the categories of person identified in subsection (1BA) as the Secretary of State thinks fit.”
(4) In section 5(4A), after “(1A)”, insert “or (1BA)”.
(5) In section 6(3), at the beginning insert “Except as provided in subsection (3A)”.
(6) After section 6(3), insert—
“(3A) Subsection (3) shall apply in relation to a complaint under section 5(1BA) as if for “a member of the House of Commons” there were substituted “the Commissioner”.”
(7) In section 7(1A), after “5(1A)”, insert “or 5(1BA)”.
(8) In section 8(1A), after “5(1A)”, insert “or 5(1BA)”.
(9) After section 10(2A), insert—
“(2B) In any case where the Commissioner conducts an investigation pursuant to a complaint under section 5(1BA) of this Act, he shall send a report of the results of the investigation to—
(a) the person to whom the complaint relates,
(b) the principal officer of the department or authority concerned and to any other person who is alleged in the relevant complaint to have taken or authorised the action complained of, and
(c) the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses appointed under section 48 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004.”
(10) After section 10(3B) insert—
“(3C) If, after conducting an investigation pursuant to a complaint under section 5(1BA) of this Act, it appears to the Commissioner that—
(a) the person to whom the complaint relates has failed to perform a Code duty owed by him to the person aggrieved, and
(b) the failure has not been, or will not be, remedied, the Commissioner shall lay before each House of Parliament a special report upon the case.
(3D) If the Commissioner lays a special report before each House of Parliament pursuant to subsection (3C) the Commissioner may also send a copy of the report to any person as the Commissioner thinks appropriate.
(3E) For the purposes of subsection (3C) “Code duty” has the meaning given by section 5(1BB) of this Act.”
(11) In section 10(5)(d), for “or (2A)” substitute “, (2A) or (2B)”.
(12) In section 12(1), after paragraph (b) of the definition of “person aggrieved”, insert—
“(c) in relation to a complaint under section 5(1BA) of this Act, means the person to whom the duty referred to in section 5 (1BA) of this Act is or is alleged to be owed;”.”
New clause 34—Police, etc. provision for victims’ entitlement: framework—
“(1) The Victims’ Code (a code of practice issued under section 32 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 (code of practice for victims)) shall include, but not be limited to, the entitlement of victims to receive as follows.
(2) A victim of crime shall be entitled to receive—
(a) accurate and timely information from—
(i) the police
(ii) such other agencies of the criminal justice system concerned with the detection and prosecution of the relevant crime and with the support of victims of crime as the Secretary of State deems fit;
(b) The police must ensure provision to victims of adequate notice of all relevant court and other legal proceedings, including information about decisions by and discussions between the police and other agencies of the criminal justice system relating to the person convicted of the crime concerned (“the perpetrator”), including—
(i) information about any prison sentence previously served by the perpetrator,
(ii) information about relevant changes to the perpetrator’s circumstances whilst on parole or in custody,
(iii) information about any crimes committed by the perpetrator outside the UK where the victim of the crime concerned is a British national,
(iv) access, where required, to adequate interpretation and translation services, and
(v) information about the direct contact details of the criminal justice agencies and individuals involved in the court or other legal proceedings concerned.
(3) During criminal justice proceedings, the police and other relevant agencies and authorities of the criminal justice system must ensure that victims of crime—
(a) are not subjected to unnecessary delay by any other party to the proceedings;
(b) are treated with dignity and respect by all parties involved; and
(c) do not experience discriminatory behaviour from any other party to the proceedings.
(4) Children and vulnerable adults must be able to give evidence to a court secure location away from that court or from behind a protective screen.
(5) The investigating police force concerned must ensure the safety and protection of victims of crime during proceedings, including but not restricted to—
(a) a presumption that victims of crime may remain domiciled at their home with adequate police protection if required; and
(b) ensuring that the victim and those accompanying them are provided with access to discreet waiting areas during the relevant court proceedings.
(6) All victims of crime shall have access to an appropriate person to liaise with relevant agencies on their behalf and to inform them about, and explain the progress, outcomes and impact of, their case.
(7) Witnesses under the age of 18 shall have access to a trained communications expert, to be known as a Registered Intermediary, to help them understand as necessary what is happening in the criminal proceedings.
(8) Victims of crime shall have access to transcripts of any relevant legal proceedings at no cost to themselves.
(9) Victims of crime shall have the right to attend and make representations to a pre-court hearing to determine the nature of the court proceedings.
(10) The Secretary of State must take steps to ensure that victims of crime—
(a) have access to financial compensation from public funds for any detriment arising from the criminal case concerned;
(b) are given the right to approve or refuse the payment of any compensation order made by a court against a person convicted of a crime against them;
(c) have reimbursed to them, from public funds, any expenses incurred by them in attending in court and in any related legal process, whether in the UK or overseas;
(d) have available to them legal advice where considered necessary by a judge in court proceedings; and
(e) are not required to disclose personal data in legal proceedings which puts their safety at risk unless specifically ordered to do so by a judge.”
New clause 35—Police etc. training: treatment of victims—
“(1) The Secretary of State shall publish and implement a strategy for providing training on the impact of crime on victims and victims’ rights for staff of the following organisations—
(a) the police
(b) the Crown Prosecution Service, and
(c) any other public agency or authority that the Secretary of State deems appropriate.
(2) The Secretary of State may also by regulation make provision for judges, barristers and solicitors involved in criminal cases involving sexual and domestic violence undertake specialist training.
(3) The Secretary of State shall publish an agreed timetable for the delivery and completion of the training required by this section.”
New clause 36—Establishment and conduct of homicide reviews—
“(1) In this section “homicide review” means a review of the circumstances a person aged 16 or over has, or appears to have, died as the result of a homicide and—
(a) no one has been charged with the homicide, or
(b) the person(s) charged has been acquitted.
(2) The Secretary of State may in a particular case direct a police force or other specified person or body or a person or body within subsection (5) to establish, or to participate in, a homicide review.
(3) It is the duty of any person or body within subsection (5) establishing or participating in a homicide review (whether or not held pursuant to a direction under subsection (2)) to have regard to any guidance and standards issued by the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses as to the establishment and conduct of such reviews.
(4) Any reference in subsection (2) to the Secretary of State shall, in relation to persons and bodies within subsection (5)(b), be construed as a reference to the PSNI or Department of Justice in Northern Ireland as may be appropriate.
(5) The persons and bodies within this subsection are—
(a) in relation to England and Wales—chief officers of police for police areas in England and Wales; local authorities; local probation boards established under section 4 of the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 (c 43); the National Health Service Commissioning Board; clinical commissioning groups established under section 14D of the National Health Service Act 2006; providers of probation services; Local Health Boards established under section 11 of the National Health Service (Wales) Act 2006; NHS trusts established under section 25 of the National Health Service Act 2006 or section 18 of the National Health Service (Wales) Act 2006;
(b) in relation to Northern Ireland—the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland; the Probation Board for Northern Ireland; Health and Social Services Boards established under Article 16 of the Health and Personal Social Services (Northern Ireland) Order 1972 (SI 1972/1265 (NI 14)); Health and Social Services trusts established under Article 10 of the Health and Personal Social Services (Northern Ireland) Order 1991 (SI 1991/194 (NI 1)).
(6) In subsection (5)(a) “local authority” means—
(a) in relation to England, the council of a district, county or London borough, the Common Council of the City of London and the Council of the Isles of Scilly;
(b) in relation to Wales, the council of a county or county borough.”
New clause 37—Statutory duty on elected local policing bodies—
“(1) An elected local policing body must assess—
(a) the needs of victims in each elected local policing body’s police area, and
(b) the adequacy and effectiveness of the available victims’ services in that area.
(2) An elected local policing body must—
(a) prepare and consult upon an Area Victims’ Plan for its police area,
(b) having taken account of any responses to its consultation and any Quality Standard, publish the Plan in such a manner as sets out clearly how the identified victim needs will be met by the available victims’ services, and
(c) submit its Area Victims’ Plan to the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses on an annual basis.
(3) In this section—
“elected local policing body” and “police area” have the same meaning as in Part 1 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, and “Quality Standard” means the standard published under section 49(1)(f) of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004.”
New clause 38—Duties of the Commissioner for Victims and Witnesses—
“(1) Section 49 of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004 (general functions of Commissioner) is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (1), after paragraph (c) insert—
“(d) assess the adequacy of each elected local policing body’s Area Victims’ Plans submitted to the Commissioner under section (Statutory duty on elected local policing bodies) of the Policing and Crime Act 2016,
(e) make to elected local policing bodies such recommendations about submitted Area Victims’ Plans as the Commissioner considers necessary and appropriate;
(f) prepare a statement of standards (the “Quality Standard”) in relation to the provision of victims’ services;
(g) publish the Quality Standard in such manner as the Commissioner considers appropriate;
(h) review the Quality Standard at intervals of not more than five years;
(i) in preparing or reviewing a Quality Standard, consult the public, and for that purpose may publish drafts of the standard;
(j) assess the steps taken to support victims and witnesses in giving evidence;
(k) make such recommendations in relation to that assessment as the Commissioner considers necessary and appropriate;
(l) issue guidance and standards for the establishment and conduct of homicide reviews under section (Establishment and conduct of homicide reviews) of the Policing and Crime Act 2016.””
New clause 39—National anti-doping provisions—
“(1) Subsections (2) and (3) apply to—
(a) all athletes participating in sport in the UK who are members of a governing body of sport or an affiliate organisation or licensee of a governing body of sport (including any clubs, teams, associations or leagues);
(b) all athletes participating in such capacity in sporting events, competitions or other activities in the UK organised, convened, authorised or recognised by a governing body of sport or any of its member or affiliate organisations or licensees (including any clubs, teams, associations or leagues), wherever held;
(c) any other athlete participating in sport in the UK who, by virtue of a contractual arrangement or otherwise, is subject to the jurisdiction of a governing body of sport for purposes of anti-doping; and
(d) any person belonging to the entourage of an athlete, whether or not such person is a citizen of, or resident in, the United Kingdom.
(2) An athlete is guilty of an offence if he or she knowingly takes a prohibited substance with the intention, or one of the intentions, of enhancing his or her performance.
(3) A person belonging to the entourage of an athlete is guilty of an offence if he or she encourages or assists or hides awareness of the relevant athlete taking a prohibited substance with the intention, or one of the intentions, of enhancing such athlete’s performance.
(4) A medical professional commits an offence if they proscribe a prohibited substance to an athlete and believe, or ought reasonably to believe, that the substance will be used by the athlete to enhance their performance.
(5) For the purposes of this section a “prohibited substance” is as defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
(6) Any person guilty of an offence under subsection (2), (3) or (4) shall be liable—
(a) on summary conviction, to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months, or to both; or
(b) On conviction on indictment, to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years, or to both.
(7) UK Anti-Doping shall discuss the following issues with the World Anti-Doping Agency annually—
(a) the effectiveness of section 11 of the International Standard for Testing (athlete whereabouts requirements) and its harmonisation with EU privacy and working time rules and the European Convention on Human Rights;
(b) the effectiveness of the international work of the World Anti-Doping Agency; and
(c) progress on the development of a universal rollout of athlete biological passports.
(8) UK Anti-Doping shall submit the results of the annual discussions referred to in subsection (7) to the Secretary of State, who shall in turn—
(a) lay before both Houses of Parliament an annual report documenting—
(i) whether the athlete whereabouts requirements are effective in combating the abuse of drug-taking and in compliance with EU privacy and working time rules and the European Convention on Human Rights, and
(ii) the performance of the World Anti-Doping Agency in general; and
(b) determine whether the Government should remain a member and continue to support the World Anti-Doping Agency.”
New clause 41—Local Safeguarding Children Board: prevention of child sexual exploitation—
“(1) The Children Act 2004 is amended as follows.
(2) In section 14 after “children”, insert “and preventing child sexual exploitation, child abuse and child neglect.””
New clause 44—Modern technology: specialist digital unit (child abuse)—
“(1) The chief officer of each police force in Wales and England must ensure that within their force there is a unit that specialises in analysing and investigating allegations of online offences against children and young people.
(2) The chief officer must ensure that such a unit has access to sufficient digital forensic science resource to enable it to perform this function effectively and efficiently.”
New clause 46—Anonymity for victims who have private sexual photographs and films disclosed without their consent with intent to cause distress—
“(1) Section 2 of the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1992 is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (1), after paragraph (b) insert—
(c) an offence under section 33 of the Criminal Courts and Justice Act 2015.”
New clause 47—Compensation for victims who have private sexual photographs and films disclosed without their consent with intent to cause distress—
“(1) Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 is amended as follows.
(2) After subsection (9), insert—
“(9A) The court may order a person guilty of an offence under this section to pay compensation to the victim of the offence, under sections 130 to 132 of the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000.
(9B) Compensation under subsection (9A) may be awarded for (among other things) any anxiety caused by the offence and any financial loss resulting from the offence.”
New clause 60—Duty to report on Child Abduction Warning Notices—
“(1) Each police force in England and Wales must report to the Secretary of State each year on—
(a) the number of Child Abduction Warning Notices issued;
(b) the number of Child Abduction Warning Notices breached; and
(c) the number of Sexual Risk Orders and Sexual Harm Prevention Orders issued following the breach of a Child Abduction Warning Notice.
(2) The Secretary of State must prepare and publish a report each year on—
(a) the number of Child Abduction Warning Notices issued in each police force in England and Wales;
(b) the number of Child Abduction Warning Notices breached in each police force in England and Wales; and
(c) the number of Sexual Risk Orders and Sexual Harm Prevention Orders issued following the breach of a Child Abduction Warning Notice in each police force in England and Wales
and must lay a copy of the report before Parliament.”
New clause 61—Disclosure of private sexual photographs and films without consent and with the intent to cause distress, fear or alarm, or recklessness as to distress, fear or alarm being caused—
“(1) Section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (1) after “disclose” insert “or threaten to disclose”.
(3) In subsection (1)(b) after “distress” insert “fear or alarm or recklessness as to distress, fear or alarm being caused”.
(4) After subsection (1) insert—
“(1A) It is also an offence to knowingly promote, solicit or profit from private photographs and films that are reasonably believed to have been disclosed without consent and with the intent to cause distress, fear or alarm, or recklessness as to distress, fear or alarm being caused”.
(5) Leave out subsection (8).”
This new clause clarifies and expands the definition of the offence of disclosing private sexual photographs and films without consent and with the intent to cause distress, also known as revenge pornography, so that it includes reckless intent. This new clause also makes it an offence to knowingly promote, solicit or profit from private photographs and films that are reasonably believed to have been disclosed without consent.
New clause 62—Meaning of “private” and “sexual”—
“(1) Section 35 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 is amended as follows.
(2) In subsection (3)(a) after “exposed genitals” insert “breasts, buttocks,”.
(3) Leave out subsection 4.
(4) Leave out subsection 5.”
This new clause expands the definition of “sexual” and ensures the disclosure of pornographic photoshopped images, posted with the intent to cause distress, fear or alarm or recklessness as to distress, fear or alarm being caused, are covered by the law.
New clause 67—Misconduct in public office—
“(1) A person commits an offence if—
(a) the person is a public officer,
(b) the person wilfully neglects to perform their duty or wilfully misconducts themselves in the performance of their public duty to such a degree as to amount to an abuse of the public‘s trust in the office holder, and
(c) the person acts without reasonable excuse or justification.
(2) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (1) is liable—
(a) in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or, in relation to offences committed, to a fine, or to both;
(b) in Northern Ireland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months, or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum, or to both;
(c) on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine, or to both.
(3) For the purposes of this section, a public officer is an officer who discharges any duty in the discharge of which the public are interested and includes, but is not limited to—
(a) executive or ministerial officers,
(b) police officer, including a police officer in a period of suspension and a former police officer doing part-time police work,
(c) constable,
(d) special constable,
(e) community support officer,
(f) employee of a police force with responsibility for the computer system of that police force,
(g) prison officer,
(h) Independent Monitoring Board member,
(i) nurse working within a prison,
(j) coroner,
(k) army officer,
(l) accountant in the office of the Paymaster General,
(m) Justice of the Peace
(n) magistrate,
(o) district judge,
(p) clergy of the Church of England,
(q) mayor,
(r) local councillor,
(s) employee of a local authority, and
(t) civil servant or other employee of a public body.”
This new clause seeks to codify the common law offence of misconduct in public office and prescribes a list of ‘public officers’ to which this offence shall apply
Government amendments 107, 108, 111 to 116 and 119 to 122.
Liz Saville Roberts
I intend to speak to new clauses 2, 3, 4, 5, and 44, and I intend to press new clause 2 to a Division. The other new clauses are intended to test discussions that took place in Committee.
I note what the Minister said earlier in support of localism, but would cautiously remind him if he were still in the Chamber that although Wales is one of the four nations of the United Kingdom, it is the only one that has no responsibility for its police forces. The Governments of both Scotland and Northern Ireland are able to acknowledge the specific needs of their communities and direct their police forces to work effectively in response to those needs, but Wales must follow the policing priorities of England.
The four police forces of Wales are unique in the United Kingdom in that they are non-devolved bodies operating within a largely devolved public services landscape. They are thus required to respond to the agendas of two Governments, and to serve a nation whose people have the right to use either the English or the Welsh language. It should be noted that the Assembly’s budget already funds 500 extra police community support officers.
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
Does my hon. Friend, like me, find it peculiar that other services that are vital to Welsh communities, such as social services, education, economic and health—including mental health—are all devolved? Would it not greatly aid the coherence of public policy in Wales if this particular service were also devolved?
Liz Saville Roberts
I understand that the very fact of having to work to, and be answerable to, two agendas is the reason our colleagues in the Assembly, and the four police and crime commissioners in Wales, are calling for the devolution of policing.
What I am describing contrasts starkly with the situation in Wales. Power over policing is due to be devolved to English city regions: Manchester and Liverpool, for example. The present approach to devolution has been criticised in a House of Lords Constitutional Committee report, published last month, which described it as piecemeal and lacking a coherent vision. I would strongly argue that the devolution of policing to Wales would benefit the people of Wales, and that they are ill served by the antiquated England and Wales arrangement, which, inevitably, is designed with the priorities of English cities in mind.
Our demographics are different in Wales. The need to maintain effective services in rural areas with scattered populations cries out for better consideration. The impact of tourism—populations rocket at bank holidays and in summer months—stretches resources to the limit. Abersoch, in my constituency, has 1,000 year-round residents, yet North Wales police have to deal with an influx of 20,000 visitors in the summer season. I went on patrol with officers last August, and saw that drunken behaviour meant that police officers had to focus attention on that one community, travelling for hours back and forth along country roads to the nearest custody cells 30 miles away. The current arrangement of policing in England and Wales is dominated by English metropolitan concerns, and fails to provide for Wales's needs.
Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)
My hon. Friend is making very strong points. Only recently, the UK Government introduced centralised helicopter services for the police in England and Wales. That did not affect Scotland and Northern Ireland, because their police forces were decentralised. They kept their helicopters, but we lost ours in Dyfed-Powys. Ministers should not smirk; this affects lives in my constituency. The police force in Dyfed-Powys called out the helicopter on more than 40 occasions, and it was sent out on only a handful of them.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. This is not like you, Mr Edwards. If you want to speak, you are allowed to speak, but you cannot make a speech and get carried away and start pointing at the Minister. Let us try to keep it calm. If you want to raise any points, there will certainly be time for you to do so. We will not miss you out.
Liz Saville Roberts
But the question of resources and how those priorities direct them does indeed highlight again the fact that Wales has different needs, and those resources from central Government do get directed to those priorities which best serve England.
When devolution of policing to Wales was discussed in Committee, the Minister present referred to the Silk commission on devolution in Wales, which was established by his party in 2011 with cross-party membership. Part 2 was published in 2014 and recommended devolution. He made much at the time of the fact that there was no consensus on this recommendation as a result of the St David’s day process and “Powers for a purpose”.
Those involved in that process have told me it was little more than a tick-box exercise: if all party representatives liked it, the power was in the bag; if not, chuck it out, regardless of the implications for the governance and needs and, indeed, people of Wales. I note that in Committee Labour indicated a grudging support for devolving policing, albeit in the distant future: 10 years away. It seems pressure from Plaid is driving the accelerator. This is not a matter of jam tomorrow; we are living in hope of this today.
This opportunity is before the House here and now. The contents of future legislation and future amendments lack this certainty. If this House votes for devolution today, policing will be devolved to Wales, and the Government will then have to amend the Wales Bill accordingly at the very start of its journey. Indeed, surely, the Wales Bill deals first and foremost with constitutional matters, but here is our opportunity to make sure. I urge Labour to grasp the opportunity and support the National Assembly for Wales and all four police and crime commissioners in Wales and vote for the devolution of policing today.
New clauses 3, 4 and 5 relate to aspects of digital crime. I would note that these and new clause 44 are probing amendments. The Government state that resources are already provided to counter digital crime in the form of the National Cyber Crime Unit. I would respond that the National Cyber Crime Unit is relatively small, and that the national cyber security programme concentrates primarily on the security of businesses and infrastructure. Action Fraud addresses crime in relation to online fraud. The priorities are business, financial and serious crime, and do not cover the safeguarding of victims of abuse crimes such as domestic violence, stalking, harassment or hate crime.
The first of the new clauses proposes a review of legislation relating to digital crime and to consolidate the numerous Acts into a single statute. There are now over 30 statutes that cover online crime. Criminal justice professionals, including the police and CPS, believe this to be confusing at best and overwhelming at worst. Victims’ complaints are sometimes subject to delay, and there are times when officers are uncertain whether specific activities are criminal or not. The law has developed incrementally as technology advances, and there is an urgent need to codify and clarify the current situation. Consolidation will save police time and money. It will avoid duplication of officers on cases. Swifter action on victims’ complaints will reduce distress and anxiety.
As regards new clause 4, surveillance and monitoring highlights further issues against which there is currently no redress. The identification of these actions as offences will enable the police to counter activities that are evidently related to surveillance with intention to cause distress, and the law should respond appropriately.
New clause 5 addresses the need for training that is fit for purpose. Even in large police areas, fewer than 5% of officers and staff, including call and first response personnel, are trained in cyber-crime. Victims report being advised to go offline and not to use social media by officers. This defies modern communication media. It is equivalent to telling victims of harassment not to venture outside their own homes. The Home Office believes that training is a matter for individual forces, but in the absence of strong central leadership, this can only perpetuate present inconsistencies and variations from force to force. National training would help to raise the status of victims.
Finally, I turn to new clause 44, which calls for the establishment of a specialist digital unit to investigate online offences against children and young people. As I mentioned earlier, there is a real risk intrinsic in dependency on central units, although I acknowledge the work done by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. But, once again, children’s charities report to us that the scale of abuse of children online in terms of offenders, devices and images is leaving police swamped. There are delays in forensic analysis of devices—delays in some cases of up to 12 months. These delays pose risks to the safeguarding of children.
In Committee, the Minister mentioned the child abuse image database, and praised the accuracy of imagery interpretation and how it aids identification. It is of course to be commended that this database will take some of the load from individual forces. I would argue, none the less, that there is precedent for digital units on a similar model to domestic violence units as a means to ensure that all forces direct proper resources to this serious issue.
Mrs Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)
I commend the hon. Lady for tabling these amendments. Importantly, she talked about the idea of a specialist digital unit within each police force. Does she agree that, if that were to happen, it would be imperative that this would feed back to some central database to ensure the work that was done in each of those individual units had read-across across the country?
Liz Saville Roberts
Of course, what we need is the expertise of a central unit alongside the work on the ground that individual forces can do, and to ensure that we avoid the risk that the presence of a central unit results in a tendency to treat certain crimes as another agency’s problem. There is also—this is important at individual force-level—a need for specialist approaches to support child victims and their families.
Those are the amendments that I have chosen to discuss, and I reiterate that they are probing amendments, but in closing I repeat my intention to press a Division on new clause 2.
Mrs Miller
I rise to speak particularly on new clauses 3, 5, 44, 46 and 47, and note the advisement of the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) that her amendments are set out as probing amendments. Those five amendments tabled by both Liberal Democrat Members and Plaid Cymru Members all have a common theme: to call for reform in connection with the internet and the digital online world.
We all need to get our Government and Governments around the world to wake up to the extent to which crime and criminal activity has now moved online. Our laws are not giving victims the protection they need and our police forces face a revolution if they are to tackle the crime that they face now effectively in the future.
There has been a significant shift in the way people experience harm in this world. New clause 44, as the hon. Lady has set out, calls for the police to have special digital units to deal particularly with child abuse images. Many police forces in this country, including my own in Hampshire, have gone a long way to building up this sort of specialist expertise, but the new clause is an interesting piece of advice on which I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response, as well as the response on police training.
There are serious questions to ask as to whether the providers of online space are doing what they need to do to keep their communities safe. They have not only a corporate social responsibility to do that, but I also think an economic imperative, because it is their brand names that are tarnished, and rightly so, when their products are used for illegal purposes.
Another aspect is not particularly brought up in the amendments today, but I will mention it: the importance of the international implications of all these things. If we are to get a solution to the sorts of crimes that are being committed online in this new digital world that does not respect country boundaries, we need to have some buy-in from international Governments, too. I myself have met companies in the US, but we need to go further than that and see whether we can actually get the sort of action that we need on an international basis by perhaps looking to the United Nations, or indeed the youth part of the UN, to explore how we can get more effective laws in the future that are not constricted by international boundaries.
Our law is struggling to cope. These amendments recognise that. The real need to recognise that online crime is different is a battle that was won when this Government put in place the revenge pornography law a year or so ago. We have already seen 1,000 reports to the police and thousands more people using the revenge pornography helpline, yet two-thirds of those cases that have been reported to the police have seen no action because of problems of the evidence that victims have been able to give or indeed because the victims have withdrawn it. Again, the new clauses are picking up those issues and calling on the Government to consider again. New clause 46 calls for anonymity of victims. That was considered at the time the law was put in place, but the advice then was to wait to see how things progressed. The statistics suggest that now is a time to think again, as new clause 41, which also deals with compensation, also seeks to do.
The myriad amendments before us today show the level of complexity involved and the level of concern among hon. Members from at least three parties represented in the Chamber tonight—I am sure Labour Front Benchers would share in this, too—but I worry that they offer a piecemeal set of solutions. The hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd picked up on that. Surely what is needed is a wholesale review of the law, police training and the development of international support for digital providers to take seriously the importance of keeping their communities safe online. I support the spirit of these amendments, but I am struck by the need for a more comprehensive review, perhaps in the form of the digital economy Bill, which Her Gracious Majesty announced in the Gracious Speech only last month.
Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is articulating a very serious problem, with which many of us have been involved for some time. Does she acknowledge that with some 70,000 cases of historical child abuse likely to be investigated by the police this year alone and with up to half of cases coming to the courts involving sexual exploitation, many of them historical, the police are overwhelmed in their capacity to be able to deal with this new wave of digital crime against some of the most vulnerable children? Her suggestion for a more holistic overview of this is therefore essential.
Mrs Miller
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. He of course has an impeccable record of campaigning in this area. Perhaps the very scale of this problem is an indication that our regulatory framework within which these organisations work is not quite as good as it needs to be for the future. We cannot expect our police force simply to put down the work it is doing in every other area to focus solely on online crime, but at the moment he is right to say that the scale of what is being seen is, in the words of some police chiefs, “frightening”. We do not yet seem to be seeing a response to that. I hope that the digital economy Bill will provide the Ministers sitting on the Front Bench today, and perhaps their colleagues in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with the opportunity to look carefully at this. It is no longer something that we can simply say is the by-product of a new industry that will settle down over time. Those Ministers will have heard a good deal of evidence this evening to suggest that more action needs to be taken, and I ask them to do what one of them, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley), agreed to do today in departmental questions: sit down with me and other hon. Members who might be interested to set out how the digital economy Bill can be used as a vehicle to achieve the objective of making our internet safer, both at home and abroad.
Ann Coffey
I wish to say a few words about new clauses 13 and 14, which stand in my name. New clause 13 would make it an offence for adults to groom children and young people for criminal behaviour, and new clause 14 would introduce a new grooming for criminal behaviour prevention order, which I would call a “Fagin order”. The new Fagin orders would ban criminal adults from contacting a child. Just as with children groomed for child sexual exploitation, we must recognise that young people drawn into criminality and drug dealing have, in the first instance, often been groomed and manipulated.
Currently, we have numerous prevention orders available to the police to combat grooming for child sexual exploitation, including sexual risk orders, sexual harm prevention orders and child abduction warning notices. I would like to see the creation of a similar order to be used where children are being groomed by organised crime to act as drug runners. That would be a practical way of disrupting activities including the phenomenon of “county lines”, whereby criminals groom and coerce children and young people into selling class A drugs many miles from home, often in quiet towns. Organised crime is aggressively creating new markets for drugs, in every seaside town and every small country village across the country. Criminals used to do their own drug running, but now they are actively identifying groups of vulnerable children to use, including those living in children’s homes and pupil referral units, to minimise the risk to themselves. As I said in a previous debate, county lines is the next big grooming scandal on the horizon. It takes many forms, but its basis is using vulnerable children and adults to develop new markets for drugs.
One example I saw involved a 15-year-old girl who was offered £500 to go “up country” to sell drugs. She had the class A drugs plugged inside her but was then set up by the original gang and assaulted on the train, and had the drugs forcibly removed from her. She was told she must pay back £3,000 to the group for the stolen drugs, and had to continue to sell drugs and provide sexual favours. The threat of child sexual exploitation for girls in gangs is known, but the added factor of being trafficked to remote locations compounds their vulnerability. Those young people are at risk of physical violence, sexual exploitation, and emotional and physical abuse. That model of grooming arguably involves both trafficking and modern slavery. Children from Greater Manchester are being groomed by criminal gangs and have been found selling drugs in places as far away as Devon. These gang members are rather like modern-day Fagins or Bill Sikes: hard men who groom youngsters and get them to do their dirty work. They need to be stopped in their tracks.
The recent Home Office report “Ending gang violence and exploitation” said that young girls are often groomed for involvement in criminal behaviour and harmful sexual behaviour as part of gang culture. Indeed, the most recent Rotherham trial showed the connection between organised crime and drugs and child sexual exploitation. I have read the recent Home Office report and also the National Crime Agency report on county lines from August 2015, and I think this development is not fully understood or recognised. Someone, somewhere needs to take ownership of a strategy to disrupt this aggressive organised network, and that strategy needs to put the safeguarding children first. I am not pretending for one minute that Fagin orders would be a silver bullet, but they would indicate a change in culture and a recognition that the responsibility lies with the adults who groom the children. We really cannot afford to make the same mistakes as we did with child sexual exploitation, where we let terrible things happen to children because we blamed them for bringing about their own exploitation.
Child sexual exploitation and drug running and involvement with criminal activities are often intertwined, which is why we need a two-pronged approach. Just as we have prevention orders for child sexual exploitation, we should have similar prevention orders for adults grooming children for criminal behaviour. We need a response to county lines that ensures that children are found, safeguarded and supported out of gangs, and that adults are stopped as early as possible from grooming and manipulating children, and are punished to the full extent of the law. Until then, it will continue to be the young victims who are exploited, blamed and then punished as their abusers and puppet masters continue with a trade that nets organised crime millions of pounds a year.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
I am grateful to you for calling me, Mr Deputy Speaker. I speak in support of new clauses 15, 16 and 18, which stand in my name and those of others. First, however, I wish to add my voice to those of the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller)—my neighbour. It is clear from the amendments in this legislation and elsewhere that the law is struggling with protecting children online; it is old and ineffective, and it really does not appreciate the dangers that are out there for children on the internet. I sincerely hope that my right hon. Friend is right and that the digital economy Bill is used to increase the protection for children online, not least because part of the reason for not tackling this problem in the way we should is that there is big money to be made here. This is a commercial enterprise: pumping this stuff out on to people’s screens and computers across the country, if not the world. There is therefore a certain sloth, an idleness, in the digital community in dealing with it. The truth is that, technically, we could switch off this stuff tonight if we wanted to. We have no problem stopping children getting into our bank accounts and buying things on Amazon or wherever it might be, and yet children can easily access pornography every day, 24 hours a day, without any protection whatsoever unless their parents intervene. That really is a disgraceful state of affairs.
We should use the digital economy Bill to create the offence of living off immoral earnings for these internet providers, because, by turning a blind eye and not interrogating the data that are coming through their pipes, that is effectively what they are doing. They should turn off such material so that eyes below the age of 18 cannot see it. They are living off immoral earnings and they are not living up to their duty to society and to our children. We need to find some way to make them face up to their obligations.
I have three children, two of whom are very small. I feel as if I am in a daily fight for them with the media—whether it is TV, online or whatever it might be. We carefully ration what they get and what they can see. I hope to God that, as they grow and become teenagers, I can protect them from the worst excesses, but I need some help. I need help from the Government. I also need help from those who control the data and our access to the internet. They can do it in any number of ways and they should be forced to do it on pain of significant financial penalties. It is only when the pound is there and their profits are threatened that they will finally focus and come up with the technical solutions that we need.
Tim Loughton
I would have liked to have added my name to my hon. Friend’s amendment if I had got my act together in time. I was out with a group of people working for a tobacco company recently. We went on stings to local newsagents and other such places buying illegal, counterfeit and discounted cigarettes. In many cases, those cigarettes were advertised by a phone number, which we then rang up. Very clearly, it could only have resulted in criminal activity. Just as my hon. Friend is very much making the point about prostitution, which clearly is only going to lead to illegal activity, it is so easy for us to be able to use those phone numbers, and those telephone companies should be taking a greater responsibility.
Kit Malthouse
Exactly right. My hon. Friend brings me neatly on to new clause 16, which deals with that matter.
I know that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, have been an aficionado of my political career, so you will know that, 15 years ago I was charged with getting rid of prostitutes’ cards in telephone boxes. It was costing Westminster council about a quarter of a million pounds a year to remove these things, and so I was given the job of getting rid of them. We tried clearing them out and putting up false cards so that people were misdirected. We tried all sorts of things. In the end, the only solution that we came up with that we and BT felt would work was barring the numbers. I visited all the mobile companies and, as people had landlines in those days, all the landline companies as well—NTL, BT and all the rest. I said to them, “When we notify you of this number, we would like you to bar it.” They said, “We will not do that, but we will if you manage to make placing the cards an offence.” They thought that I would give up at that stage, as there would be too much of a mountain to climb. None the less, we decided to have a go, and so ensued a two-year campaign to get that offence on the statute book.
During those two years, I learned the truth about prostitutes’ cards and, indeed, the advertising of prostitution generally. Effectively, being allowed to advertise for free and in an unrestricted way on our streets, in the back of our newspapers and online is organised crime. When someone gets one of these numbers, they are ringing not a prostitute who is a victim, but a switchboard. When they ring the number and say what they want, they will get a menu of women—mostly it is women—trafficked or otherwise, of all ages, creeds and races. They can pick from the menu. Those numbers then gather a bit of value. Once someone is a punter and they have used the number and got what they wanted, they will use it again and again and again.
I started to learn that understanding the economics behind these telephone numbers is key to how we can eradicate them. Once we realise that these numbers carry a value and that there is a stream of income attached to them, it becomes even more pressing that we should bar them. When we add to that the fact that the printing of the cards, the advertising, and the websites also cost money—prostitutes’ cards are printed in the hundreds of thousands to make them incredibly cheap—we can see why making it dangerous to advertise a telephone number could become an extremely effective deterrent. If they advertise a number that is gathering income, and it is barred within 24 hours, they lose all of that income. Hitting them in the pocket is the most effective way to do it.
Sarah Champion (Rotherham) (Lab)
Just for clarity, behind every one of those numbers is a woman who very, very often might have been abused as a child or trafficked into the country. They might have an incredibly violent pimp who is working her. Is the hon. Gentleman looking to prosecute the woman who, in my experience, is usually the victim and not the belle de jour that is often presented, or is he going after the pimps, the manipulators and the gang leaders that are behind it all?
Kit Malthouse
I am absolutely not targeting the women at all. This is about the organised crime that is creating the number, printing the card, placing the card, and victimising the woman. It is about cutting off their access to cash, and therefore restricting their ability to build a business off the back of this free advertising.
Eventually, after a two-year campaign, we got the offence made illegal. I was helped by friends in the House of Lords. The night that it was enacted by Her Majesty the Queen, we arrested the first carder—an Italian law student. I remember it well. He was bailed and disappeared back to Italy. The very next week, I had a meeting with the mobile phone companies and they completely welched on the deal. They did not realise that we would get it done, and that by campaigning for two years and by having a bit of gumption, we would manage to achieve our goal.
Jonathan Edwards
The use of the term “welching” in that context is deeply disrespectful to the people of my country, and I ask the hon. Gentleman to withdraw his comment.
Kit Malthouse
I do unreservedly withdraw it. It was an unfortunate use of the word. I think that the spelling is different, but the hon. Gentleman is quite right. Let me say that the phone companies reneged on the deal—I ask him to forgive me. It is a word in common parlance, but I should not have used it.
The phone companies completely reneged on the deal. As a result, I have been waiting for the opportunity to try to put to the Government the idea that there is this solution to the problem. I present here a simple solution, which is, effectively, if the chief officer of police finds a number being advertised in their area for the purposes of prostitution, they can apply to a magistrate to have the number barred. That means that both the police officer and the magistrate have to judge whether that is a measured thing to do; it is not automatic. It is for the police to decide. I would advise the police officers to warn the owner of the number that this is about to happen before they do it. It is a relatively simple solution, and I guarantee that it will result in the disappearance of these cards from Liverpool, Manchester, the west end or wherever they may be.
My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) is right that the scheme could be extended. There could be numbers used for dealing drugs and for selling cigarettes. Numbers for prostitution and drugs could be on the internet. People can access such numbers quite freely at the moment. We need to cut the numbers. If we do it swiftly, we will certainly go a huge way towards suppressing the activity and making it difficult for criminal and customer to connect. I do not intend to press my amendment to a vote, but I ask the Government to look at it—the Minister has promised to do so—and hopefully it will come back in the Lords.
I have tabled another two new clauses. You will have noticed, Madam Deputy Speaker, that I have had a theme during my time in this House, which is the protection of children. It has alarmed me for some time that the legislation protecting children is elderly, out of date and very patchy. The offence of child cruelty, which I am seeking to raise the tariff for tonight, dates back to the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. It still includes things such as allowing a child to be burned, which used to arise when we sent them up chimneys. The legislation is very elderly and is really not fit for purpose. The last time the sentence for child cruelty was looked at was in 1988. We have not looked at it for nearly 30 years, and yet the number of offences is rising quite significantly. Clearly, the deterrent effect is not working. I am given to understand that the Sentencing Council will review child cruelty over the coming summer. If it does so, we are duty bound to try to give it a bit of headroom and move the tariff up from 10 years to 14 years for the most severe offences.
New clause 15 is about reviewing all child offences. We have been very good in the House in seeking to protect vulnerable groups by legislation generally. If someone commits a crime against someone who is gay because they are gay, they will get an aggravated sentence. Similarly, if they commit a crime against someone who is black because they are black, they will get an aggravated sentence. If they commit an offence against someone on the grounds of their religion, they will get an aggravated sentence. Yet if they commit an offence against a child because they are a child, they will not necessarily get an aggravated sentence.
Children are not a protected group in law, unlike other minority and vulnerable groups, and they should be. I am grateful to Public Bill Office for helping me try to draft an amendment that would allow me to do that. The best way that we could find to do it was to require the Sentencing Council to review all offences for children within 12 months, to allow us all to have our say about aggravating the sentences when offences are committed against children.
I have attempted to insert this principle in previous Bills—principally, in the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016. Sadly, the Government would not accept my amendment, which would have ensured that anyone who sold a psychoactive substance to a child would get a stiffer sentence than if they sold it to a 55-year-old man. It seems crazy to me that that would not happen, but the Government would not accept the amendment, so this is my attempt to do something similar.
All my amendments are probing. I am willing to give the Government time, in consultation, to look at them again. I hope that they will come back in the Lords, but if they do not, I gather that, pleasingly, we get a policing and crime Bill along in the House once every six months, so I will get another chance. On that basis, I hope that my hon. Friends will look at the amendments at least and give them a thumbs-up for future consideration.
Sarah Champion
I rise to speak predominantly to new clauses 6, 10, 41 and 60, which have been tabled by Opposition Front Benchers. The intention behind the new clauses is to provide stronger safeguards against the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and to disrupt the perpetrators of those heinous crimes before they have the opportunity to destroy a child’s life.
I start with new clause 6, which relates to the extension of child abduction warning notices, known as CAWNs, which are a vital tool for the police in the prevention of the abuse and exploitation of children. CAWNs are issued by the police at the request of a parent or legal guardian. They disrupt contact between a child and an adult believed to be in the process of grooming that child for sex. Currently, the police can issue a CAWN in relation to any child under the age of 16, but only a tiny minority of 16 and 17-year-olds, including children who have been taken into care under section 31 of the Children Act 1989, those who are subject to an emergency protection order and those in police protection. All other 16 and 17-year-olds are left unprotected.
By definition, children in care are vulnerable. The last available annual statistics show that 4,320 16 and 17-year-olds who became looked after by the local authority would not be eligible for the protection of a child abduction warning notice. The Minister has previously expressed some scepticism about the proposals to extend the use of those notices to all children in care. I recognise the sensitivities about the law in this area, given that 16 and 17-year-olds are legally able to marry and consent to sexual activity, but that group of children—yes, they are legally children—are living unstable and risky lives. They face a significantly greater risk of sexual exploitation than others and are targeted by adults who exploit their vulnerability, yet the police are denied access to a critical intervention tool that would help to keep them safe.
I agree with the Minister that CAWNs are an imperfect tool, but we agree that children of any age, including those who are 16 and 17, must be able to rely on the state for protection. For three years, I have been pushing successive Ministers to find a solution. The way to deal with complex issues is not to avoid them altogether. We need to persevere and collaborate so that we can find the best possible solutions. It is vital that we get legislation to protect all children up to the age of 18 from abuse, and it is important that we get that legislation right. I know that the Minister is not minded to support new clause 6, so what assurances can she give us that the Government plan to ensure that children up to the age of 18 are protected from the early stages of sexual grooming?
Next, I turn my attention to new clause 60, which, unlike new clause 6, relates to the existing use of child abduction warning notices by the police. CAWNs are not legally enforceable. Breaching a notice is not a criminal offence but does form an evidence base for future action. That further action, according to Government guidance, is meant to take the form of a sexual harm prevention order or a sexual risk order, both of which require a higher threshold to use. They are legally enforceable and punishable with criminal sanctions.
In theory, that is a good system. It allows the police to intervene formally to prevent harm at the earliest possible stage when concerns have been expressed about an adult’s behaviour towards a child. Even when demonstrable evidence is sparse, the police have the ability to take further action, using the breach of a CAWN as evidence. The police currently have the tools to escalate their response to keep, and continue to keep, a child safe. The problem is that police forces in England and Wales are failing to record the breach of a child abduction warning notice. Indeed, they are failing to record the issuing of a notice in the first place and the actions that follow from that breach.
Andrew Gwynne
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this important issue. On 4 May I held an Adjournment debate on taxi licensing, because we in Greater Manchester have the problem that a neighbouring local authority in Lancashire is effectively handing out taxi licences like sweeties. They are often given to people who have been legitimately refused them by the 10 Greater Manchester authorities, yet they are operating private hire cabs on the streets of Greater Manchester. Not only should that worry the public, but the law needs strengthening to prevent it from happening.
Sarah Champion
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing up that issue. My deep frustration is that we in Rotherham work really hard to get the legislation right. We have really robust legislation to protect children, but within six weeks of its being implemented, the Government’s Deregulation Act 2015 meant that it was not worth the paper that it was written on. He is right that people from other areas could then be subcontracted and come in and pick up fares, and none of the safeguards that our local authority tried to put in place had any effect whatever. I thank him for raising the issue, which the Government need to look at.
To create the system in Rotherham, there was much consultation not only with taxi drivers but with the survivors of child abuse. Rotherham Borough Council has now implemented a new licensing system, which is one of the points covered in new clause 10. Two years after the horror that we discovered in Rotherham, the Government have failed to take action to make the taxi profession safer across the UK for all vulnerable people in our society. They must learn lessons when such things go catastrophically wrong. In Committee, Labour pushed the Government to place taxi and private vehicle licensing authorities under a statutory obligation to prevent child sexual exploitation.
Taxi drivers are in a position of considerable trust. The overwhelming majority of taxi drivers live up to the responsibility that their role creates for them, but unfortunately a minority do not. Better regulation is needed urgently to improve the training and awareness of drivers, so that they can play a part in keeping vulnerable children safe from harm and so that they know how to report abuse if they see it. All local authorities must ensure that checks are carried out to prevent perpetrators or potential perpetrators from being licensed. Monitoring must be in place, complaints must be investigated and passengers must feel confident.
I am delighted to see that the Government have listened to Labour and have responded to our new clause by tabling one of their own, which would empower the Secretary of State to issue statutory guidance to licensing authorities. However, can the Minister give us an assurance that Government new clause 56 would have the same effect as our new clause 10? I notice that the Government’s new clause will empower but not require the Secretary of State to issue statutory guidance. Can the Minister confirm that the Secretary of State does intend to issue guidance, and to do so without delay? I would appreciate an indication of the timeline involved, both on the roll-out of the consultation and on when the guidance will take effect.
Andrew Gwynne
Although I support much of what my hon. Friend says may be included in the Government’s new clause, is not part of the problem that the local authority that issues the licence receives the funding for that licence to be processed, but if the taxi driver is operating in another part of the country, a local authority very distant from the issuing authority might have the cost of enforcing and investigating them? Do we not need parity of funding according to where a taxi driver is operating?
Sarah Champion
Once again, my hon. Friend is right. That is why there needs to be a national licensing scheme for which the Government have responsibility.
The Government have been good at making promises about tackling child sexual exploitation, but not so good at following them up with action. Will the Minister make some commitments on taxi licensing? I would appreciate a steer on the contents of the guidance, although I realise that they will be the subject of consultation. The Minister may want to write to me on that point.
Councils continue to report a lack of intelligence sharing by the police on issues crucial to deciding the suitability of applicants for taxi licences. Although the new common-law disclosure policy should allow for information sharing, the interpretation varies and many police forces do not share data. Guidance to councils alone will not resolve the problem. Will the Home Office take steps to ensure that the police co-operate fully with councils so that applicants for taxi licences can be screened effectively?
Finally, will the Minister confirm the status of the guidance? Government new clause 56 states that licensing authorities “must have regard” to it. I hope the Minister will clarify that the guidance must be followed, not just looked at and put in a drawer. If the Minister can provide confirmation on those questions, we are minded to withdraw our new clause and support the Government’s.
New clause 41 would make it explicit in the law that local safeguarding children boards have an obligation to prevent child sexual exploitation and other forms of child abuse. Such boards should bring together professionals in education, law enforcement, social care and the voluntary sector to help protect children. They are collaborative bodies, established by the Labour Government, which have the potential to ensure that the focus of every organisation on the board is the protection and welfare of children. Local safeguarding children boards have the potential to act as the canary to child sexual exploitation and abuse, bringing together professionals who can develop a full picture of the harm being perpetrated against a child. But far more emphasis must be given to the prevention of child sexual exploitation and child abuse.
Chief Constable Simon Bailey has said that in 2015 more than £1 billion was spent on investigating child abuse allegations. Sadly, by the time the police are involved, it is likely that children have already been harmed and will be living with the trauma for the rest of their lives. The Prime Minister has given child sexual exploitation the status of a “national threat” in the strategic policing requirement. I therefore hope that the Minister will support our new clause to explicitly broaden the objectives of local safeguarding children boards to include a focus on the prevention of sexual exploitation.
Tim Loughton
The hon. Lady is making some good points, but it was my understanding when I was responsible for the child sexual exploitation action plan introduced nationally in 2011 that each local safeguarding children board was responsible for developing its own localised version of that CSE plan. The problem is not so much the plan as the unwillingness of some partners within an LSCB to pull their weight. Does the hon. Lady agree that the recent review undertaken for the Department for Education may need to lead to the introduction of some statutory duties on those partners to do their bit, in partnership with everybody else?
Sarah Champion
As ever, the hon. Gentleman is superb on this subject, and he is ahead of me by a line of my speech. I completely agree. The problem with the safeguarding boards as they stand at present is that they are very dependent on the skill, determination and bloody-mindedness of the chair. The hon. Gentleman is right. I do not want things to come down to the luck of whether there is a good chair who can implement a good plan. What I want is for every child across the country to be safe and safeguarded in the same way, so I look to the Government to move on that.
I support new clauses 13 and 14. I praise my hon. Friend the Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), who works tirelessly for the protection of children in her constituency and across the country. She has been a role model and a mentor to me, and I want to put on record my gratitude to her for all the help she has given to me and to all the children in this country. She has been tireless, and I am very grateful for that.
My hon. Friend’s new clauses, which deal with the grooming of children for criminal behaviour, raise an important issue that the House must tackle. Children are not just at risk of grooming for sex. They face exploitation by criminals for terrorism, trafficking and drug-related offences, for instance—we have heard other examples. The Government must take the issue seriously and offer a holistic approach to tackling child grooming and exploitation. Will the Minister work closely with my hon. Friend to turn her new clauses 13 and 14 into legislation?
New clauses 46, 47, 61 and 62 were tabled by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael). Through my campaigning work to prevent violence, exploitation and harm against children, I have seen the most dramatic and shocking increase in the proliferation of sexual images, often taken and shared by children. The right hon. Gentleman will appreciate that the current legislation has been in effect for only a year. I hope he will support my call on the Government to conduct a thorough review of the effectiveness of the legislation, the number of prosecutions and convictions, and the suitability of the sentences given.
I welcome Government new clause 55, which will create lifetime anonymity for victims of forced marriage. The crime of forced marriage is another form of domestic violence. The victims, mostly women, suffer violence, threats of violence, coercion, manipulation, psychological trauma and economic control. As with every other form of domestic violence, victims have their right to determine their own lives forcibly removed from them by their abusers. Anonymity will encourage victims to come forward and seek help from the police. It will give a survivor of this form of domestic violence a chance to regain control and rebuild their life. Now that the Government recognise the benefit of anonymity for victims of forced marriage, female genital mutilation and sexual abuse, I hope they will consider extending anonymity to victims of other forms of domestic and sexual violence and do more to raise awareness of these awful crimes.
I would like briefly to comment on a number of the provisions tabled by the shadow Home Office team, led by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer). It is unfortunate but true that our criminal justice system does not always place support for the victim at its core. I know from my work with victims of domestic and sexual violence that they often feel totally unsupported when reporting a crime or after a prosecution. Many victims face the most horrendous ordeal in court, where they are forced to relive their trauma over and over again. Yet there is no statutory framework in the criminal justice system for the provision of services for victims—there is no legal regime promoting and protecting victims’ rights from the beginning to the end of their engagement with the criminal justice system. Similarly, the role of the Victim’s Commissioner has great potential, but the position is under-resourced and exists without significant powers. Victims’ rights will be taken seriously only if and when they are enshrined in law. I hope the Government will hear our calls today and make that a reality.
I wish to end by commenting on new clause 2, which would devolve responsibility for policing to the Welsh Assembly. I have had the pleasure of working with the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) on other clauses in the Bill relating to child protection, so I have no doubt that the convictions she has expressed in this new clause are heartfelt and sincere and need to be taken seriously. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) has outlined, Labour believes that the people of Wales should have a greater say over the policing of Wales, and that should be pursued through the Wales Bill.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
I wish to speak to new clauses 46, 47, 61 and 62, which stand in my name. Perhaps I can pick up where the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) left off, on new clause 2. My hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) would normally speak for the Liberal Democrat party on such matters, but he is, unfortunately, absent from the House today through illness. However, the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) indicated that she intends to push the new clause to a vote, and I should indicate that, in the event that she does, my party will support her and her colleagues. To devolve substantial portions of the criminal law in relation to Wales without devolving control of the police force that would then enforce that law seems at the very least to be a little illogical, so I wish the hon. Lady and her colleagues well.
I am grateful for the indications of support for my new clauses that I have had from members of different parties, including those not represented in the House. In particular, members of the Women’s Equality party are assiduous and effective campaigners on the issue of revenge pornography; indeed, they were the authors of new clauses 61 and 62.
The hon. Member for Rotherham, who spoke from the Opposition Front Bench, rightly said that it was only last year that we undertook the criminalisation of revenge pornography. That was a quite remarkable step, and none of us should underestimate its importance. However, to pick up a point that she made, the statistics already demonstrate that this is a stubborn problem, which will require more action if we are to bring about the changes in attitude that will ultimately see this behaviour reduced and, hopefully, eliminated.
Mrs Miller
I commend the right hon. Gentleman for bringing these provisions to the House. He reflected on the importance of the law the Government brought in on revenge pornography. At the time, we talked about the importance of recognising that the impact of online crimes is very different from that of offline crimes. Will he join me in saying that, although it can be easy to say that what is illegal offline is illegal online, that misses the point, because the impact online can be so much greater and so much more devastating to the people involved?
Mr Carmichael
Indeed. I will come to the distress that is caused by this conduct in my remarks on new clause 62. The right hon. Lady is absolutely right that, in relation to these offences, we should focus on the outcomes and effects endured by those who suffer the abuse—and when I say “abuse”, I use the term advisedly.
From April to December last year, 1,160 cases were reported, which is quite remarkable, given the period we are dealing with—indeed, those figures are from England and Wales alone. Only 11% of the cases that have been reported have led to charge, with 82 prosecutions and 74 cautions resulting from those charges. That suggests that with regard to the need to see a change in attitude and behaviour, we first need to see it among some of the criminal justice professionals dealing with this—the police officers, prosecutors, and judges.
This takes me back to my early career, when as a trainee and then a qualified solicitor, I worked for the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service in Edinburgh, where one of my first bosses—she was then a senior legal assistant—was Elish Angiolini, who became the first female Lord Advocate, and the first solicitor Lord Advocate, in Scotland. At that time, along with other colleagues, she did tremendous amounts to drive forward improvements in how the victims of sexual abuse in general, but child sexual abuse in particular, were treated by the court system. A lot of it seems very rudimentary and basic stuff now, but in the early and mid-1990s, when we were arranging for court visits ahead of trials so that victims of these sorts of offences could give their evidence from behind a screen or by live link, it seemed pretty revolutionary, and it met with substantial resistance from the police—not so much the police, in fairness, but certainly many within the legal profession. We were right to drive those changes, as has been demonstrated by the way in which the law and procedure in that area has developed ever since. A similar attitude and a similar drive is now required in relation to the offence of revenge pornography.
New clause 46 goes right to the heart of this by seeking to extend the protection of anonymity to victims of revenge pornography. That would mean that we would not necessarily have to wait for a review to look further at where cases and procedures will develop in this area. As we have heard, the principle of anonymity is accepted by the Government in relation to victims of forced marriage. I welcome new clause 55, which extends that protection. However, it surely strikes at the heart of the offence that we introduced last year that we should seek to protect those women—they are nearly all women—who are, in essence, subject to an invasion of privacy. No really meaningful remedy is available to them if making complaints seeking to reinforce the criminal sanctions that come as a result of that invasion of privacy only makes them vulnerable to further invasions of privacy. That is why it is important that at some point, by whatever means—I will listen very carefully to the Minister’s response—we should look at extending the protection of anonymity to these victims.
New clause 47 would allow the court to make compensation orders to victims of revenge pornography. Many campaigning in this field would like a full civil remedy to be available, although that would have taken us somewhat beyond the scope of this Bill. However, we ought to be taking advantage of the quite remarkable degree of consensus that we have seen across the Chamber tonight. I hope the Government will recognise that and take full advantage of it, because that sort of consensus is rare enough, and when we see it we ought to make the most of it.
New clause 61 would extend the test from an intent to cause alarm, as in section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015, to include recklessness. This strikes at what is required evidentially to provide mens rea in relation to the commission of the offence. It would bring people in England and Wales into line with the protections that are already afforded to people in Scotland through the Abusive Behaviour and Sexual Harm (Scotland) Act 2016.
The offence would also be extended from one that required disclosure of the material to one that required a threat to disclose it. Research indicates that no fewer than one in 10 ex-partners make that threat. If the outcome is to provide meaningful protection, it would make sense to extend the ambit of the offence to include a threat to disclose. That is being pursued by the #CtrlAltDel campaign, which is being led by the Women’s Equality party and which I commend to the House.
The final new clause standing in my name is new clause 62, which brings me to the point made by the right hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller).
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. Before the right hon. Gentleman turns to his next new clause, I am not suggesting for a moment that he has spoken for too long, because he has not—he has been quite brief—but this debate is time-limited. The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) has indicated that he wishes to speak and I trust that he will be brief, because I am sure that the House would be disappointed if the Minister did not have time to answer the many points that have been made to her this evening.
Mr Carmichael
I am grateful to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for saying that I have not spoken for long, because I have actually spoken for longer than I had intended.
I do not have a great deal to say about new clause 62, but it might assist the House if I explain that, by seeking to extend the definition of the offence, we are striking at the stress caused by, and the actual outcome of, the behaviour suffered by victims of this abuse. At the moment, the definition is drawn tightly, for reasons that I think are understood by all. Those experienced in the field, however, say that the harm and distress caused is the same for those who have suffered this wider disclosure and that it would make sense to ensure that they are equally covered by the criminal law.
Jonathan Edwards
I was not going to make a speech, but I thought I had better use this opportunity to explain further my earlier intervention. Before I do so, I would like to apologise to Mr Deputy Speaker and the Minister. I do not usually make it a rule to get worked up in this place, not least because my mother watches BBC Parliament, but I do get very passionate about the issue of the old Dyfed-Powys police helicopter. I am delighted that the Policing Minister is in his place, because we have debated the issue on several occasions and he was kind enough to meet me during the course of those deliberations.
We lost our helicopter in Dyfed-Powys because policing is not devolved to Wales. Northern Ireland and Scotland have kept their helicopter services, yet Wales has been put in a centralised service called the National Police Air Service, which means that our helicopter has been pooled from Dyfed-Powys. The only figures available from the month of January—the first operational month for NPAS as far as Dyfed-Powys is concerned—show that 86% of requests by police officers in Dyfed-Powys were not honoured by NPAS.
This is not just about police officers not having the service and support that they deserve; the residents of Dyfed-Powys are also clearly being let down. Let us remember that we are now hitting high season, during which the population of Dyfed-Powys will swell considerably, not least with people who will enjoy our fantastic coastline, so use of the helicopter will become far more important.
Devolving policing is not just about securing equality for Wales. It is devolved to Scotland and Northern Ireland, and it will be devolved to cities in England, but why is it not being devolved to Wales?
I am very disappointed that the Labour party is abstaining on this issue, but I am delighted that we have the support of the Lib Dems. Where are the Welsh MPs? Not a single Tory MP who represents a Welsh constituency is here to debate a vital policy issue for my country. Only two Labour MPs from Wales have been in the Chamber—the hon. Members for Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) and for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones)—and I am delighted that the hon. Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden) is here as well. These debates will be recorded by the people of Wales and they will be reported by the press, I hope. The people of Wales will draw their own conclusions from the lack of action by the Unionist parties.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)
This has been a wide-ranging debate. Before I respond to the many Opposition and Back-Bench amendments in this group, I hope hon. Members will forgive me if I touch briefly on the key Government amendments and new clauses.
Jonathan Edwards
Does the Minister not understand that the Silk commission was in fact a cross-party commission set up by the UK Government and that it included her party?
Karen Bradley
I know that the hon. Gentleman feels strongly about this. I also accept his apology from earlier; I can promise him that I was not smirking at anything he was saying. The Policing Minister is here and he will be happy to meet the hon. Gentleman again to discuss the specific issue of the helicopter.
The current England and Wales-wide arrangements for policing work well, and the proponents of devolution have failed adequately to address the significant risks that would arise if those arrangements were disrupted. I disagree with the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd when she says that policing in England and Wales is set up for urban areas in England. I represent a rural constituency in England, and the way in which policing operates by devolving power to the police and crime commissioners to ensure that we have the right policing for each area is certainly right for my constituency. However, we are debating the Wales Bill tomorrow, and it will be important to debate these matters fully then, as the hon. Member for Rotherham has also suggested.
I am conscious of the time, and I want to try to get through as much of my speech as possible, so I will turn to digital crime issues. We debated in Committee many of the points that have been raised. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) made very important and powerful points about the law on digital crime. However, I do not accept the premise that the criminal law is defective in this area. It is important to acknowledge that the crimes are the same; the fact that they are committed online does not change anything. I would not wish to create a whole new suite of offences that may confuse the courts and make it more difficult to get convictions.
Mrs Miller
Will the Minister take a moment to explain why the police are finding it so difficult to secure convictions, particularly in relation to revenge pornography, if the law in this and other areas of online crimes is so clear?
Karen Bradley
My right hon. Friend will understand that conviction is not just about the offence in legislation or the precedent in case law; it is about the evidence that can be gathered and presenting that evidence to a jury. I am not in any way saying that we are perfect in this regard, and we could have many debates about how best to get convictions. As I said earlier, I would very much like to meet her, together with my noble Friend Baroness Shields, who has responsibility for the digital Bill in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, because I want to make sure that we are covering these issues and that we make it as easy as possible for the courts to get convictions. I do not accept that the answer is simply to create a whole new suite of offences that may confuse the law enforcement agencies and prosecutors. I want to discuss this with her and others to make sure we address these points.
New clause 44—I realise that I am darting about, but I am doing my best to get through my speech—is about a specialist digital unit. Again, we discussed this in Committee. The way operational policing decisions are taken is a matter for chief officers; it is not something on which the Home Office should legislate to say that every force should operate in such a way. That is down to chief officers locally and, of course, police and crime commissioners. [Interruption.] I am now coming to the new clauses tabled by the hon. Member for Rotherham.
I want to take new clause 6 and all the points about child protection together. We have had many debates about the issue of vulnerable young people and children, how best we can protect them and how to stop their going missing. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stockport (Ann Coffey), who, as her Front-Bench colleague said, has been such a pioneer in this area. When she talks, I know that she is talking common sense. The hon. Member for Rotherham and other Members will know that I am determined to tackle this issue, but I think we need to do it in the right way. That is why I have convened the round table in a couple of weeks’ time to look at the overall issue of child abduction warning notices. I am not convinced that a warning notice from the police in relation to a child abduction offence is necessarily the right way to make sure we protect such vulnerable young people. I want to consider all issues relating to child abduction warning notices—I think the hon. Member for Stockport has been invited to the round table, but if not, I now extend an invitation to her—and to look at everything we are doing in this area and at ensuring we have the right tools in the armoury for the law enforcement agencies, because it is so important that the police are able to use those tools and to protect young people with the right tools for those young people.
I am extremely conscious of the time and that I need to leave a moment before 9 o’clock, so I will now sit down. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will agree the Government new clauses and amendments, and that they will not press their own.
Liz Saville Roberts
Just to close the debate, I must first ask why, given that we have had devolution in Wales for 17 years, Wales is being treated differently in terms of policing from the other nations of the United Kingdom and, indeed, from the English cities? Secondly, the policing needs of Wales are different. Our experience of centralising and sharing specialised services, such as the police helicopter, has shown that such services are drawn inevitably eastwards and away from the rural areas where we most need them. Finally, I would strongly argue that the absence of consensus is now a historical issue. There is consensus in Wales for Wales policing—for policing to be devolved to Wales. There was consensus on Silk, then not on “Powers for a Purpose”, but there is consensus in the Welsh Assembly and among all four police and crime commissioners.
Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.
Type of publication | Persons responsible |
|---|---|
Newspaper or other periodical | Any person who is a proprietor, editor or publisher of the newspaper or periodical. |
Relevant programme | Any person who— (a) is a body corporate engaged in providing the programme service in which the programme is included, or (b) has functions in relation to the programme corresponding to those of an editor of a newspaper. |
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Mr Speaker
Consideration completed. I will now suspend the House for about five minutes in order to make a decision about certification. The Division bells will be rung two minutes before the House resumes. Following my certification, the Government will table the appropriate consent motions, copies of which will be available shortly in the Vote Office and will be distributed by Doorkeepers.
Mr Speaker
I can now inform the House that I have completed certification of the Bill, as required by the Standing Order, and that I have made no change to the provisional certificate issued last week. Copies of my final certificate will be made available in the Vote Office and on the parliamentary website.
Under Standing Order No. 83M, consent motions are therefore required for the Bill to proceed. Copies of the motions are available in the Vote Office and on the parliamentary website, and have been made available to Members in the Chamber. Does the Minister intend to move the consent motions?
Mr Speaker
Under Standing Order No. 83M(4), the House must forthwith resolve itself into the Legislative Grand Committee (England and Wales), and thereafter into the Legislative Grand Committee (England).
The House forthwith resolved itself into the Legislative Grand Committee (England and Wales) (Standing Order No. 83M).
[Mrs Eleanor Laing in the Chair]
The First Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
There will now be a joint debate on the consent motion for England and Wales and the consent motion for England. I remind hon. Members that, although all Members may speak in the debate, if there are Divisions, only Members representing constituencies in England and Wales may vote on the consent motion for England and Wales, and only Members representing constituencies in England may vote on the consent motion for England.
Resolved,
That the Committee consents to the following certified clauses and schedules of the Policing and Crime Bill and a certified amendment made by the House to the Bill:
Clauses and schedules certified under Standing Order No. 83L(2) as relating exclusively to England and Wales and being within devolved legislative competence
Clauses 7, 11 to 16, 18, 20 to 26, 28, 30 to 32, 37 to 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 48 to 64, 67 to 70, 72 to 77, 101 to 103, 110 to 112, 115 and 135 of the Bill as carried over into this Session (Bill 3) (including the amendments made on Report);
Schedules 3 to 5, 7, 8, 12 and 13 to the Bill as carried over into this Session (Bill 3) (including the amendments made on Report);
New clauses NC30, NC49, NC55 and NC56 on Report.
Amendment certified under Standing Order No. 83L(4) as relating exclusively to England and Wales
Amendment 145 made in the Public Bill Committee to clause 22 (now clause 27).—(Mike Penning.)
The House forthwith resolved itself into the Legislative Grand Committee (England) (Standing Order No. 83M(4)(d)).
The First Deputy Chairman
I remind hon. Members that no further debate on the consent motion for England is permitted, and that if there is a Division on that motion, only Members representing constituencies in England may vote. This extends to expressing an opinion by calling out Aye or No when the Question is put.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83M(4)(d)),
That the Committee consents to the following certified clauses and schedules of the Policing and Crime Bill:
Clauses and schedules certified under Standing Order No. 83L(2) as relating exclusively to England and being within devolved legislative competence
Clauses 1 to 6 and 8 to 10 of the Bill as carried over into this Session (Bill 3);
Schedules 1 and 2 to the Bill as carried over into this Session (Bill 3).—(Mike Penning.)
Question agreed to.
The occupant of the Chair left the Chair to report the decisions of the Committees (Standing Order No. 83M(6)).
The Deputy Speaker resumed the Chair; decisions reported.
Third Reading
Queen’s consent signified.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
Since becoming Home Secretary in 2010, I have put in place the most radical programme of police reform in a generation. Today, that programme is changing policing for the better, making it more transparent, more accountable and more efficient. But the task of reform is not yet finished. If we are to continue ensuring that the police can protect the most vulnerable in our society, if we are to continue helping the police build trust between themselves and the public, and if we are to continue ensuring that the police and other emergency services deliver for the taxpayer, we must go further and faster.
The Policing and Crime Bill will allow us to do that: it will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our emergency services by placing an overarching duty on them to collaborate where it makes sense to do so; it will enable police and crime commissioners to take on the governance of fire and rescue authorities where a local case has been made; it will make changes to pre-charge bail to prevent the injustice of people spending months, or even years, on bail only for no charges to be brought; it will ensure that those experiencing a mental health crisis receive the help they need rather than prolonged detention in a police cell; and it will radically reform the complaints and disciplinary systems to help strengthen public confidence and trust in policing, an outcome that I know will be welcomed by the Hillsborough families, who have campaigned tirelessly for effective accountability in policing when things go badly wrong.
Throughout its passage in this House the Bill has been subject to many lively and constructive debates. I welcome the broad measure of cross-party support for many of its provisions. I commend the work of my right hon. and hon. Friends, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims and the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) who is responsible for preventing abuse, exploitation and crime, all the members of the Public Bill Committee and the officials who have supported their work.
There have been a small number of areas of disagreement, most notably on the role of police and crime commissioners in relation to the governance of fire and rescue authorities, the role of volunteers within police forces and the cut-off for taking disciplinary action against former police officers—although on the last of those issues, I am pleased that we have been able to make some progress. I am sure that all these issues will continue to be examined carefully as the Bill makes its way through the Upper House, but the process of scrutiny that the Bill has already been subject to in this House has greatly strengthened and improved it.
Among the important measures added to the Bill in Committee and on Report are those to reform the governance of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, strengthen inspection powers in relation to fire and rescue services, enhance the powers of the police to retain the DNA and fingerprints of persons previously convicted of an offence outside England and Wales, provide for a new offence of breach of pre-charge bail conditions relating to travel, strengthen cross-border powers of arrest and police powers to seize cancelled travel documents, confer lifelong anonymity on the victims of forced marriage and strengthen the safeguarding of vulnerable people through the introduction of statutory guidance in respect of the licensing of taxis and private hire vehicles. Those additional measures, alongside those contained in the Bill on its introduction, will support the vital work of our police forces. They will put in place provisions to ensure the greater efficiency and effectiveness of our emergency services. They will introduce changes to protect the rights of the public when they come into contact with the criminal justice system and they will provide important powers to help the police cut crime and keep our communities safe.
This Bill will ensure that the police can continue to meet the challenges they face day in and day out, and it will ensure that we can get on with the important job of police reform. I commend the Bill to the House.
Andy Burnham
The fairest thing that we can say about this Bill is that it is a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand it makes improvements to police accountability, but on the other it undermines the independence of the fire service and the police service by allowing volunteers to replace front-line staff.
None the less, the Bill leaves this House in a better state than it came to us in. I pay tribute to my shadow ministerial team, my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and for West Ham (Lyn Brown), all of whom have played an important part in improving the Bill. I thank the Home Secretary and her ministerial team for the constructive way in which they have continued to debate these matters with us. I also thank all members of the Bill Committee and the Chairmen, the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley (Mr Howarth).
The Bill makes some real improvements, but we still have some concerns. The issues broadly fall into four categories: measures we support; measures we have helped to improve; measures we oppose; and the missed opportunities in the Bill. I will go briefly through each.
On the measures we support, the super-complaints system is a genuine step forward, and we congratulate the Home Secretary on bringing it to the House. We also support the strengthening of the IPCC and of the regulation of the police in general. The ban on the use of police cells for people in mental health crisis is a crucial step forward, but it needs to be matched with a commissioning strategy in the NHS that ensures alternative places of safety for people who will no longer be held in police cells.
On the measures that we have helped to improve, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham for the work that she has done to strengthen the measures in the Bill on child sexual exploitation, and particularly on the licensing regime for private hire vehicles. There are further improvements to come on child abduction warning notices.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington, the shadow Policing Minister, pushed the issue of police bail in Committee, based on the case of Siddhartha Dhar, the individual who waltzed out of the country while on bail. I am pleased that the Government have responded, although Mark Rowley said in evidence to the Home Affairs Committee that there should be the very tightest of regimes, whereby people have to surrender passports while they are still in police custody at police stations. I believe that the Bill could still be tightened on that point.
We have had a good exchange today on police misconduct. We welcome the fact that the Government have been prepared to extend the 12-month limit for exceptional instances of misconduct. We will work with the Home Secretary and the Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims on getting that right, but that, too, appears to be a genuine step forward.
There are two main measures that we oppose. First, we believe that the greater use of volunteers in the police service is dangerous in the context of the further cuts being made to police budgets, contrary to what the Government promised in the spending review. Police services in England and Wales are facing real-terms cuts to their budgets this year, which will not be backfilled by the local precept. We believe that it is dangerous to impose those cuts without setting out a vision for policing and saying precisely what the boundaries are for what volunteers can and cannot do, and the Government need to think again before going down that road.
On the fire service, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham made a powerful case that we should not just merge the two services and, in effect, make the fire service the junior partner of the police service. The Bill will allow a hostile takeover of a fire service, authorised by the Home Secretary but over the heads of local people and without their consent. We do not believe that that will strengthen the fire service, which has an important role as a separate statutory service. All the pros and cons of the single employer model have not been fully debated, and we feel that this is a road down which the Government should not go because they have failed to make the case for it.
I will finish with the missed opportunities. I conclude my speech on Third Reading with a sense that Parliament has missed a moment to make some real changes on the back of the historic Hillsborough verdict. Today, we have debated two issues. First, there should be a principle of equality in legal funding for bereaved families at inquests where police are represented. Secondly, we have debated the Prime Minister’s promise to the victims of press abuse and intrusion that there would be a second-stage inquiry into the relationship between the police and the press. On both fronts, we have not made any progress tonight. It was disappointing that the Government chose to oppose the measures that we in the Opposition proposed.
Representatives of the Hillsborough Family Support Group—the chair, Margaret Aspinall, and Sue Roberts—were here today, and I can tell the House that they have gone home disappointed and feeling that Parliament is already forgetting what their fight was all about. It was a monumental miscarriage of justice that now requires a commensurate response from the House. Changes must be made to stop any family in future going through what they have been through, but sadly, families can still go through it. Many families continue to go into inquests raw with grief, face aggressive questioning by Queen’s Counsel hired at great public expense and find the whole experience deeply unsatisfactory.
It is disappointing that the Government were not even able to accept the principle that we should have equal funding. It would have been a step forward if they had been able to do so. I understand that they are asking Bishop James Jones to look at these matters, but of course, this issue goes much broader than Hillsborough. It is about fairness in our criminal justice system, and I believe that the Government are missing an opportunity by not acting on it quickly. Quite frankly, it is obscene for police forces to continue to spend large amounts of money on hiring aggressive lawyers to challenge families in the way that they do at inquests. This scandal should not be allowed to continue, and we in the Opposition will continue to fight against it until there is real change.
In conclusion, the Bill was an opportunity to make this country fairer, to even up the scales and even to tip them in favour of ordinary families and away from the establishment. I fear that we have failed to do that, and it will now be up to the other place to see whether it can make progress. Who can vote against the principle of equal funding for bereaved families at inquests? I cannot believe that anyone would actually vote against it. There is a debate about how to achieve it, but I find it very strange indeed that people can really vote against that principle. How can Members go through the Lobby tonight voting against the Prime Minister’s commitment to the victims of hacking, press intrusion and abuse? The Government have weakened their position tonight. They said before that there would be an inquiry. Now they say that there might be an inquiry once outstanding legal matters are concluded. That is not fair to the families who were given a firm promise by the Prime Minister.
This is my direct appeal to the other place: vote for equality of legal funding for families, and vote for the honouring of the promise to the victims of press intrusion. In doing so, make Hillsborough a moment of real change in this country.
Keith Vaz
It is a pleasure to follow the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham). He was generous with his praise for those involved in the Hillsborough campaign, but the House should recognise his part in that campaign and the incredible work that he has done. He spoke with great passion on the subject even today, and he should be commended for what he has done.
It is not often that the Home Affairs Committee praises the Government, but they have done quite well in the Bill in picking up a number of the recommendations that we made about detention in police cells, which is to be stopped, and in particular about the seizure of the travel documents of those who have committed or are suspected of committing criminal offences. We would have liked the Home Secretary to go a little further and accept Mark Rowley’s evidence, but she has gone a long way towards dealing with the issues that we were concerned about, and I am glad that that provision is in the Bill.
The third recommendation that the Home Secretary has accepted, for which we are grateful, concerned the time that people spend continuously on bail. We listened to the evidence of Paul Gambaccini and others who came before the Committee, who could not understand why bail kept being renewed month after month with nobody telling them what was going to happen. Reputations have been ruined as a result. Of all the provisions in the Bill, the one relating to that situation will stand out. It does not mean that the police will not be able to do their job; it just means that citizens will not be continuously in limbo, not knowing what is going to happen. We welcome the fact that the Home Secretary has accepted all three of those measures that we put forward.
I want to thank the Policing Minister, who is one of the rare Ministers who write to the Committee and say, “We have decided to take up your recommendations.” That does not happen often, and the fact that he did it shows his courtesy and his willingness to take on suggestions, obviously with the support of the Home Secretary.
I strongly agree with what the shadow Home Secretary says about Leveson 2. I cannot understand the Government’s reluctance to accept that we will have to have a second inquiry. We need that inquiry. It was promised to me and to the then Chairs of the Justice Committee and the Culture, Media and Sport Committee by the Prime Minister in his private office behind the Speaker’s Chair after Mr Speaker had granted the urgent question and an emergency debate under Standing Order No. 24, which resulted in the entire debate on hacking. We should try to ensure that we have a timetable that will give comfort to those who have been waiting for that second inquiry.
At Home Office questions, I mentioned that the Home Secretary was now the third longest-serving Home Secretary in the history of our country. We have to look back to 1822 to find Viscount Sidmouth, who served for 10 years as Home Secretary—longer than the present Home Secretary has done. I do not know whether that will be her fate. It is important to remember that there has been a revolution in the policing landscape under this Home Secretary. Everything has been turned upside down. There have been massive changes. When she came to the Dispatch Box, I thought she would say that the reform agenda was finished, but when she said that it was ongoing, that caused us trepidation in the Home Affairs Committee, because we will have to continue our scrutiny.
There are many good things in the Bill. I am sure we will return to the subjects of policing and crime again in this Parliament, and I hope the Government will be able to accept even more of the Home Affairs Committee’s recommendations.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.
Business without Debate
Kentmere Mental Health Ward, Westmorland General Hospital
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
Kentmere ward is the 12-bed adult mental health ward at Westmorland general hospital. It provides essential in-patient acute mental health services to people in South Lakeland and beyond. Four weeks ago, the Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which looks after mental health in the county, proposed to close the ward by the end of June, with new admissions ceasing at the end of May.
This is the second time in my time as our Member of Parliament that the ward has faced the threat of closure. Ten years ago, similar proposals sparked a huge outcry from local residents. Thousands of people signed petitions and wrote to health bosses, and about 3,000 of us marched through Kendal town centre in pretty shocking weather to voice our opposition.
The campaign took many, many months, but we won. Our victory in saving the ward was a hugely important moment for our community. Mental health is often a taboo, so the suffering of those living with mental health conditions, and of their families, often happens in silence and in private. In the face of a threat to the services that those with mental health conditions rely on, far too many people would choose to look the other way—but not in South Lakeland. The campaign showed that local people were prepared proudly to stand up in solidarity with those living with mental health conditions and with their families. I am therefore extremely proud of my community. In the face of this latest threat, the character of our community is once again shining through.
Westmorland general hospital is the main hospital serving the Lake district, the western Yorkshire Dales, Kendal and much of the rest of rural southern Cumbria. I have learned over the years that the tendency to overlook the health needs of rural communities such as ours means that I need to be permanently vigilant in my defence and promotion of our hospital. The campaigns we have run to win new cancer services, to prevent the closure of the hospital itself and to increase surgery at Westmorland general are testament to the fact that ours is a special community, which will fight with unique energy and tenacity for mental and physical healthcare that is high quality and accessible. Once again, it appears that we must roll up our sleeves and fight to defend our services.
As I said, the ward provides 12 beds, the majority of which are usually full at any given time. The people occupying these beds are often suffering from the most serious mental health conditions. For much of the time, the majority of patients staying on the ward are under section.
The apparent trigger for the proposed closure came after the Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust was inspected as part of Care Quality Commission’s comprehensive inspection programme last November. Its report, which was published in March, awarded a rating of “requires improvement” to the Kentmere ward. In particular, the CQC highlighted concerns relating to privacy, access to outdoor areas and the internal physical structure of the ward. Having visited the ward myself, most recently on Saturday, I have to say that the quality of staffing and patient care is absolutely outstanding. In fact, the CQC itself was surprised that the trust’s response to the report was to close the ward, believing that the upgrades needed to meet required standards were perfectly feasible. Let me be clear: this ward is providing excellent care from outstanding staff in a physical setting that requires some improvement. It most definitely does not require closure. Indeed, the CQC has been clear that it did not recommend closure, or anything of the sort.
As I said, the ward is situated in Westmorland general hospital. The partnership trust that is responsible for mental health in Cumbria is a tenant of University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust. The hospital is a fairly modern building, with plenty of car parking and a beautiful setting looking out towards the Lakeland fells and the Howgills. Put bluntly, if you have to go to hospital, I cannot think of anywhere more pleasant you could be, and that is not unimportant when supporting people living with mental health conditions. The hospital building is not full. There is a great deal of space on the site, with ward space that is not used or under-used. There are enormous opportunities, with a little bit of imagination, to seek more spacious, more suitable, better-quality accommodation elsewhere in the hospital.
It is clear, then, that Kentmere ward needs upgrading. It is not ideal that it is on the first floor. There could do with being more space for the unit as a whole and greater privacy for the patients. There will be projected costs of a completely new building to meet the requirements of an upgrade. The Minister may have seen those projections. They will no doubt be expensive, and the conclusion that he is probably meant to draw from whatever scary numbers he has been given is that the only affordable solution is to close the ward. He is expected to read his brief and fob me off. However, I know him well, rate him highly, and know that he has much better judgment than that.
The reality is that the needs of patients in South Lakeland could be met on the current Westmorland general hospital site. An immediate project should be launched, alongside the hospitals trust, to ensure that there is a larger unit with ground-floor access that has greater levels of gender segregation, greater privacy, greater dignity, and greater safety. If there is a will, then the way is staring us in the face. Whatever the challenges, which we acknowledge, in upgrading this unit, it is obvious from my conversations with patients, their families, staff, the CQC and the trust that there are serious concerns about the incredibly detrimental impact that closure will have on patients’ conditions.
Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)
What the hon. Gentleman is saying very much echoes what happened in York when the hospital closed nine months ago. The consequence has been loss of life to my constituents. It seems that primacy in decision making is given not to clinical need, but more to the physical environment, and that has to be wrong, does it not?
Tim Farron
I am extremely grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention and wish to express great solidarity with her in the campaign that she is running in York. It is of great concern to me that the CQC will make recommendations that will require improvements, and potentially not offer solutions to maintain a plausible and sustainable provision instead. The judgment we have to make is, “Is a good service that is not perfect better than no service?”, and of course the answer is going to be yes.
As I said, the quality of care in Kentmere ward at Westmorland general hospital is excellent, as stated in the report, and the staff are excellent. The ward needs upgrading—that is a given—but its closure would harm the health of some of the most vulnerable people in our community. It is utterly unacceptable that those people will have to be shipped off to Barrow, Whitehaven or Carlisle rather than being treated much closer to home in Kendal. What is more, there is no guarantee that those far distant wards will have the capacity to accommodate them. Already, patients sometimes face the immense journey to Manchester, for example. For many less well-off residents, a round trip to these alternative wards of up to 100 miles, with many hours on the bus or train, will put family and loved ones beyond easy reach. It is the patients who would be harmed if they were cut off from their families and friends and missed out on all-important visits. Instead of the reassurance of familiar faces and surroundings, they would face this dark time alone and in an unknown place.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Does the hon. Gentleman know whether any issues have been raised by veterans’ organisations or by veterans themselves? Ex-soldiers and former service personnel are clearly—
Jim Shannon
Does the hon. Gentleman know whether there is a need to address that issue? A lot of veterans in my constituency need help. Does his constituency have the same problems as mine?
Tim Farron
The hon. Gentleman draws attention to an extremely important matter, namely the plight of so many veterans. It seems that we are happy for brave women and men to provide loyal service and to put their lives on the line for us, but they are often dropped when they return from duty. There are incidences of mental health concerns for them and their families in the years after their return, and I am not clear that we as a general community provide the support that we should. That support can sometimes be provided by the community, but sometimes it needs to be provided in a physical setting as well. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.
A recent Government report showed that the closure of this ward in South Lakeland would leave our part of the world with among the worst access to mental health services in the entire United Kingdom. Out of the 6,688 open ward stays in adult acute mental health in-patient care in England alone over the past year, only 263 patients —4% of them—received care 30 miles or more away from where they lived. The closure of the Kentmere ward would leave vast numbers of South Lakes residents—including all of Kendal, as well as many other rural areas—even further away from those services, as the closest alternative in-patient ward is in Barrow, 35 miles away from Westmorland general. The most likely alternatives are further away still: Carlisle is a 45-minute drive, at best, and Whitehaven and Manchester are both more than 70 minutes away, if the traffic is kind.
The provision of replacement community support, which has been offered to compensate for the closure of the ward, would be inadequate. More community support would, of course, be welcomed, but that must be in addition to, not instead of, the 12-bed unit. Increasingly, the majority of patients in the unit are under section, and one cannot section people in the community.
By the way, when people are sectioned, there is an immense impact on our local police force. Closure of the unit in Kendal would mean that our local police force, which is already heavily stretched, under-resourced and under pressure, would have to take patients vast distances across Cumbria to far-off mental health units, taking officers off the beat and threatening the safety and security of our rural communities.
The last time I spent a night out on the beat with our local police force, I was stunned by how much of its time was spent dealing with various kinds of mental health issues. Indeed, that was pretty much all it did on that occasion. Anecdotally, police officers locally tell me that up to half of their workload can involve dealing with people living with mental health conditions. Their dedication and compassion in being the first line of support for incredibly vulnerable and often distressed people and their families is overwhelming, and I am proud of them. However, our police are already working beyond their physical capacity; the closure of Kentmere ward would just add to that pressure. It is unacceptable.
Local people recognise the damage that closure of the ward will have on patient welfare and are once again uniting to make their concerns heard as we stand together to fight to put a stop to the proposed closure. There has been an overwhelming response from local people to the campaign, and as of today our petition has reached 5,500 signatures.
Last week, we were encouraged, in the face of such massive public opposition, as we were able to secure a much welcome but temporary victory: the trust announced that a final decision is to be postponed while it looks at whether the ward can be upgraded and improved to meet CQC standards, which means that it will now stay open and continue to admit patients over the summer. The vulnerable patients I met over the weekend continue to get treatment close to home. If we had not achieved this victory, they would already be being carted off to Barrow or Carlisle—far from home, and far from loved ones. News that new admissions will continue to be made throughout the summer is also welcome.
I am grateful to the trust for listening to our concerns and thinking again. I personally thank every single one of the thousands of local people involved in our campaign. Between us, we forced the trust to hold back on closure. I am especially grateful to volunteers from South Lakeland Mind, and to the local media outlets that have shown such strong support to the campaign. This is only a temporary reprieve for Kentmere ward, and our work is far from complete. My message to the people of South Lakeland is that this is the moment to step up our campaign, energised and encouraged by this success and spurred on by victories in campaigns for our hospital over the last few years. My message to patients and their families is: we will stand with you and we will not give up, because we must not give up.
It has been very clear from my discussions with the trust over the last few days that its default position is still to close the ward. I have one very specific request of the Government this evening. Will the Minister clearly instruct the Cumbria Partnership trust not to close this vital ward? While the trust looks at upgrade options and alternatives, I ask him to make it very clear, right here and right now, that closure is off the table.
I have spoken to many local residents about the matter over the past few weeks, but a conversation I had with one lady struck me particularly hard. She is regularly treated for her mental health condition at the unit, and she was clearly extremely distressed by the thought of having to trek miles from home to receive care if the ward were to close. Her condition has been visibly exacerbated by the tangible threat from this proposal. A decision by the Minister to instruct the trust, tonight, not to go ahead with closure could directly alleviate the worry and anxiety of that lady and many more like her.
The long-term effects of closing the unit would be far greater than the short-term savings. If the Government are serious about mental health, they must put words into action and prove it by stepping in and preventing the closure of this vital ward. The closure of the ward would be a serious backward step for mental health care in South Lakeland, and the Minister has the opportunity to prevent it. On behalf of the people of the South Lakes, I ask him now to take the opportunity to save Kentmere ward.
The Minister for Community and Social Care (Alistair Burt)
There is no pressure here, then. I thank my friend, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), for securing this debate and for his vigilance in raising such an important subject, which matters a great deal to his constituents. I put on record my appreciation for the work done by the NHS in Cumbria and I thank the staff for their hard work and commitment to patients. In doing so, I acknowledge what the hon. Gentleman said about the police. As we in the Chamber who know about these matters are aware, the police do a great deal of work in this area. The crisis care concordat, which was piloted by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), has made a considerable contribution to the way in which we look after those with mental health issues at times of crisis, and the police have been intimately involved. I fully accept what the hon. Gentleman has said about the amount of such work that the police in south Lakeland are involved in.
I am fond of South Lakeland. Bury Grammar School had a house at Helsington, near Brigsteer, which I am sure is in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. I remember the place extremely well. It is a beautiful area, and its constituents are entitled both to good service from an MP and to the best quality services.
Let me turn immediately to the subject of the debate. Cumbria Partnership, the provider trust, announced in May its decision to close Kentmere unit following information from the CQC that highlighted the environmental constraints on the unit. Kentmere is an old mixed-sex unit with no access to outdoor space. The hon. Gentleman’s concerns and comments about the decision have been widely reported. As he knows, and despite what he said at the conclusion of his remarks, this is a matter for the local NHS. Neither I nor any other Minister have a role in the decisions that are taken. The hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell), who spoke forcefully about Bootham Park in York, also knows that well.
However, I understand, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, that the NHS now says that the unit will not close as announced and that decisions will depend on further work. It is, therefore, worth setting out the background and indicating the interest that I have in making sure that the best possible services are provided, while recognising that the old levers of Ministers and the NHS are not quite as they were.
Mental health services for Cumbria are commissioned by the NHS Cumbria clinical commissioning group. Cumbria Partnership NHS Foundation Trust is the provider of mental health services for patients in Cumbria. The CCG has been working on a new mental health strategy for Cumbria for some time. It is fair to say that one of the problems that the NHS, in common with other public services, faces in Cumbria is the geography. The largest towns are at the northern and southern ends of a region that covers a large area, and it is difficult to travel between the smaller towns because the roads are often slow. This means that the NHS has to make difficult decisions about where and how to provide services. To put it bluntly, everything cannot be available in every local community. While cost is a real factor, the main problem is maintaining quality. It is not about saving pennies; it is about making sure that the quality of service is high.
Like everyone else, NHS clinicians learn and improve through experience. Skills that are not being used will decline. Facilities seeing only a few patients tend to lack the patient throughput needed to ensure that services remain of high quality. The cost of employing staff is the main factor driving the cost of services, and providing services from a greater number of locations means that more staff are needed. There are only so many staff to go round. The NHS invariably finds that larger units do better in terms of patient outcomes, but the question is where those larger units should be located. Inevitably, decisions taken by the NHS will disappoint those areas not chosen.
NHS services in Cumbria overall—not just mental health services—are facing a range of challenges, and in many cases the reasons are the same. The northern part of the area is part of a success regime aimed at improving all patient services; the issues at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust in recent years are well known. It is against this background that the NHS is considering what should happen at Kentmere and what is best for the hon. Gentleman’s constituents. Cumbria Partnership announced on 17 May that the Kentmere unit would close from the end of June 2016. At the same time, it was announced that the adjoining health-based place of safety would close at the end of May. The trust said that the decision was a result of quality and safety concerns raised by the Care Quality Commission. The CQC had inspected the unit in November 2015 and its report was published in March. However, the CQC says that the decision to close the ward and the health-based place of safety is not a necessary outcome of the findings of the CQC inspection, to which the hon. Gentleman referred. In short, while it did identify problems, the CQC report did not recommend the closure of the unit.
The report clearly highlighted concerns about the ward environment, which it said placed service users at risk and did not support good care and treatment. Something does need to be done about those concerns. The unit, which treats men and women, does not meet minimum standards on single-sex accommodation and has poor access to outside space. As I understand it, one issue is that privacy for bathing and sleeping cannot be guaranteed on the mixed ward. That poses an obvious risk to patients.
On 25 May, the trust gave a reassurance that the closure would be temporary and that timescales for the closure would be reviewed. I now understand that, following discussions with the CQC and with commissioners, any decision on closure will be delayed to allow further exploration of what improvements can be made. More needs to be done, and I will say a bit about that later. It says here that the trust accepts it did not get its messages right on the closure, and I think that hon. Members will probably agree strongly with that. Many hon. Members will be aware of similar experiences in other areas, and I think the NHS needs to think carefully about how it communicates with patients and the public, particularly when the news is not good. The facts need to be clearly set out, and it is important not to rush to announcements prematurely.
These circumstances reminded me of the closure last year of Bootham Park Hospital in York, in the constituency of the hon. Member for York Central. There are differences, in that the CQC recommended the closure of Bootham Park on patient safety grounds, which is not the case here. But the report produced on the closure by NHS England makes a number of observations about how difficult processes such as this need to be handled by the NHS. I have discussed this matter with the hon. Lady and I would be happy to discuss these matters further with the hon. Gentleman if we get an opportunity to do so. These are difficult decisions to get right—safety considerations really matter and when things are identified as needing to be put right, they must be put right—but the question then becomes how to do it, on what timescale and what the options are. I will come to that in a moment. The difficulty of handling such decisions, and the way in which they have not been handled well at Bootham Park, reminds us of the importance of getting such decisions right. The report on Bootham Park, particularly in relation to owning and communicating decisions, has been made public, and I have placed a copy of the report in the Library.
As I have said, in relation to Kentmere ward, we have moved in the space of a few weeks from a permanent closure to a temporary closure, and then to the unit remaining open while more work is completed. The safety of patients has to be the primary concern, and we would be failing patients if the NHS continued to tolerate the risk to the quality and safety of care that the environment at Kentmere places on local services. Something needs to be done, and it is up to the local NHS to decide what that is, but I do not think it will do so on its own. That is where the hon. Gentleman and his friends come in.
The CCG recognises that mental health services in Cumbria need to improve and it has already involved service users, their families and carers on this project. Much of the work so far has shown, not surprisingly, that patients want better services closer to home in their local community. Later this year, NHS Cumbria CCG will therefore be consulting about the future configuration of adult in-patient mental health beds across Cumbria. That will ensure it has the right beds in the right place, with a sustainable service that the local NHS can staff for the future. The CCG has already said it will not support any permanent service change at Kentmere without full public consultation.
In preparation for this, the CCG is looking at the current configuration of adult in-patient mental health beds, benchmarking how it is managing mental health needs across Cumbria with other mental health providers and advising on areas where the NHS needs to develop services to meet future needs. The CCG also needs to make sure it has the right kind of beds in place—for example, facilities for children and young people, older adults and psychiatric intensive care beds.
Tim Farron
There is not much time left, and I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. I want to point out to him, first, that there is not a single tier 4 adolescent or child mental health bed in the whole of the county of Cumbria, and secondly, that the 12 beds on Kentmere ward are nearly always full and the majority of them are for people under a section, so there is no opportunity for community options. It is not the case that there is a lack of demand.
Alistair Burt
I take the hon. Gentleman’s point. I cannot be as au fait with the situation as him, but I fully understand the point in general. Whereas there is a tremendous move towards improving community services, which is important and vital in its own right, that cannot be a total substitute for the in-patient acute beds that are needed. I understand his point, and that is my view and the Department’s. Getting the right balance is important, but the one is not a cheap substitute for the other. Such services are an important component, because it is important that more is done in the community to keep people away from acute beds and make sure they do not need them, but I entirely take his point.
NHS Cumbria CCG is working with its providers—mainly the foundation trust, as well as clinicians, service users and carers—to help develop the model of care it will need in the future to deliver its vision of improved mental healthcare and sustainable services. I am told that public consultation will be carried out in line with best practice and the latest Government guidance. There will be sessions for stakeholders and the public to share their views, ideas and concerns in communities around the county. I spoke to health service chiefs this afternoon in preparation for this debate, so I know how seriously they take the point about the need for consultation, as well as that they recognise the communication difficulties in relation to how they have got to where they are and that they are open to such a consultation. I therefore urge the hon. Gentleman and his constituents to involve themselves fully in that consultation, which will shape whatever happens to Kentmere in the long term.
Tempting as it is to follow the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion that I should decide on the configuration of services, I am afraid that I cannot do so because that would be outside my authority. I wish him, the hon. Member for York Central and other Members in the House good night and good luck.
Question put and agreed to.
Electoral Commission
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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The Deputy Leader of the House of Commons (Dr Thérèse Coffey)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the motion, That an Humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, praying that Her Majesty will reappoint Alasdair Morgan as an Electoral Commissioner with effect from 1 October 2016 for the period ending on 30 September 2020.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone.
Alasdair Morgan has served as an electoral commissioner since 12 May 2014 and his current term of appointment ends on 30 September this year. The Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission has produced a report, its second in 2016, relating to this motion and I arranged for it to be emailed to members of the Committee earlier today. It may help if I set out the key points for the record.
Electoral commissioners are appointed under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, as amended by the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009. Under the Acts, the Speaker’s Committee has a responsibility to oversee the selection of candidates for appointment to the Electoral Commission, including the reappointment of commissioners. Mr Morgan is one of the four nominated commissioners—someone who has been put forward to be a commissioner by the registered leader of a political party. Three of the four nominated commissioners are put forward by the leaders of the three largest parties in the House of Commons. The fourth commissioner is nominated by the leaders of the other parties at Westminster.
Mr Morgan was previously nominated to the commission by the leader of the Scottish National party, supported by some of the other smaller nominating parties at Westminster. However, in view of the changes to the balance of the political parties at the 2015 general election, Mr Morgan’s name is now being put forward by the leader of the SNP as the commissioner nominated by the third largest party in the House of Commons. In consequence, David Howarth, who is currently serving as a commissioner, having been nominated by the leader of the Liberal Democrats, will continue to serve on the commission, but as the representative of the smaller parties at Westminster. When his term expires, the minor parties will have an opportunity to nominate a new electoral commissioner.
Before recommending Mr Morgan’s reappointment, the Committee received evidence from Jenny Watson, chair of the commission, about Mr Morgan’s effectiveness as a commissioner. Ms Watson noted that Mr Morgan had made a significant contribution to the commission’s response to the Law Commission’s review of electoral law and had served as a member of the Electoral Commission’s audit committee. She also said his political knowledge and significant experience of the practicalities of campaigning were useful to the Commission. The Speaker’s Committee reported that, having considered Ms Watson’s submissions, it was content to recommend this reappointment.
When the Speaker’s Committee has reached a decision, statute requires the Speaker to consult the leaders of political parties represented at Westminster on the proposed reappointment. The statutory consultation provides an opportunity for the party leaders to comment, but they are not required to do so. Four leaders responded on this occasion: Mike Nesbitt for the Ulster Unionist party, Nicola Sturgeon for the SNP, the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) for the Labour party and my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) for the Conservatives, all of whom were content with Mr Morgan’s reappointment. Their responses to the consultation have been published by the Speaker’s Committee as an appendix to its report.
If the appointment is agreed, Alasdair Morgan will continue to serve on the Electoral Commission until September 2020. I am sure his expertise will continue to be appreciated by the commission and I hope that Alasdair Morgan will have the support of this Committee and of the House.
Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone.
We recognise that Alasdair Morgan has served as an electoral commissioner since May 2014 and is the only commissioner who currently has any direct experience of campaigns and campaigning north of the border, which is an important practical perspective for the commission.
On the basis of Mr Morgan’s performance, the chair of the commission is content for him to be reappointed. Are the Government satisfied that the commission has a suitable process of performance appraisal for commissioners? Could the commission do more to give confidence to the public and interested parties that these positions are effective roles that drive its agenda in the right direction? How can the public have confidence that all commissioners are playing a full and functioning role within the commission, and are not just acquiescing voices that fail properly to challenge as and when necessary?
Dr Coffey
I thank the hon. Lady for her query. Mr Morgan was an MP from 1997 to 2001, and then became a Member of the Scottish Parliament from 2001 to 2011, so he has extensive scrutiny experience. I believe he continues to serve as a trustee of the Scottish parliamentary pension fund, so he is a trusted figure in that regard and assiduous in his duties.
The hon. Lady raises an interesting point. That said, the Electoral Commission is an independent body. I think it would be worth referring her questions—I am happy to do so on her behalf or she may wish to do so directly—to the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission for consideration.
The Chair
I may have been asleep, but I thought that was an intervention. I thought, Minister, that you were intervening on the shadow Minister, because you jumped up before I had a chance to look round to see whether anyone else wanted to be involved in this exciting debate. However, if you have finished, I am happy.
Feed-in Tariffs (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2015
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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The Committee divided: - Ayes: 10 / Noes: 6 - Question accordingly agreed to.
Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the Feed-in Tariffs (Amendment) (No. 3) Order 2015 (S.I. 2015, No. 2045).
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. Normally, I run in the door three minutes after a debate has started, so it is a pleasure that I was actually here just before things started and someone else was running through the door just behind me.
I am opening the debate on the statutory instrument because the Opposition have prayed against the original negative SI, which introduced the changes. As a result of the way that SI was introduced to the House, those changes have come into effect, so our debate is more about the principle of what is being done rather than about looking prospectively at those changes. That is what I want to address my remarks to today.
The effect of the SI is, first, that changed rates of payment for feed-in tariffs, or FITs, for several technologies have come into place. More importantly, for all technologies, from now on, deployment will be limited by a new first come, first served measure, whereby agreement to provide FITs payments for projects will be based on an overall envelope of spending. We should be clear that that is not spending as we might plainly understand it, but putative tax and spend, because it is financed by a levy on supply that is eventually passed on to customers in the shape of their electricity bills.
It has always been the position of Labour Members that we do not object to degression being part of the FITs regime. Our concerns in the past have been about the rate and effect of degressions that are too precipitous or, as we have discussed on similar occasions, replacing a degression slope with a cut-off on payments. Degression is combined in the order with an absolute limit on the amount of levy that can be spent on FITs overall from now on. The control will be £100 million a year for all small renewable installations, be they wind, solar, hydro or anaerobic digestion, and there will be assumed subtotals in place governing how much of each technology can receive FITs each quarter before the limit is deemed to have been reached—reaching the limit will be the end of a FIT application, except that the applicant might get a FIT in the next quarter, and so on.
We are essentially returning to the original low-carbon building programme from before FITs were conceived. The programme rationed grants to installers to, I think, a quarterly limit, with schemes shut to new entrants as soon as the totals had been exceeded. The FIT arrangements were partly introduced to ensure that if an installer had put in the effort to install a device, with all the up-front investment involved, they would know that they had a tariff waiting for them once the installation had been completed. The pre-accreditation arrangements that the Government unwisely scrapped a little while ago are to come back under the new regulations, but, even so, we have to be clear that that way of doing things is a straightforward and basic breach of the principle of how FITs were supposed to work and from now on will clearly be a considerable barrier to new entrants at a smaller scale.
I note that the Government intend to recycle underspend in any category under the new arrangements by adding one quarter’s underspend to the total available for the next quarter, but they may change caps between priorities according to their own policy priorities. Will the Minister clarify for me during the debate what those priorities might be and at what point underspends on each technology at the end of each quarter, if they occur, will be announced? Will there be a delay in allocating, or reallocating, sums while the Government decide on their priorities, or will the sums go on to the next quarter’s limit pro rata unless the Government say otherwise?
Reallocation or no reallocation, the effect of the proposals will be radically to reduce to deployment of renewables under FITs over the period up to 2020-21. Such limitation in deployment appears to be startlingly large. The impact assessment suggests that, in the central scenario, some 5.7 GW of low-carbon generation that otherwise would have come into the system will be lost by 2021.
The Minister will undoubtedly say that there is a levy control mechanism—here is the shibboleth that must not be breached—and that the order will help substantially to keep levy control spending at levy control figures, regardless of the damage it would cause to the deployment of smaller-scale renewables and regardless of the measure’s adverse carbon impact. It is interesting that that carbon impact is not recorded in the impact assessment, as it is supposed to be.
The impact assessment states that the changes on degression and on capping will save about £1 on domestic customers’ bills per year over the next five years. It is an interesting side proposition, not considered in the accompanying documents, whether the deployment of renewables through FITs itself has a depressing effect on prices as deployment increases, mainly because of solar affecting the daytime merit order of generation and pulling prices down as a result. It is therefore quite possible that the savings set out will be dribbled away against higher prices as a result of the lower levels of deployment that I have outlined. I will not dwell on that because there are rather more important issues to consider on capacity.
Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
I had hoped that the hon. Gentleman would not pass over the merit order effects quite so quickly, and I encourage the Minister not to do so, because understanding the trade-off between the subsidy and the effect of taking the merit order out of the equation at any one time for the more expensive sources of production is an important component of understanding the real costs involved in subsidising something such as solar.
Dr Whitehead
I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman is a member of the Committee, because he will no doubt be as happy as I am to talk at great length about merit order. I suggested that we do not dwell on it partly because of issues about how one looks at the dislodging of merit order by low-carbon energy coming on to the grid, particularly during daytime hours, which is a fairly complicated process. Nevertheless, as he said, that is important in terms of higher-carbon generation potentially coming on to system when lower-carbon generation is available and how that affects the relative prices coming forward, with the heights in the morning and the evening and the dips during the day, and pushes the merit order out along the line. That is a pretty important thing to consider, but other members of the Committee may not wish to be detained at length to discuss the intricacies of such arrangements.
I put that on the table as a potentially important point as far as the arguments for price reduction in energy generation in general are concerned. Actually, the very deployment of a larger amount of renewables may countermand some of the supposed reductions and, in fact, the net effect may be that prices would go up to a greater extent than would have been the case were those renewables in the system and affecting the merit order in the way I suggested.
The important additional point is that the deployment of renewables through FITs is, as I mentioned, adding to the nation’s installed energy generating capacity and the loss as projected in the central scenario in the impact assessment to the order of 5.7 GW by carrying out the cap option is a real loss to installed generation capacity over the medium period. FITs-eligible installations do not get any sort of reward for being there to generate because they already have some assistance through the FIT, but other, non-renewable generation now does through the mechanism of the capacity market—auctioning assistance, essentially, for agreeing to be there to generate if generation is required, although not actually generating, as renewable energy would do if it were installed.
The Minister and her Department have not been slow to ensure that such capacity availability is to be well rewarded—about £18 per kWh at the first two auctions for existing generation. Through those two auctions and the additional early auction, about £5.5 billion will probably have been spent on securing existing capacity and supposedly procuring new capacity under the capacity market, which will explicitly not result in any new capacity coming on the system by the time the first round of capacity auctions is through. Indeed, we now know the results of the first two capacity auctions, which have procured precisely no new large gas capacity, but they have procured the establishment of some heavily polluting diesel sets as small-scale marginal generators to the tune of about 1.5 GW.
By the way, that 1.5 GW of new generation achieved though the capacity market system impacts on customers’ bills in just the same way as FITs payments because that will be financed by a levy on producers, which will be passed on to customers’ bills. That is for £5.5 billion, and 5.7 GW of new capacity will be lost to the system after 2020 because of the levy control cap and the way the Department is lying down and rolling over in front of the levy control framework demands. The purpose of the feed-in tariff—to generate low-carbon energy and incentivise the establishment of new technologies to do it—is being thrown out of the window in the process. If we were to ask the Minister what the impact of that £5.5 billion spend on procuring capacity in the capacity market would be on customers’ bills by 2020, the answer would be, “About £20 to £30”, which massively counteracts the so-called saving achieved on eviscerating the feed-in tariff in the way proposed.
A valid riposte to my figures on capacity, as represented by the proposals before us, would be that the capacity margins of the renewables do not remotely add up to the level of power supply because the sun does not always shine, the wind does not always blow and so on, which is, of course, true. However, certainly as far as small-scale hydro and AD are concerned, the capacity margins look similar to those of gas plant. Even so, according to the impact assessment, some 7,000 GWh of generation will be lost if the cap goes ahead, against present projections. However, if we are making a comparison with the equivalent new generation through the capacity market, that new generation—the diesel sets—is predicted to run for even fewer hours than solar photovoltaics will as a proportion of its installed capacity. Indeed, the Government have made a virtue of the tiny hours that diesel sets will run in the capacity market, as an argument for discounting their extremely polluting nature.
The other, one might say valid-ish, riposte, is, “Yes, but we do not know when smaller generators are coming on to the system, so we cannot count that as capacity.” It is, however, clearly capacity. It is coming on to the system and can increasingly be modelled as such. It is only because there is no visibility of power inputs below 15 MW that National Grid does not know when the capacity is coming on stream; it is merely recorded as a loss of load. With different arrangements on visibility, however, a different picture of what capacity is around could, and would, emerge.
That leads on to the next question for the Minister: has she ever looked, or is she now going to look, at processes whereby the capacity represented by small-scale generation can properly be accounted for in capacity margin calculations—calculations that tell us what capacity gaps there are and impel us towards decisions to build plant to bridge those gaps in the first place? If she did that, the 4.4 GW already installed under FITs and the 13 GW possible as cumulative installation under the present programme—if it continues under the current arrangements—might be seen by the Government in a different light, as a capacity asset and not a funding drain.
The Minister and hon. Members will, I think, have gathered by now that Labour Members do not like the proposals. We do not like them because they represent a fundamental missed opportunity to start to reshape policy so that there is a more real definition of how the system is working, what capacity is coming on to it and how it can be properly rewarded, in bringing the assets forward. I suggest that we have a completely unbalanced system at the moment, but, among the capacity that is coming on stream, penalising the renewable and rewarding the non-renewable is to the detriment of what I believe are overall carbon goals that we share, as far as renewable and low-carbon generation is concerned, for the future shape of our energy policies.
Instead of that, the measures represent a capitulation to limits that dismantle policy in favour of a sterile nightwatchman view of deployment, which cannot be acceptable with the low-carbon energy emergency that we face. We must have a better way of dealing with the deployment of renewable energy—with the capacity and the future asset that it represents—than to cap its deployment in the way described in the statutory instrument.
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Andrea Leadsom)
The instrument before the Committee and the associated modifications to the standard licence conditions implement the changes set out in last year’s feed-in tariff review. The changes include, among other things, the introduction of a cost-control mechanism in the form of deployment caps, and a revised level of generation tariffs to be paid under the scheme. The changes are necessary to protect bill payers from unacceptable costs in the future and to ensure that support for renewables remains affordable.
In recent years, we have made enormous progress in encouraging the development and deployment of renewable energy and building a successful renewables industry. The feed-in tariff, or FIT, scheme has been a vital part of that achievement. The Government recognise the significant role FIT has played in engaging non-energy professionals in the electricity market and also the role small-scale generation can play in future on a path to subsidy-free deployment.
The scheme now supports more than 861,000 small-scale renewable installations. That figure is far in excess of what was expected to deploy when the scheme was set up in 2010. The Government at the time estimated it would cost £490 million per year by 2020. Those projections are no longer even slightly correct. Without the changes we have introduced, which are set out in the instrument that we are debating, we estimate that by 2020 the FIT scheme would cost more than three times that figure at £1,740 million per year.
The Government are committed to cost-effective decarbonisation of our electricity supply and to protecting consumer bills by controlling costs under the levy control framework, or LCF.
Graham Stuart
The Minister is right to highlight the Government’s record, which is tremendous. In 2010, only Malta and Luxembourg had fewer renewables than this country. The Government truly have been the greenest Government ever. To what extent is the Government’s approach to the LCF and capping informed by an understanding of the merit order effect? That subsidy is not all that it seems. In fact, the costs to the consumer are a great deal less than would be apparent purely looking at the LCF total.
Andrea Leadsom
My hon. Friend makes a good point. He will be aware that the analysis my Department does takes into account the merit order effect. Nevertheless, the levy control framework—the actual sum that gets added to consumer bills by our policy on support for the renewable sector—has to be taken into account. This was not a modest overspend; it was shooting the lights out. It beat all our own assessments over our targets in our electricity market reform analysis. Both the deployment and the cost associated with it have gone massively over what we anticipated. Therefore, it is not fair to consumers simply to say, “Never mind, we won’t even attempt to meet either the target that we set out for renewables or the cost associated with it.”
Graham Stuart
I am grateful to the Minister for giving way again. The wholesale price is so much lower than I think the Government predicted. Perhaps she can confirm that. Therefore, in a sense, the cost to the consumer and the merit order effect are such that the low cost of renewables has dragged down the wholesale price of energy. That is why no one at the moment will put any form of new generation into place, without some sort of support. That is because renewables have lowered the wholesale price. Therefore, one must offset that against the subsidy if one is to have a true picture of what the consumer is paying towards greening our energy supply.
Andrea Leadsom
I say again to my hon. Friend that I completely understand the point he makes. He, too, completely understands the point I am making, which is that in terms of deployment, the management of the system and the transition to a low-carbon energy future, we cannot simply throw all our own estimates, budgets and targets up in the air and suggest that it does not matter what we add to consumer bills. I totally understand the point he makes—please do not get me wrong there. Nevertheless, it is vital that when we set our targets for how we want to manage our transition to a low-carbon future we keep some kind of rein on the deployment levels and the cost that we put on consumer bills as a result.
The Government are committed to cost-effective decarbonisation of our electricity supply and to protecting consumer bills by controlling costs under the levy control framework. The LCF projections published last July showed a significant overspend due to, among other things, demand-led schemes such as the FIT providing unchecked support for the renewables industry, so urgent intervention to manage spend has been necessary. It is important to remember that the FIT scheme is funded by consumer electricity bills—bills that are paid by all regardless of whether they benefit from the scheme. Uncontrolled spending on FITs therefore has a direct impact on the energy bills of consumers, including families and businesses.
Hon. Members will recall that the Government announced a package of cost control measures, including a consultation on the future of the FIT scheme last summer. This proposed a number of measures to meet two core objectives: first, to comply with our EU state aid approval, a review of the support offered by the FIT scheme, which is required every three years; and, secondly, proposals aimed at controlling the cost of the scheme to limit the impact on consumer bills.
It is clear that the scheme in its original form was no longer affordable and needed to be amended to protect consumers. With the changes introduced by this instrument, spending will be more controlled and will be reduced from £1,740 million to £1,300 million a year by 2020. That still allows for very significant support, but it will be provided in a more controlled manner, balancing the interests of bill payers with those of the wider renewables industry. Overall, the changes we are making will save at least £7.6 billion from consumer bills over the next 20 years.
Tom Pursglove (Corby) (Con)
I draw the attention of the Committee to my declaration of interest as director of Together Against Wind. When reaching these policy decisions, do Ministers take into account the real challenges that our manufacturing industries are experiencing? Spiralling energy costs have made it difficult in recent years for them to compete on a global playing field. It is important that we control costs and we must not see them increase in what are already difficult circumstances.
Andrea Leadsom
My hon. Friend is exactly right to point that out. The balance we are seeking to achieve is to be fair to the industry and fair to those consumers, including businesses—we have seen this a lot of recent weeks and months—who are really struggling to meet their electricity costs and to be competitive. As I said, overall the changes will save at least £7.6 billion from energy bills over the next 20 years.
Members of the Committee will recognise that this Government were elected with a clear manifesto commitment to keep bills as low as possible, so controlling costs under the LCF is a key part of delivering that commitment. Urgent action was needed to bring projected FIT scheme spend down in order to manage LCF spend responsibly and to protect consumers. It is simply not acceptable to continue with an unconstrained scheme.
This amending instrument makes a number of changes to the FIT scheme, including, first, the introduction of deployment caps, limiting the aggregate total installed capacity of installations that can be applied for within any quarter. That will enable us to limit spend on the scheme to £100 million up to the end of 2018-19. Such caps are necessary if the scheme is to continue and if its impacts on consumer bills are to be properly controlled. I tell the hon. Member for Southampton, Test that currently, if the technology does not reach its quarterly cap, the underspend is rolled over to the next quarterly cap.
Secondly, the order reintroduces pre-accreditation. That would not have been appropriate without the security provided by the deployment caps. It will therefore also mitigate some of the uncertainty inherent in a system of capped deployment.
Thirdly, the order removes the right to receive a generation tariff for extensions to existing installations. That is intended to incentivise generators to install the maximum capacity achievable and to eliminate the potential for gaming of tariffs.
Fourthly, the order introduces a cap on the amount of green overseas electricity by which suppliers are exempted from paying FIT policy costs.
The rest of the measures from the review are implemented through amendments to licence conditions. First, there are changes to the generation tariffs. Tariffs have been revised following consultation to ensure a viable scheme while maximising value for money for bill payers. Secondly, there are modifications to both default and contingent degression tied to the quarterly system of budgetary caps. Thirdly, there are changes to energy efficiency criteria to require that an energy performance certificate—an EPC—is obtained prior to the commissioning date of solar PV installations under 50 kW. That change has been made to encourage improvements to the energy efficiency of properties more generally.
Prior to making the changes, my Department carried out an extensive stakeholder consultation. DECC officials met stakeholders across England, Scotland and Wales, and received and analysed just under 55,000 consultation responses. We listened carefully to the views of industry, in particular the £1 plan of the Solar Trade Association, and we took account of its responses in redesigning our scheme. I myself held a roundtable for all industry associations to hear their views. As a result of our stake- holder engagement, we revised tariffs upwards to reflect the findings of the evidence provided. We allocated more budget to solar under our £100 million cap and we implemented a cap system that will allow us to recycle underspend and to consider the balance of caps between years.
Our changes combine the visibility that industry asked for with the robust cost control that the Government need.
Dr Whitehead
The Minister has set out the various cost benefits of the changes, but has she set that against the possible loss of capacity after 2020 and the consequent expenditure, also a cost on bills, that will ensue from getting further capacity on the systems concerned? Has she looked at how that works in the round? Has she put those comparative figures to the Treasury in terms of how the levy control framework and the capacity market may work as a consequence?
Andrea Leadsom
I think the hon. Gentleman is suggesting that subsidy will continue to be necessary for ever for solar.
Andrea Leadsom
No? Okay. In which case, the hon. Gentleman will appreciate that, given the rate at which costs are coming down in various renewable technologies, it is our hope and expectation that as subsidies become less necessary, different renewable technologies will be able to stand on their own two feet. I am not entirely sure what he is asking me.
Dr Whitehead
Perhaps I can clarify. As the Minister is aware, we are about to spend £5.5 billion on procuring capacity through capacity markets. If we had greater renewable capacity in the system, and we were able to make that visible on the system, a good proportion of the expenditure to procure capacity from non-fossil fuel plant would not be necessary. Has she considered that, because the very large expenditure that is under way, which costs bill payers between £20 and £30 a year on their bill and dwarfs the figures she has cited, could at least in part be avoided by opting for that route?
Andrea Leadsom
Yes is the answer to that; we have absolutely considered that option, as we always do. Of course, the capacity market is an insurance policy for security of supply. In three or four years’ time, we hope and expect that energy storage will have been deployed to a greater extent. In those circumstances, the hon. Gentleman might be right that, for future years, we may be able to say that, owing to such storage, solar and wind are despatchable power. However, he will recognise that our energy trilemma is to keep the lights on, keep bills down and decarbonise.
The capacity market is an insurance policy and therefore it is despatchable power that bids into that market. At the moment, solar and wind are not utterly reliable technologies. It is not negotiable: we will keep the lights on. I hope that is a reasonable answer, but I can assure the hon. Gentleman that we look at this from both ends of the telescope, and in the past year, my Department has done a lot of work to look at precisely how different policy changes affect every aspect of our energy trilemma. We always consider the questions, “What does this do to energy security? What does it do to the cost of bills, and what does it do to our targets for decarbonisation?” We never look at just one aspect of our energy policy. I hope that response gives him some reassurance.
The changes will limit the subsidy available under the FIT scheme. That is necessary to prevent overcompensation and to protect bill payers. In our electricity market reform delivery plan, our best estimate of the solar deployment needed to hit our 2020 renewables target was that we should achieve between 10 GW and 12 GW. Without action on demand-led schemes, we would have exceeded that target, and even with those changes, we are still on track to exceed that range. We expect to hit around 12.8 GW by 2020, so even with the limit on subsidies, we still expect to exceed our own targets by 2020.
The aim of the continued support we are offering is to get us to the point where the calculation is not about what jobs are supported because of subsidy, but what the industry can sustain in a post-subsidy world. For example, we believe that the future FIT scheme will provide enough support for new solar installations to power more than 260,000 homes. That is still a significant increase from where we are today. Of course, 99% of all solar installations have taken place since 2010, so this is still a significant growth sector.
The order came into effect on 15 January, so it is still too early to determine the longer-term impact of the changes on deployment, but early data show that six of the 11 caps for Q1 of 2016 have been hit. We are encouraged by the way the industry is responding to the recent changes. For example, deployment of solar under the revised FIT scheme continues at rates that match those seen historically following previous revisions to the scheme. I assure hon. Members that my Department is closely monitoring applications and deployment, and will continue to review the effect of the changes.
I would like to make one final point. If the order were to be annulled, we would have to consider closing the FIT scheme altogether. At the very least, we would need to suspend the scheme while we considered alternative means of controlling costs. That would bring further uncertainty, which would be deeply unwelcome to the renewables industry. Hon. Members will recognise that the Government are consumer champions, and we simply cannot allow uncontrolled costs to impact on consumer energy bills.
I remind the Committee that the changes to the FIT scheme are part of a package of cost control measures to deliver our manifesto commitment to keep bills as low as possible. The Government want to protect bill payers, ensuring technologies can stand on their own two feet while also meeting our renewable energy commitment. To annul the order and remove the cost control measures—measures intended to protect bill payers—simply will not do. I commend the instrument to the Committee.
Graham Stuart
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward, and to participate in today’s debate. Going forward, our aim should be to have a completely different energy market—not so much one characterised by base-load and then some flex, but as flexible a market as we can have, so that we can take on board renewables, with their intermittencies, and balance that by having flexible production.
One reason we might hesitate before curbing deployment of renewables is that there are four technologies that can help to provide flex in the system. One is storage, to which the Minister referred. Huge technological developments are afoot in storage. As we have seen with solar and wind, so we see with storage: prices are coming down, investment is going in and technology is being harnessed to lower costs. There is a big hope that storage could start to play an increasing role, and if we look at an online meter that shows where we get our energy from, we will often see that storage is playing a part already.
The second technology is on demand management. We are seeing significant efforts by National Grid to provide seedcorn for that market, in order to get people to start looking at whether they can switch off their systems, lower their energy use at key times in an affordable way and find out the price for that. That will develop over time as it becomes more transparent, and people may design major energy-using systems precisely so that they can easily be switched off cost-effectively at peak times, thus contributing to the system.
The third technology is interconnectors, which the Minister has played a big role in promoting and supporting. Having more interconnectors with our neighbours provides us with another flex in the system, because our peak is at a different time from our neighbours’ peaks.
The fourth technology that helps to provide flex in the system is flexible generation. The gas-fired power station at Saltend in my constituency was built for eight closures a year, if I remember rightly: it has four turbines, which have two maintenance closures each a year. But last year it shut down hundreds of times, precisely because work has been done to turn it into a more flexible generator. Mitsubishi, one of the major suppliers, has entirely changed the cost system for supplying parts; the system has responded, to try to allow Saltend cost-effectively to provide generation that switches off and on.
Those four technologies are developing day by day and getting better, just as is happening in my constituency. That gives us all the more reason to be optimistic that the system will be more flexible over time and that traditional fossil fuel systems such as gas, which might previously have seen themselves as base-load suppliers, can be flexible suppliers, providing energy where it is needed. With storage, demand management and the interconnector in place, the requirement for them to do that—and the requirement for the fossil fuels themselves—will, I hope, reduce over time and eventually disappear.
I have some concerns about cuts and about the direction we are going in with solar and onshore wind deployment while diesel generators are being commissioned as part of the capacity market. It is fair to say that the Government are taking action to ensure that that does not happen again, but none the less it has happened recently.
However, my biggest concern is around the levy control framework—the idea of capping spending and viewing how much it is in static terms. When the LCF was put in place a few years ago, what wholesale price did the Government predict? I am not sure, but I am pretty sure that their predicted price was a great deal higher than the price today. Contrary to the suggestion made by my hon. Friend the Member for Corby that prices are spiralling, wholesale prices are at a remarkable low—far less than anyone in gas, wind or any sector can currently afford to commission new generation for.
Why is that? It is rather weird that, when there is a capacity market auction, the Government end up being alarmed that the prices that the system pays for the capacity they ask for turn out to be far less than would allow the commissioning of new plants. That is why the Government will doubtless come forward with new ways to ensure that we get a new generation system.
Why is the wholesale price so far below the price of new generation? People might say that it is because cap ex has been exhausted—an awful lot of plants have been going for a long time and can therefore produce cheaply. That argument does not entirely persuade me. It seems to me that if my cap ex had been repaid, I would still want to sell at the market price, regardless of my cost. In a normal market, the market price is the market price: the cheapest producer—the most profitable company—makes its profits and is very happy; it does not drop them.
Why has the wholesale price been dragged down? It is because of the merit order effect, which sounds terribly technical and distant but basically means that when our renewables—solar and wind—are going, they have to generate, which has helped to squeeze out the more expensive generators and has lowered the cost. In many ways, the renewables have made a significant contribution to lowering costs for consumers. I have not done the maths, so I am not suggesting that that entirely counteracts other factors. However, in a report on the merit order effect, Good Energy stated:
“In net terms, the cost of supporting wind and solar generation in 2014 was £1.12 billion—58% less than the cost reflected in the Levy Control Framework.
The value of the Merit Order Effect will increase with further renewable deployment”.
In other words, the more renewables we have, the more the cost will be dragged down. According to that economic analysis, the idea that renewables are a chronically expensive, bill-boosting form of energy generation is not entirely correct. I am sure there are other aspects to this, so we need to add it all up. Perhaps we need to add up the additional costs per unit of generation of that plant in my constituency, which is not running so many hours a year.
There will be counter-costs, but on something like the measure we have before us today we need net figures. We need the Government’s estimate of what the real costs are on the consumer rather than just the headline figure, which is over what we budgeted, not mentioning the fact that the wholesale price, if I am right—someone correct me if I am wrong—is actually a lot lower than the Government budgeted. Therefore, the cost to the consumer, far from being massively boosted, is not boosted. We then risk cutting the very technologies that are contributing to those reductions, or at least netting off a very great deal. At the same time, they are much cleaner and help us meet our carbon targets.
On the face of it, there are some issues there. Remember what Good Energy said about the £1.12 billion—58% less—in 2014:
“The value of the Merit Order Effect will increase with further renewable deployment…the current level of savings suggest that, if renewable support was viewed in net terms”—
I suggest that it should be—
“the projected future overspend of the Levy Control Framework may not be a reality”.
It may not be a reality. That, it seems to me, is the central challenge to the proposal.
Those are my concerns. I am sure that that report, like any other, will not have the entire truth in it and there will need to be further balancing, but, as I quietly and loyally support the order, may I make a plea to the Government that they look to come forward with a more sophisticated assessment—perhaps they have it already and are not sharing it with us—of the overall net position of the costs on both sides so that we can make a better informed decision and ensure that when we meet in a Committee Room such as this, we are better able to scrutinise the decisions they make, I am sure with the best of intentions?
Dr Whitehead
The hon. Gentleman, in expanding a little on the merit order arrangements, hit the nail on the head about the inadequacy of the order’s response to the wider issues of renewable deployment; what that means over the next period and how we are properly to account for it in our generating capacity loads, given how expensive they are; what sort of subsidies we ought to put into what; and how the overall picture emerges. The truth of the matter is, as the departing chief executive officer of National Grid set out recently, that we are in not an energy transition period, but an energy revolution period in which many of the things we thought were certainties are beginning to be—and have been—turned on their heads.
My concern about the measure in the order is that it is—dare I say it—counter-revolutionary inasmuch as it turns the clock back on what will be some different calculations about what is being costed in and where, as far as generation is concerned, and how renewables play a part in that generation process. My suggestion is that if the order were to be annulled, that might well make the Government go away and, as things change as rapidly as they are doing, cost in some of those real factors in a rather better analysis within a reasonably controlled cost framework of energy deployment, with what it is that customers will have on their bills, because of course that is an important part of the process.
My case—the hon. Gentleman will perhaps join me in at least part of this—is that trying to save customers money on their bills essentially by closing down substantial parts of renewable deployment, but at the same time spending large amounts of money and costing customers a lot more money on their bills by trying to procure non-renewable, high-carbon capacity on the other side of the equation, may well lead to us completely losing the opportunity to decarbonise our energy supplies at a good cost to customers over a longer period. I hope that a review might result in a discussion emerging on the real net cost over that period and perhaps a more realistic view of what the levy control framework is going to do on deployment.
I am sure that the Minister would agree that having a static target against a variable and changing series of demands is probably not the best way to proceed in the longer term with energy policy. It may be that the Committee’s deciding that it did not want to go down that route would be a rather positive and cathartic way forward for wider energy policy, although I accept that the Minister would have some short-term problems with that. I dare to say that she has been arguing recently about the longer-term benefit that we might get even though we might have short-term economic problems, for other reasons entirely.
How to get our energy policies right for the longer term, which may mean in the shorter term having to review how we make the levy control framework work and how we make power and generation work within that, could be a difficult question to resolve. Nevertheless, from what I and other Members have put before the Committee, there are some real questions about whether this way of adhering to the levy control framework is the right way forward, and I seek a Division to see whether we can put forward different ways for the future of energy supply.
Question put.
Draft Statutory Auditors and Third Country Auditors Regulations 2016
(7 years, 10 months ago)
General CommitteesRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
The Minister for Small Business, Industry and Enterprise (Anna Soubry)
I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Statutory Auditors and Third Country Auditors Regulations 2016.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner. I have quite a lengthy explanation of what the regulations do. They are important because they effectively mark the conclusion of a substantive body of work over a number of years, emanating from the European Union, which has seen all the countries coming together—as I hope they will continue to do—in everybody’s best interests to look at, in this case, auditing.
Effective financial reporting underpins the success of every business. It helps to inform decision making, improves performance and promotes confidence in the company’s future. For many businesses, audit is essential to provide assurance that financial reporting to shareholders is honest and accurate. Government activity in this area should improve trust and transparency, without placing excessive or undue burden on business.
The proposed regulations implement the 2014 EU audit directive, which amends a directive adopted in 2006, and the EU audit regulation. They apply to a wide range of businesses that require audit services. The most significant changes will apply to public interest entities, which I will refer to as PIEs. Those are basically banks, building societies, insurers and other companies listed on a regulated market. The audit directive and regulation came about through recognition that action was needed to improve confidence in audit quality and assure auditor independence. That particularly came out of the financial crisis in and around 2007-08. The final legislation, which was passed with UK agreement, represents a workable and positive outcome for UK negotiation over more than two years. With our partners—including Germany, France and UK MEPs—the United Kingdom ensured that the EU took time to get these proposals right. Negotiation was heavily scrutinised by the European scrutiny Committees of both Houses of Parliament.
The directive and regulation are an extensive package of reforms, but they are not a knee-jerk reaction to the financial crisis. They take further steps that harmonise audit regulation across the European Union and allow member states flexibility to regulate audit services in ways that reflect their national systems, which have been built up over time. This is a good example of a consolidation and a coming together of all countries—including, of course, all Parliaments—and it shows how the European Union can work in everybody’s best interests, in this case to ensure that our businesses are on a sounder footing. Indeed, it shows how EU directives encompass the broad democracy of this House and the House of Lords.
The key priorities for the United Kingdom, in both the renegotiation of this legislation and its implementation, have been to help secure high-quality audits and independence in auditor judgments across the European Union, and to help avoid excessive concentration of large firms in the audit market. The regulations will amend the Companies Act 2006 and legislation on the current audit framework. I am aware that the regulations may appear complex; indeed, they are an extensive, lengthy document. However, they should be understood with the help of guidance, and that will not be difficult for our auditors.
We have tried to keep additional costs as low as we can. Our impact assessment is publicly available. I acknowledge that the majority of the costs will affect PIEs, but those are the most important businesses and effective financial reporting in this area is crucial. The regulations will implement the requirement to identify a single competent authority for the regulation of statutory audits. The Financial Reporting Council will fulfil that role. That is consistent with the written statement in the House last July. The FRC will delegate tasks to the existing recognised supervisory bodies—for example, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Those delegations will include: approval of individuals and firms as eligible for appointment as auditors; inspections; investigations, and enforcement. The FRC will retain the task of inspections and investigations of PIE audits.
The regulations will introduce provisions to secure auditor independence. Most significantly, they include a framework for mandatory rotation and retendering of audit engagements with PIEs. That means that PIEs have to put their audit out to tender at least every 10 years, and change their auditor at least every 20 years, to ensure that a cosy relationship, which may not be healthy, does not arise. The framework will apply in respect of financial years beginning on or after 17 June this year.
There is currently no maximum duration for an audit engagement, and annual reappointments of the same auditor can continue indefinitely, leading to the problems that I have identified and, indeed, that we have experienced. The retendering and rotation requirement will be introduced on a phased basis. Some engagements will be given a further four to seven financial years after the regulations come into force, depending on how long the engagement has already been in place. That engagement must then be brought to an end.
The changes are expected to increase competition in the sector, as they will broaden the requirement for regular tendering of auditor appointments. The wider requirement is intended to be as consistent as possible with that introduced by the Competition and Markets Authority. As a result, and to ensure that the initial implementation of the framework is simple to follow, we have not taken up the member state option to incentivise joint audit. The practice of appointing more than one audit firm is not followed in the UK, and the CMA did not consider that it would improve competition in the audit market. We will, of course, keep that decision under review.
Another change made by the regulations will benefit the full range of businesses that use statutory audit services. Companies will no longer be permitted to sign loan agreements that restrict the choice of auditor. That represents another step towards enhancing competition. As well as implementing the directive, the change also implements an important recommendation of the CMA. The regulations also contain changes that are likely to have a deregulatory effect.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
On the Minister’s point about joint audit, I do not know whether she has seen the representation that Mazars sent to Committee members—she may not have—but it said that
“the SI as drafted fails to give UK-based businesses the option of joint audits…This means that many businesses—including Mazars and other smaller auditors will be…at a competitive disadvantage compared to their EU competitors”.
Has she given any thought to that observation? I think she just said that she intends to keep the matter under review, but does she have anything to say that might give comfort to smaller businesses, such as Mazars, that are concerned about that aspect of the regulations?
Anna Soubry
My officials helpfully warned me about this issue, so I am very grateful to them. Mazars has written to several MPs about a member state option on a practice called joint audit. It is relevant to France, but not to the UK. The CMA considered whether joint audit would improve competition in the audit market and, as I described, chose not to incentivise it. We have taken the same approach and have not taken up that option. I know that Mazars has concerns because it has its origins in France and feels that joint audit has helped it secure its larger share of the market there, but that is about all I can say at this stage. We are aware of those concerns but, on balance, we think that what we have done is right, which is why I am so keen that we should all agree that these regulations are the right way forward. Nevertheless, we will, as always, keep a firm eye on all these matters. If there is ever a need to make changes, I hope we will do so.
Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)
On that subject, notwithstanding the fact that it might have some self-interest, Mazars suggested that smaller auditors might be at a competitive disadvantage, but also that challenger businesses would be less likely, thereby reducing consumer choice, and that the regulations would be less likely to encourage competition in the market. Will the Minister comment on that?
Anna Soubry
As I said, we are aware of Mazars’s concerns and have looked at them. The important thing about the directive and the fact that the regulations will, hopefully, now come into force is that there really has been extensive consultation, which is highly commendable. We have listened to all parties. All the stakeholders that are involved in this part of the financial sector have been consulted and had their say. On that basis we are content with the regulations as they are. Nevertheless, we will keep a firm eye on them. We will always keep things under consideration.
The regulations contain changes that are likely to have a deregulatory effect, including some to make cross- border provision of audit services more straightforward. That is encouraging, and it is a very good example of how the EU is increasingly moving in the direction of wanting to deregulate and becoming much more aware that it must not be a burden on our businesses. As well as having the potential to increase competition in the UK, the requirement must be reflected in similar provisions in other member states and should open up opportunities to UK firms.
The Government believe that a non-statutory approach to the implementation of EU legislation should be adopted wherever possible. The implementation of ethical and technical requirements in the directive for auditors will be covered by revised FRC standards. The approach reflects that taken to implementing the 2006 audit directive, as the requirements in that directive were implemented in the UK as requirements on the content of FRC standards.
Many requirements of the EU regulation will apply as part of the standards, including a blacklist of services that auditors will not be able to provide alongside the audit to avoid overfamiliarity between the management and auditors of PIEs. It also includes additional requirements on the content of the audit report of PIEs that supplement further harmonisation in the directive. That is not expected significantly to increase the length of audit reports but is likely to increase their value to users.
The Financial Conduct Authority has amended its rules to reflect changes to the framework in the directive on audit committees. The directive requires rules on audit committees to be applied to unlisted banks, building societies and unlisted insurers for the first time. The EU regulation and FRC standards then put in place further measures for corporate governance of PIEs in the form of an additional report by the auditor to the audit committee.
Finally, the regulations will strengthen standards for the audit of PIEs and make audit reporting more informative. They should also improve confidence in the independence of auditors and avoid excessive concentration in the audit market. They open up opportunities for smaller audit firms. On that basis, I commend the regulations to the Committee.
Kevin Brennan
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Turner.
As the Minister said, the regulations are quite complex in many ways, although they have a simple purpose, which is to try to ensure that the standard and quality of auditing improve right across the EU, not just in the UK, for the benefit of all concerned—investors, consumers and, ultimately, people working for businesses and organisations. Having a high quality, independent standard of business auditing is important.
As the Government’s impact assessment indicates, there is clear evidence of market failure in the area due to the misalignment of incentives that can happen in business. There can be conflicts of interest between the purpose of audit, which is to give a clear and honest account of the financial situation of a business, and the need for auditing companies to obtain and maintain their clients. The regulations are a good example.
The Minister said that the measures will have a deregulatory effect, which is interesting because normally each time the Government introduce a new regulation, they say that they have a rule that they must get rid of two other regulations. They never tell us what those two other regulations are but, at this very moment, two regulations are expiring somewhere; they are on their last legs, out of breath and about to die. We do not know what they are because the Government never tell us, but the Minister says that these regulations are actually deregulatory. Whether they are or not is irrelevant. If the measures constitute good regulation, we should have them and if they are bad, we should not. That is the sensible position.
Our position is that, broadly speaking, the measures are an example of good regulation. We broadly welcome what the Government are doing. The Minister is a passionate advocate for our membership of the EU but I suspect that at least half of those Conservative Back Benchers behind her are in favour of leaving the EU. They should think again, because this is a good example of an EU-initiated reform that is of benefit to the United Kingdom and, ultimately, to businesses, consumers and workers in the United Kingdom. The regulations will bring greater consistency and better practice to the auditing of businesses, which is a very positive initiative for the European Union to take.
Kevin Brennan
I will in a moment. The regulations will be counted, no doubt, by some Government Members as yet another law made in Brussels. However, I assume that those Members—including, I suspect, the hon. Member for Windsor—are going to vote for yet another law made in Brussels in a few months.
Adam Afriyie
I am enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s Eurosceptic baiting. Does he know whether the audit regulations also apply to the auditing of the European Union budget?
Kevin Brennan
That is not their intention, as the hon. Gentleman knows. They are a positive contribution from the European Union that I am sure he will welcome if he makes remarks later in our deliberations.
Having got that off my chest, I will move on to ask a few questions of the Minister. Even though we broadly welcome the regulations, the job of Opposition Members here today is to probe the Government a little and to understand whether they are getting this right and whether the implementation is correct. My hon. Friend the Member for Bootle and I have raised concerns about the regulations not allowing for a joint auditing approach that could help smaller auditors. Some of these companies are quite large, even though they are small in the auditing world. Nevertheless, the Government should seriously consider anything that could enhance genuine competition in this area. I hope the Minister will review that, because there is real concern that that is a missed opportunity, as was expounded by Mazars when it got in touch with Committee members.
I want to ask the Minister a few questions about the FRC’s future accountability and governance. I understand that the Government told the Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee that the FRC is likely to review the current accountability framework. Will the Minister include wider interests—those of consumers, investors and employee representatives—in the review of the current accountability framework and the FRC’s governance structure? I would be grateful if she clarified whether the Government intend to make it a broader consultation.
As we survey the wreckage of the BHS scandal and other corporate failings, we are left wondering what auditors were actually doing in some of those cases. It is essential, in fulfilling its larger role, that the FRC works with not only audit firms—important as that is—but those with wider interests who depend on there being a high standard and class of auditing for the future of their jobs, their investments or, as consumers, for any products they purchase. Will the Government consider that as governance issues are further discussed, in addition to systems of reporting to the Department and to Parliament?
In the consultation, a number of organisations raised different issues. I want to check the Government’s response to those concerns and find out whether Ministers feel they have adequately responded to them. For example, the Association of Investment Companies said that it understands the Government consider that the disclosure of non-audit services may need to be amended, so that services required by the European Union or national legislation are disclosed under a separate heading from other non-audit services. That is not urgent, as it is not due until accounting periods begin on or after 17 June 2019, but the AIC’s submission recommended that the Government release a further consultation paper in due course to discuss any proposed amendment to the disclosures. Clarity about whether the Government agree with that recommendation would be helpful to the Committee.
In its response, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants said:
“We would continue to urge that maintaining the approach whereby the audit exemption threshold tracks the small company accounting regime is taken. We believe that consistency with IFRS standards wherever possible supports international business by decreasing the regulatory burden”,
which the Minister says is the intention in the regulations. Again, will consistency with the IFRS standards be adversely affected by the proposed changes?
The Quoted Companies Alliance raised a general concern in the consultation that the impact assessment, which has been published and which I have read,
“does not provide enough detail on what the costs would be for smaller companies in connection to the new rules or what the costs would be for the non-PIEs”—
that is, non-public interest entities—
“to familiarise themselves with the audit committee. We believe that further analysis should be conducted by BIS in this regard.”
Does the Minister feel that enough research has been commissioned on the costs for small companies of familiarising themselves with the proposed changes? If necessary, will she commission further analysis, as proposed by the QCA?
Returning to a point I made earlier, PricewaterhouseCoopers recommends that a separate consultation be considered to build consensus on the appropriate future governance and oversight model for the Financial Reporting Council. As part of that, it wants BIS to consider arrangements for how Parliament and the Department itself might exercise more active oversight of the FRC. Are the Government considering that proposal for a separate consultation?
PricewaterhouseCoopers also warns about a lack of clarity and too much ambiguity in the regulations, saying that the appropriate application of the provisions would not necessarily be clear in all cases. PwC suggests that to achieve the FRC’s objective of enhancing confidence in audit quality, non-binding guidance should be developed by BIS, the FRC and the wider profession to assist audit firms and audit committees in interpreting the provisions. I believe the Minister mentioned guidance. The kind of guidance that PwC referred to would assist shareholders and the FRC, which will have responsibility for monitoring compliance. In the absence of any guidance, there is a risk that inconsistent practices could emerge. The provision of guidance would not undermine the FRC’s clear focus on principles, but might prevent inconsistencies from developing. Does the Minister believe that such guidance should be issued, and are there plans to help or encourage its development between BIS, the FRC and the wider profession?
I have a couple of other questions for the Minister. The ICAEW has concerns relating primarily to the implementation of the new audit regulatory framework and a desire to ensure that the FRC can focus on the systemic risks on which a single competent authority should concentrate, while the recognised supervisory bodies should have sufficient certainty to fulfil their role effectively and efficiently. It is also concerned about the procedures for recognition of statutory auditors from other member states of the European Union. Will the Minister comment on the concerns about those procedures and on the implementation of the new audit regulatory framework?
To conclude, I confirm that it is not our intention to divide the Committee. However, if any of the leavers on the Government Benches are so offended by the fact that this is a European Union initiative that they decide not to support the Minister, we will ride to the rescue.
Anna Soubry
I will respond to the various questions and comments from the hon. Member for Cardiff West. There is quite a lengthy timeline that shows that this whole process began in about 2006. Obviously, it is not a criticism of the EU that it has taken so long to do this. It has taken so long because this has been very carefully considered and of course things have changed quite substantially, especially as some of the real concerns coming out of the financial crisis became clear. In October 2013, the CMA reported on its investigation into the market for the largest auditors. The CMA report, the various to-ing and fro-ing, the careful negotiation, the fine-tuning and the making sure that any people with an interest, whatever it may be, were involved in the final set of regulations are a testament to the concern there was about getting this right.
Although I cannot say we will definitely do any of the things that have been urged, we are more than willing to—indeed, we will—keep an eye on all these matters, many of which have been raised by the hon. Gentleman, to ensure that the arrangements are working well. The regulations will have to bed down, as such things often do, but we have certainly not closed our ears or eyes to the possibility of change being needed. I should say that I am told Mazars is not a small business; it is a medium-sized business, which is quite interesting.
Kevin Brennan
I sought to make that point and to give the Minister a chance for in-flight refuelling. Often in this area there are businesses that are quite large by some standards. Nevertheless, very large businesses are involved in this practice. To give an opportunity to all, joint auditing arrangements might be something to consider for the future.
Anna Soubry
That is very helpful. My officials have also said that on rotation and retendering, there will be non-binding guidance on the implementation of the regulations. Some of that has already been published by the FRC and the CMA, and it will be updated and republished shortly. Everybody is on top of these things. As ever, if I do not respond now to any of the points the hon. Gentleman raised, I will write to him.
I hope everyone on the Committee will agree that the quality and reliability of financial reporting in our country is well regarded, and rightly so. It will always be a priority of mine to maintain the rigour and integrity of our audit regime. We know the huge importance to our economy of financial services—some 80% of our economy relies on that industry. This is a good example of the need for cross-EU regulation, so that we can do business much better. I am pleased that it is thought the regulation will be of real benefit to our own audit companies, which have a good reputation, so that they can do business in other member states even better.
The cost to business is not small by any means, but we think the benefits may well outweigh that cost. The one-off cost is estimated to be £41.7 million, with continuing costs of an additional £23.7 million a year, but we are confident that the overall benefits may well financially outweigh those costs. Compulsory retendering of audits should increase competition and choice in the marketplace, which is good for everybody.
Although the application of the requirements to auditors of LLPs goes beyond the minimum requirements of the audit directive and regulation, it will implement the recommendation of the CMA and meet the understandable desire of users and preparers of accounts for consistency in financial frameworks. On the basis that the regulations will make a good system even better and be good for a particularly important part of our financial sector, I hope that they will be passed without any difficulty.
Question put and agreed to.
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Foreign Aid Expenditure
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Steve Double (St Austell and Newquay) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered e-petition 125692 relating to foreign aid spending.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I am pleased to see so many colleagues here to debate this important issue. We find ourselves here today in response to an e-petition started by John Wellington from The Mail on Sunday. I am bound to say that after the events of the past week, The Mail on Sunday is my favourite national newspaper. The e-petition calls for the spending of a fixed 0.7% of the UK’s gross national income on foreign aid to be stopped and instead for money only to be given to
“truly deserving causes, on a case-by-case basis.”
I am delighted to have the opportunity to open this debate as a member of the Petitions Committee, because it is the perfect opportunity to set out the arguments clearly. We know that the UK is a world leader on international development.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the UK is a world leader because we deliver spending of 0.7% of gross national income on overseas aid?
Steve Double
I wholeheartedly agree with the right hon. Gentleman, and I will come on to make that point very soon.
We know that in 2013, we were the only United Nations country to achieve our target on aid spending. We know that our 0.7% spending commitment is enshrined in law. Furthermore, let us not forget that our commitment to overseas aid was a clear part of the 2015 manifesto on which a majority Conservative Government was elected. There are people who feel strongly about this issue and feel that we should not be spending this amount of money on international aid. People are perfectly entitled to hold those views, and that is the beauty and very purpose of the Petitions Committee—it gives the opportunity to debate in the House issues that the public raise.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
I know that there are concerns about this issue—in particular when we see cuts to local services in our local areas, such as to social care—but does the hon. Gentleman agree that the choice between spending on foreign aid and investing in our communities at home is false? We have a duty to do both.
Steve Double
I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Lady. It is not either/or; it is about doing both.
Several hon. Members rose—
Steve Double
I would like to make a little more progress, and then I will accept further interventions.
The issue can be emotive and controversial for some. It is far too easy to get caught up in the attention-grabbing headlines or misled by the wildly exaggerated information out there in the public domain. People want to know how the money is spent and whether it is being spent in our interest, and rightly so. That was clearly demonstrated in the Twitter discussion held this afternoon, in which the Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), and I participated. We had about 3,000 contributions in just an hour. In fact, it was impossible to keep up with the number of people posting, let alone respond to them all, but it was clear from that discussion that there are strong feelings on both sides of the debate.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
I am sure my hon. Friend will accept that there are concerns. My right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) set up the traffic light system that shows how our aid budget is being spent. There are far too many red and amber warnings about how well the money is being spent, and that is what the public are concerned about.
Steve Double
I agree with my hon. Friend. It is absolutely essential that we ensure our aid budget is being spent well and wisely and is delivering value for money for the British taxpayer. I am sure that the Department for International Development is committed to achieving that.
Nick Thomas-Symonds (Torfaen) (Lab)
While we all want to monitor aid spending, does the hon. Gentleman not agree that the money has transformational potential, not least for the 11 million children who have gone to school for the first time as a consequence of that spending?
Steve Double
I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman. I will come on to that point in a minute. The money is transforming lives around the world, and we should be very proud of that fact.
Steve Double
I will take one more intervention and then I want to make some progress.
Chris White
I have previously had the good fortune of sitting on the International Development Committee, and I have visited countries where I have seen housing, governance and health programmes working. My hon. Friend talks about leadership. Can he also explain how our leadership in this country encourages other countries to support international development?
Steve Double
I suspect that is a matter for the Minister far more than it is one for me, but I wholeheartedly agree that this country is providing the leadership and setting the trend on international development. We should be incredibly proud of that and hope other countries follow our lead.
Sir Alan Duncan (Rutland and Melton) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend, whom we congratulate on launching this debate, appreciate that the debate is about the 0.7% and that it would be a tragedy—indeed, it would be repulsive—if it was hijacked by those who want to use it to demonise Palestine and Palestinians? The debate should concentrate on the 0.7% and only that.
Steve Double
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention, and I agree with his point, but I accept that the debate is wide-ranging and we need to discuss how the money is spent and not just the amount. I believe that the UK can be very proud of how the money is spent.
Steve Double
I will take one more intervention, and then I will make some progress.
Steve Double
I agree wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend. That is the very point I want to make: continuing the spending is not just the right thing to do; it is also in our national interest. The truth is that this country gets great value for money from the aid. Funds are subject to rigorous internal and external checks, and we are helping to create a more stable world.
There are many myths out there relating to foreign aid spending. One example is that aid money from British and European taxpayers has gone to Palestinian prisoners, including terrorists. That is simply not true. Another is that UK aid to the Palestinian Authority funded an £8 million presidential palace. Again, that is simply not true. The myths go on and on, and they are based on out-of-date information or inaccurate reporting. The Government have been very clear on that.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
Has my hon. Friend seen the report from the Overseas Development Institute, which found that some of the funding that has gone to the Palestinian territories has resulted in an increase in violence? That is why the Department is re-looking at it.
Steve Double
I have read those reports, but I am assured by the discussions I have had with the Department that that is simply not the truth and is not taking place.
It is right that people have their views heard, and today we will debate the merits and issues surrounding the UK’s foreign aid spending. That is what the e-petition is all about. I am proud that this great country has a strong record of helping those most in need. Helping to save and improve millions of lives is no small task and is something to be incredibly proud of. I believe that as a human race, helping others is something we are designed and created to do. UK aid reaches millions of people across the world.
Let us consider some examples of what has been achieved. Some 11 million children have been supported through school. Some 47 million bed nets have been distributed, which has helped lead to malaria deaths falling by 60% in the past 15 years. Sixty million people have been given access to things that are so simple, yet so vital, and that I am sure each of us takes for granted: clean water, better sanitation and improved hygiene conditions.
Steve Double
I will just make some more progress. From scientific research, health and climate change to economic growth, education, governance and security, there are few aspects of life that our aid does not touch in many of the poorest nations of the world.
Steve Double
Yes, and then I will come back to the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin).
Mr Evans
I am extremely grateful. What my hon. Friend is saying is absolutely right and reassuring. If we do not recognise that there are issues out there—that is why we are debating this matter—then we need to address areas where the money has been misspent. Does he agree that when we give money to a charity in America that then spends millions on new headquarters as opposed to ensuring that that money gets through to the poorest people, we do an injustice to the poorest people throughout the world and are probably putting the 0.7% in jeopardy?
Steve Double
I agree with my hon. Friend. We have to ensure that whatever money we have is wisely spent and delivered to the front line. When that is not the case, it needs to be addressed.
Ian Austin
The hon. Gentleman is right about the good work that DFID does, but he is completely wrong to say it is a myth that the Palestinian Authority fund terrorists. The fact is that nearly all of DFID’s funding in the region goes directly to the Palestinian Authority. That is a matter of concern because of the allegation that the Palestinian Authority continue to fund payments to convicted terrorists and their families, which is in direct contradiction to the demands of the international community.
Steve Double
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. [Interruption.] I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Minister.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Sir Desmond Swayne)
Of course we fund the Palestinian Authority. Our funds are paid to named civil servants and pensioners from an audited and scrutinised list for the delivery of public services. British taxpayers’ money does not fund terrorism.
Steve Double
I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention.
Between 2010 and 2015, more than 28 million children under five and pregnant women were helped through the Government’s nutrition programmes, more than 5 million births took place safely with the help of nurses, midwives and doctors, and more than 13 million people were given emergency food assistance—and the list goes on. These are not just facts. These are real people living in the same world as us who deserve to have their basic human needs met. What kind of world would we be living in if we reduced or stopped this spending and did nothing or little, or if we idly sat by and watched while the most vulnerable in our world suffered? I put it to this House that the majority of British people wish not to turn a blind eye and see innocent people suffer, but instead stand tall in this world, side by side with those who most need our help.
Comparisons are casually and carelessly tossed about regarding how much is spent abroad and how that money could be spent here at home on nurses, schools and more bobbies on the beat, but it is not that simple. It is not that black and white. It is not about being solely reactive as and when disasters, crises and epidemics happen; it is about being constantly active in this world. This money goes a long way and we should judge our commitment to the rest of the world not solely by figures, but by the effectiveness of it, too.
Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)
On that point, does my hon. Friend not think that one of the problems is that the public have difficulty conceiving what 0.7% of GNI really means? It is a fact that the value of the food we throw away is more than 0.7% of GNI. The amount we spend on takeaways every year in this country is more than we spend on overseas aid. A few of those comparisons can be quite illuminating.
Steve Double
I agree with my right hon. Friend. A stat that I read today said that in the UK we spend more on ice cream than we give away in international aid.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend on his presentation of the debate. My fundamental concern is that we have a twin deficit in this country: a current account deficit that is exacerbated by international aid spending and a public expenditure deficit. Although aid is incredibly worthy—no one would argue with that—can we truly afford to sustain such levels, given the public finances?
Steve Double
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention, but I believe we cannot afford not to spend money on aid. In the world as it is today, with the many crises and the needs that we meet around the world, it is in the interest of the UK to continue spending on international aid.
Steve Double
I want to make a little more progress, and then I will. The Government have been very clear and consistent in their principles on this issue: our development spending will meet our moral obligation to the world’s poorest, as well as supporting our national interest, a point I will come on to later. Let us not forget the history of how Britain made its wealth. We took resources from countries across the world, especially those in the empire, and then left them as independent nations, giving very little back. Some of the issues that those countries face today have been compounded by the historical actions of this nation, so I feel strongly that we have a moral obligation to help these countries now, in their time of need.
The Government have also been very clear that we will keep our promises and put international development at the heart of our national security and foreign policy, but how we do that is changing. Our official development assistance spending is now shaped by four strategic principles: first, strengthening global peace, security and governance; secondly, strengthening resilience and the response to crises; thirdly, promoting global prosperity; and fourthly, tackling extreme poverty and helping the world’s most vulnerable. Through this, it has been made clear that the Government are committed to ensuring that every last penny spent on ODA is spent well and offers good value for money.
It is true that in the past there have been cases where the way in which our money has been spent could have been brought into question, but it has been made clear that funds are now subject to greater transparency. In fact, DFID has been congratulated on being the most transparent aid donor in the world.
Chloe Smith (Norwich North) (Con)
I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate; my hon. Friend is setting out the issues very carefully. Does he agree that it is important for the Government to focus on specific, not open-ended support? In other words, we should focus on results-based projects, rather than general budgetary support.
Steve Double
Absolutely. I agree that we have to ensure that the money is spent as effectively as possible and delivers measurable, tangible outcomes that we can assess. We must accept that there may be times when we do not achieve what we set out to do, and we should be honest with ourselves and admit when that is the case.
Derek Thomas
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We know that when there is a crisis in the world, the British people are quick to dig into their pockets to give money. Does he agree that international aid is a tool that can be used to promote human rights in countries where the rights of minority groups and vulnerable people are often not upheld? Does he agree that international aid helps to transform the wellbeing of many people?
Steve Double
I agree with my hon. Friend. Our foreign aid funding and budget can achieve many things. Addressing the issues of equality and human rights around the world is one of the positive things that we can do.
I have set out the strategic aims of our foreign aid budget, and the UK’s aid will be used to meet those objectives, all of which support poverty reduction and are aligned with the UK’s national interest. Money is now going straight to the frontline—to non-governmental organisations around the world, where it is needed most. More emphasis than ever is being put on reforming the way in which aid is spent, and on ensuring that DFID is a world leader in aid transparency. It is clear that how aid is allocated, used and spent has changed for the better. The calls that the petition makes are impractical and could prove counterproductive. Rather than simply responding to crises and requests for help, our aid spending needs to be strategic and to take a long-term view to be most effective.
Three years ago, the UK became the only G20 country to achieve the UN target of spending 0.7% of its gross national income as official development assistance. This is a massive commitment to the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, and it is disappointing that other countries are not doing the same. I had the pleasure and humbling opportunity to travel to Nairobi with Christian Aid last year to see our aid in action. I went specifically because I wanted to see for myself how our overseas aid money was being spent.
Kenya has a population of 43 million people and is the biggest economy in eastern Africa, yet around 25% of Kenyans do not have enough income to meet their basic food needs. A massive three quarters of the population are dependent on agriculture. This proves troublesome when their weather patterns are becoming increasingly erratic. That beautiful country and those wonderful people face a number of issues, including the unequal distribution of political, social and economic power; tax and governance issues; high maternal and child mortality rates; and—the main focus of my trip—climate change.
Droughts and intermittent flooding are becoming increasingly frequent, each time growing more severe. With each devastating blow that a drought brings, farmers lose a significant percentage of their assets. When that is combined with snowballing vulnerability to disasters that result in severe displacement and human suffering, and an increasing lack of resources such as food and water, it is easy to see how, without any assistance from countries such as the UK, Kenya could find itself stuck in a never-ending cycle of suffering and hampered long-term development.
Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)
I agree with the tone that my hon. Friend is taking on this issue. Just a few days ago I was in Ethiopia. I saw the effects of the drought in that country, where more than 16 million people are dependent on food aid to survive. I am proud that this country is stepping up to the mark, because nobody in this country did anything to deserve being born in the relative luxury that we live in. It is pure luck, and the least we can do is help those people.
Steve Double
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention; he makes a point that I will come on to.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
Does the hon. Gentleman also recognise another grave threat in Kenya: that of young men, in particular, being seduced by extremism? We saw that extremism again yesterday in Orlando. International development and the 0.7% commitment assist in the battle against that terrible, terrible seduction.
Steve Double
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I agree that if we do not address these issues, they will come home to roost in western countries. One way we can address them is through our international aid spending.
Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)
I am very proud of the contribution that this country makes to international development, but in my constituency, and I am sure constituencies up and down the country, we have a plethora of food banks. Some of my constituents are not able to feed their families. Until those problems are addressed, the same question will keep arising; my constituents will continue to ask me, “Why are we spending this money on foreign aid, when our children are hungry here?”
Steve Double
I understand the hon. Lady’s point, but my point is that it cannot be a simple either/or. We need to fulfil our responsibility in the world and address some of the challenges facing it; that is in our national interests. If we do not, those issues will come closer to us. It is still the right thing to do, although I understand the concerns of her constituents and, indeed, many of mine.
Although I had visited Kenya a number of times before in my previous charity work, my most recent visit was a chance to see Kenya with a different focus. I spent three jam-packed days in the country, meeting members of the Kenyan Government, UK representatives, campaigners and charity workers. On one occasion, I visited an extremely rural area, where the impact of climate change is felt most acutely, and met a local farming community. Rainfall is now much less frequent but heavier, which creates significant challenges of soil erosion and flash flooding. I visited a farm where a partnership of the UK and Kenyan local government has helped to fund the construction of water-capture pits for the farmer. When it rains, the pits enable him to store water, which can last for several months during a drought. This means that farmers can expand their farms and provide employment for more local people—so simple, yet so effective.
Having met these people and heard their stories, which begin with anguish but have a positive and hopeful outcome, I understand much more clearly why this spending is so necessary. My trip made it very clear that climate change, as well as every other single issue facing those who receive aid, is being felt in the poorer countries of the world, where people are less resilient and less able to adapt.
Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman makes a very powerful point about the environment and natural disasters. Does he agree that in a country such as Bangladesh, which has been ravaged by floods year after year, a strong reason for keeping the 0.7% commitment is that it has particularly helped women? He has given many reasons, but he has not mentioned women yet. Women have been lifted out of poverty. That has been particularly apparent in Bangladesh, where Muhammad Yunus has helped to provide microfinance for women’s start-up businesses.
Steve Double
Just to be equal, I have not mentioned men either, but I totally agree with the hon. Lady’s point. I shall press on and finish my contribution, rather than taking any more interventions.
The next reason why overseas aid spending is so important is to protect our national interests. Whatever we may feel about the moral responsibility we have to other countries, it is in our own interest to continue this spending. One of the biggest ongoing challenges facing the world is the migration crisis. People are fleeing not only war and conflict, but poverty. If people find, as a result of our changing climate, that life is not sustainable, especially in rural areas that are totally dependent on farming, the likelihood of them migrating to western Europe will only increase, putting more and more pressure on our country. Granting aid that can help communities to adapt and enable people to live sustainable lives in rural areas is not just the right thing to do, but the sensible thing to do.
The choice is simple: we tackle the issues at their roots or we wait for them to arrive on our doorstep. As a result of global communications, people in poorer nations are far more aware than ever of the huge gaps between the quality of life in different countries. Young people growing up in places such as Africa are bombarded with visions of the affluence of life in the west. On a global scale, there are very few poor people in the UK. I strongly believe that those of us who have had the luck to be born British have already won life’s lottery. Nearly half the world’s population—2.8 billion people—survive on less than $2 a day.
The generosity of the British people never ceases to amaze me. Reacting to major incidents around the world, we step up and help those who have fallen to get back on their feet, instead of just peering down on them from our platform of relative comfort and safety. A phenomenal £372 million was raised by the UK public in response to the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami, and £107 million was raised in response to the earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Our foreign aid spending is no different. It follows the same principle of us, as human beings, wanting to help others; it just comes in the form of Government budget. The Government are committed to ensuring greater transparency and even better value for money.
I hope that I have made my point clearly. I believe it is both the right and the practical thing for the UK to maintain its commitment to international aid. Although I acknowledge the right of those who have signed the petition to do so, and I understand the strong feelings that many people hold on this issue, I respectfully disagree with them. The UK has a proud history of playing a leading part on the global stage in assisting countries that are desperately in need. That is something we should continue to do. It is part of what makes us who we are; it is part of the values of our country; it is part of what makes Britain great.
Several hon. Members rose—
Phil Wilson (in the Chair)
Members do not need to be told that quite a lot of them want to catch my eye, so I will introduce a time limit of five minutes straight away. The first person I shall call, who will stick to that limit, I am sure, is Joan Ryan.
Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)
Three weeks after Labour won the 1997 general election, we pledged that Britain would meet the UN target to spend 0.7% of our gross national income on international development. That is one of the acts of which I am most proud from our time in office. I do not deny the important role that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives have played in ensuring that it has become a cross-party national commitment—one that only a handful of countries in the world have met.
However, none of us who support international aid believes we are writing the Department for International Development a blank cheque. We must always ensure that aid meets three tests: it must be effective and transparent, and it must reflect our country’s values. In the case of the aid we give to the Palestinian Authority, we are failing those three tests. Let me give one example: the issue of the PA’s payments to convicted Palestinian terrorists, including, we must assume, Taleb Mehamara, the uncle of the Sarona market murderers, a member of a terror cell that in 2002 targeted Israelis, killing four in a shooting attack. We are not talking about, as one DFID Minister claimed in 2012,
“social assistance programmes to provide welfare payments”.
Instead, by operating a perverse sliding scale where people receive more money the longer their sentence—in some cases as much as five times the average monthly wage in Ramallah—the payments actually incentivise people to commit the most terrible acts of violence. I simply do not see how that advances the cause of a two-state solution. What are the Government doing about it?
Last month, Palestinian Media Watch showed how the PA sought to deceive international donors by shutting the Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs and claiming that the Palestine Liberation Organisation would assume responsibility for those payments, but that was merely financial sleight of hand.
Sir Desmond Swayne
I have had discussions with the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister of the Palestinian Authority and other officials, and I continually make the point that the right hon. Lady rightly makes: if these are welfare payments, they must be made like welfare payments. The reality is that we do not pay them. Our taxpayers’ money goes to build the Palestinian Authority so it is able to morph into the Government of a Palestinian state when that opportunity arises. We pay named civil servants to provide public services.
Joan Ryan
I think the Minister understands the point I am making and wilfully will not look at this. In fact, the payments we make enable the Palestinian Authority to make its payments to prisoners.
In 2015, the PA raised its annual transfer to the PLO via the Palestinian National Fund to 481 million shekels—the amount it needed to fund the newly created PLO Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs. That amount was virtually identical to the budget of the old PA Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs—the point I am making to the Minister. I wrote to Ministers last month demanding that direct aid to the PA be suspended while these serious allegations are investigated. In response, I was told by Ministers that the Palestinian Ministry of Finance has confirmed to DFID—we have heard this again today—that
“prisoner payments are fully administered”
by the PLO. With respect, I urge Ministers to dig a little deeper. They should be asking questions about the source of the money, not who is doling it out.
Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)
I would like to ask my right hon. Friend two questions. First, is she saying that aid to the Palestinian Authority should be suspended? How does she respond to the passage in the report that was referred to earlier, which says:
“To the extent that collapse of the PA or the Palestinian economy would massively increase unemployment, this would raise the chances of a violent escalation”?
Secondly, is she saying that every Palestinian prisoner in Israeli custody is a terrorist?
Joan Ryan
On my hon. Friend’s second point, I have not said that. He just said that, not me. On his first point, I think, as we have said, that tests for aid are very important if there is to be public confidence in where aid goes to. It is important that the aid is suspended subject to an inquiry, which could happen very quickly. I am not in any way against giving aid to Palestinians, as long as it is spent in the right way.
Mrs Sharon Hodgson (Washington and Sunderland West) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that one of the ways forward in this debate about how DFID aid is spent in Israel and Palestine is for there to be increased spending on people-to-people co-existence policies?
Joan Ryan
I absolutely agree. I am not going to take any more interventions, as I want to finish my remarks. My hon. Friend makes a very valuable point.
Repeated warnings have been ignored. Nearly two years ago, for instance, the International Development Committee suggested that there is a real risk that the payment of UK aid to the PA in this fashion simply enables it
“to release alternative funds which allow these payments”
to convicted terrorists “to continue”. That is the very point I am making.
While our aid potentially helps to line the pockets of the men of violence, we are providing pitiable support to the co-existence projects that bring Israelis and Palestinians together, as my hon. Friend has said. I have written to the Secretary of State listing a number of co-existence projects that enable Palestinians and Israelis to work together, demonstrating what they have in common, not what divides them. I have calculated that less than 13% of the £1.14 million from the Government’s conflict, stability and security fund spent in Israel and the Palestinian territories funds co-existence projects. That represents a mere 0.2% of the roughly £72 million that DFID spends in the Palestinian territories.
Britain can and must help to work towards an independent, democratic Palestinian state living alongside an Israel that is safe and secure within recognised borders. At the moment, I fear that our aid to the Palestinian Authority might be taking us further away from that goal, which is why, as I have previously argued, we urgently need an independent inquiry and a radical rethink.
Fiona Bruce (Congleton) (Con)
I rise to support the 0.7% target, in particular with reference to the impact that DFID has made to reaching more than 62 million people with clean water, sanitation and hygiene—WASH—support. Behind that statistic, the lives of so many individuals have been transformed. I saw that when I went to Nepal as a member of the International Development Committee last year. We saw a scheme that had recently provided piped water to a remote village of 600 people, including to two elderly former Gurkha soldiers. One of them proudly showed me the water tap to his home and his vegetable garden, which he was able to tend lovingly as a result of having a water supply. He told me that the children of the village are now able to spend more time in school because they do not have to spend hours every day carrying water for the villagers.
That scheme was led by a young engineer from the current Gurkha regiment. It was administered by the Gurkha Welfare Trust and funded by DFID. What was truly remarkable was not only that the scheme engaged villagers from the whole village in implementing it, but that it cost just £18,000 in UK aid. Some 600 lives have been transformed—there have been improvements in health, hygiene, nutrition, education and life chances for all of those people and their families—for just £18,000. Those who criticise UK aid’s value for money will, I hope, think again on hearing of that scheme.
We can be very proud that DFID’s WASH investments have led to improved health and life chances outcomes across the globe, just as in that Nepalese village. As WaterAid’s report “Water: At What Cost? The State of the World’s Water 2016” states:
“The lack of access to an affordable, convenient, improved water source is one of the biggest barriers to escaping a life of poverty and disease.”
As evidence from another DFID-funded scheme in Bangladesh shows, DFID’s WASH programmes have a wide impact on development. There have been reductions in infant diarrhoea—a major cause of infant sickness and death in developing countries—in child stunting, and in the effect of parasitic worms and other infectious diseases, including water-borne diseases. There have been improvements in school enrolment and attendance, and a reduction in school drop-out rates, particularly for girls. There is evidence of reduced gender inequality, as it is often not just children but women who spend time fetching water.
UK aid helps with WASH programmes not just in remote rural areas. DFID’s WASH programmes are increasingly exploring the challenges of providing water and sanitation improvements in urban slums. About 80% of the estimated 1.7 million inhabitants of Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, live in barrios, often in shacks partly built with corrugated iron. Just 9% of homes are connected to the sewerage system, and half of all Maputo’s faecal matter is buried in people’s backyards, which contaminates the water system. A WASH scheme has been helping by providing investment and equipment, building skills and helping the Government to create appropriate regulations to enable the cost-effective collection and disposal of sewage by small local contractors. DFID is funding a not-for-profit company called Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor, which is helping to develop cost-effective models for providing WASH in urban settings. For the detractors of UK aid expenditure’s value for money, I repeat that it is a not-for-profit company.
Mrs Hodgson
The hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. On the detractors of the UK aid spend, I wish she could print that list of those great projects in a national newspaper. We need to advertise the great work DFID is doing around the world. We all know about it, but I do not think that the public appreciate it, and nor do they know the details she has highlighted.
Fiona Bruce
The hon. Lady makes an excellent point, and I agree with her. The International Development Committee has been urging DFID and Ministers to do that, because she is absolutely right that the public will wholeheartedly support and endorse such schemes.
Mrs Helen Grant
Does my hon. Friend agree that the huge public response to the Nepal earthquake, which she mentioned, shows that British people care about the plight of the poorest?
Fiona Bruce
I absolutely agree. The wonderful thing is that DFID’s funds often lever in other, additional moneys through the schemes that the Department so intelligently implements.
DFID set itself ambitious results targets for WASH. Its initial commitment, only six years ago, in 2010, was to provide 15 million people with first-time access to it. That figure was doubled, and then redoubled, to a target of reaching 60 million people during 2011 to 2015. In 2015, after investing almost £700 million over the previous five years on WASH programmes in 27 countries, DFID announced that it had exceeded its target by reaching 62.9 million people. That is the number of people that DFID states have gained access to clean water, toilets or hand-washing facilities, or have been reached through programmes to encourage better hygiene practices. Following that, DFID has committed itself to reach a further 60 million people with sustainable access to safe drinking water or sanitation by 2020.
Levels of disease from living in insanitary conditions that families across the globe still suffer in the 21st century were last seen in this country in the Victorian era. Those families have children for whom they have the same hopes and dreams as we do for ours. Is it too much to ask that we commit only 0.7% of our gross national income—out of all our abundance—to help combat that?
Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)
I am pleased to be serving under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson, and I congratulate the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on his introductory speech.
I first visited Bangladesh 20 years ago. On that occasion, at a charitable health facility that someone had taken me too, I met a lad probably aged nine or 10, literally dressed in rags. It was explained to me that he was not able to go to school because he had to earn a living and worked at the local hotel. At the time, I think only about one half of primary-age schoolchildren in Bangladesh were in school; today, the equivalent figure is more than 90%. A remarkable transformation has been achieved over the past 20 years. It reflects great credit on Bangladesh, with enrolment among girls at a much increased level, as well as among boys, but British aid has made an important contribution to that change.
In February—I am sure other hon. Members have had similar experiences—in Dhaka I visited a little, one-room school run by that remarkable organisation BRAC, which receives a great deal of support from DFID. I met hopeful, eager and enthusiastic primary schoolchildren, optimistically looking forward to their future, which underlined for me just how important the transformation that British aid has contributed to over the past 20 years is. I have no idea what happened to the boy whom I met 20 years ago—rightly, he might have his own children now, but, if he has, they can expect a much better start in life than he had. Our aid has made an important contribution to bringing that about.
Stephen Timms
I would welcome that, as I welcome the broad support across the Chamber for that commitment. It is interesting to reflect on the reasons for that cross-party support for the 0.7% target, which I think go back to the Jubilee 2000 campaign in the run-up to the millennium, and the tremendous public support for Britain being more generous to the poorest countries in the world. That was then renewed and strengthened by the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005—the great rally in Edinburgh addressed by Nelson Mandela, with the summit at Gleneagles, chaired by Tony Blair, whose decisions made an important contribution.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that a lot of respect has to be paid to the role of the Churches in driving Jubilee 2000? The role of the Churches demonstrates that this matter is not party political, but something that speaks to the good instincts of the British people.
Stephen Timms
My hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. During those campaigns, I remember that a Treasury Minister turned up to work one morning to find the Treasury surrounded by campaigners, arm in arm all the way around the building. They inundated the Treasury with postcards with £1 coins sellotaped to the back of them, one of which we worked out had been sent in by Gordon Brown’s mother. The organisers of the two campaigns—Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History—estimated that about 80% of the people who supported the campaigns and did those things were from the Churches. That is the reason for this cross-party consensus. It is a remarkable example. People sometimes say that the Churches never achieve much anymore; in this instance, the Churches achieved a huge amount, and it is important to recognise the source and strength of the existing consensus.
Catherine West (Hornsey and Wood Green) (Lab)
My right hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that in the same way as Make Poverty History was a huge issue then, climate change is a huge issue now? Value-for-money programmes in Bangladesh, such as those to do with flooding, have an enormous impact. They can prevent not only flooding, but famine, helping with unwanted migration and so on—issues we need to look at. Even terrorism can be linked to the failure to address climate change.
Stephen Timms
My hon. Friend is completely right. I welcome the progress, but a huge amount more remains to be done on that, as well as on education. More than 120 million primary-age children around the world are still not in school, with more girls out of school than boys. A great deal more is still to be done.
Finally, although I welcome today’s cross-party support for the 0.7% aid commitment, I hope that there will also be support throughout the House for the amendment tabled to the Finance Bill by my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) that would effect country-by-country reporting—the arrangement under which each year international companies would publish the profits made and the tax paid in each country. Years ago, I worked on that idea at the Treasury, and I welcome the growing momentum behind it now. I hope that the support rightly and encouragingly expressed in the debate will enable the House to agree my right hon. Friend’s proposal.
Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)
I am a member of the International Development Committee and co-chair of the all-party group for sustainable development goals, so it is a pleasure to support colleagues on both sides of the Chamber who are speaking in favour of the 0.7%. I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on foreign aid spending and, to be precise, the 0.7%. Given the backdrop of the need to secure the UK’s economic recovery, it is right to consider the spending of all Departments, not only DFID’s. We need to ensure that we deliver value for taxpayers’ money and that we understand what does and does not work.
Before I was elected to this place, I had the opportunity through Project Umubano, which was set up by the Prime Minister and my right hon. Friend and constituency neighbour the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), to spend time in Rwanda, Burundi and Sierra Leone, so that I could learn about international development by seeing it for myself. I took that opportunity because I wanted and felt that I needed to gain a more detailed understanding of international development. I visited schools in rural Rwanda, a health clinic in Kirambi and NGO projects where they were showing people how to build livelihoods and encourage enterprise. I have many stories I would love to share with Members this afternoon, but I will move on because time is pressing. UK aid has contributed to many of those successes and many others around the world. In the last 40 years, extreme poverty has halved. Since 2000, deaths from malaria have decreased by 60%, saving more than 6 million lives. There are many other examples.
Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)
UK investment in immunisation saves a child’s life somewhere in the world every two minutes. Does the hon. Lady agree that such immunisation programmes not only enable better health in poorer countries but provide an important roadblock to more widespread epidemics?
Wendy Morton
The hon. Lady makes a powerful point, and I agree. A lot of work is done by DFID and in the charitable sector by organisations such as Rotary to help to eradicate disease. The UK continues to lead the way. It is working to help women and girls by tackling female genital mutilation and preventing sexual violence against women. The breadth of the work that DFID is involved in is exemplary. I believe that we have a moral duty to do such work, but also that it is firmly in our national interest. It can help to strengthen our long-term security and is a vital part of protecting our prosperity as well as helping to foster peaceful diplomacy. As we have seen in recent years with the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone and the ongoing crisis with the Syrian refugees, the UK is at the forefront of international development work.
Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)
I got the chance to visit Ethiopia and see the structures that came about because of polio eradication. It was exactly these structures that were able to detect that the Ebola crisis was developing, so we protect ourselves as well as protecting others.
Wendy Morton
The hon. Lady makes a very valuable point. The benefit of such debates is that they enable us to share many examples of projects and the experiences that we have all had. We face a choice: either seek to tackle the root causes of poverty and therefore many of the great global challenges we face, or wait for the problem—be that the threat of mass migration, terrorism, disease, corruption or global climate change—to arrive here on our doorstep, by which point it is often too late.
We have already heard that the 0.7% target is not new. To be honest, I was surprised to find while doing my research that it was actually first accepted in principle back in 1974 by the then Labour Government. Subsequent Conservative Governments also accepted it in principle, and it was finally enshrined in law by the coalition Government. It is important to remember that the 0.7% aid target that we are discussing is 0.7% of gross national income. Let us be clear: that is not “wealth”, as indicated in the title of the petition. That means that aid spending could in theory come down: if GNI comes down, that 0.7% as an amount will also come down.
Critics will say that we should spend only what we need to spend. I get that. I understand that we have to deliver value for taxpayers’ money, but that has to be balanced and put in context. We are often faced with very complex situations. For example, with Ebola, I fear that if we had waited for too long, the situation that we faced would have been much worse and we would yet again have faced the charge of having done too little, too late.
There is growing global inequality in terms of peace. The most peaceful states are more peaceful than ever, but some of the most fragile states are more fragile than ever. That is why I welcome the shift in the Government’s aid strategy to place a greater focus on supporting such fragile states. That often requires a much longer-term approach, which can often bring challenges, and it is certainly not without risks, but without security and stability, development is not possible and it is not possible to move beyond dependency upon humanitarian aid.
I will turn briefly to governance, accountability and transparency. The e-petition states that our aid is leading to “waste and corruption”. I believe it is for DFID to always answer and make its case for the work it does. I am a member of the International Development Committee, which holds inquiries into the Department’s work, and the Department is also scrutinised by the Public Accounts Committee, which recently published a report, the National Audit Office and the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which I believe was set up while my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield was Secretary of State. The purpose of that organisation is to scrutinise DFID’s work and ODA spending. I would like to see more scrutiny. We have yet to fully make the case for aid to the British public. We all have a part to play in doing that. I would like to see more cross-Department inquiries to better reflect the way that the 0.7% cuts across Departments. The case for 0.7% is an important one. It is worthy of scrutiny and debate, but in my view it is worthy of our support.
Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton), a fellow member of the International Development Committee, and I agree with many of her points. It is important for Members to understand the reason why we are here today, which is not only the petition but the fact that it was started by The Mail on Sunday, which said when talking about our aid budget:
“Rather than helping people who desperately need it, much of this money is wasted and…fuels corruption, funds despots and corrodes democracy in developing nations.”
Quite frankly, that is lazy and wrong, and it is irresponsible for anyone who cares about our national security and global security—
Stephen Doughty
I will give way in a moment, but let me make a few points. It is important to note that there is both a moral argument and a practical and national security argument for why we should spend 0.7% on aid. The moral argument should shame us all. As a Christian, I think it is appalling that 800 women die every day in childbirth and 20,000 children die every day from preventable diseases. We can list the statistics, which should shame us all. It is irresponsible for us to ignore those in a world where poverty, insecurity and instability have consequences for our streets and our cities.
Gross poverty has fuelled instability in Yemen. There are ungoverned spaces there where militants can train and extremism can flourish. The Mail on Sunday is quite happy to tell us about the immigrants flooding towards us—it was happy to put that on its front page instead of the massacre in Orlando—but what it does not tell us is that many of those people trying to find a better future are fleeing because of the very poverty and insecurity that our aid aims to tackle. Do we seriously think that diseases such as Ebola and other pandemics, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic, resist borders? Of course they do not. Our aid plays a crucial role in tackling such diseases.
Stephen Doughty
I will come on to that point directly. It is absolutely right that any allegations of corruption or aid money being used by terrorist organisations, or any other allegations of that nature, are robustly and efficiently investigated. I have every confidence that DFID will do that. Indeed, we have the Independent Committee for Aid Impact, which the hon. Lady mentioned, which is investigating those very issues. I am convinced that we have one of the most robust regimes in the world, and it has been regarded as such by many other Governments.
The fact is that there is a paradox. If we operate in risky environments, some things will not work out. We would not say to a small business, “Don’t use your capital, because something might go wrong and you might lose some of it.” We would not say to our troops, “Don’t go in and fight that battle, because something might go wrong.” We should not say, “Let’s not give aid in risky environments, because something might go wrong with it.” On balance, we are far better off being in there trying to deal with the root problems and consequences than not engaging at all and pulling up the boundaries and saying, “None of this matters and none of it affects us.”
The fact is that corruption thrives in poverty and insecurity. We have withdrawn our aid from countries where there has been absolutely categorical evidence of it being used inappropriately. When I worked in Government at the Department for International Development, we removed aid from the Malawian Government when they said that they were going to spend it on a jet. We have never given money directly to many aspects of the Government of Zimbabwe because of concerns about that—we give aid through charities instead. To say the aid is all going to despots is completely wrong.
Ian Austin
I agree with much of what my hon. Friend is saying, but I just want him to understand that those of us who are concerned about the Palestinian Authority’s support for terrorists are not saying that we should withdraw, walk away and leave them to it—not at all. We are saying that perhaps some of that money would be better spent supporting projects that work across both communities, with Palestinians and Israelis, building dialogue and putting in place the building blocks of the peace process that we all want to see.
Stephen Doughty
The point I am making is a wide one. It is right to look carefully into any allegations of such a serious nature—and several have been raised today. I listened to what the Minister said about specific cases, but that is not the point I am making. I am speaking generally, with reference to the impression created by The Mail on Sunday petition. The fact is that the countries that our aid supports have been regularly reviewed. The coalition Government made different choices about which countries to support from the Labour Government that I was part of; but that was right—we should review those things. We have stopped giving aid to India, and places such as China—it was a difficult decision but I think it was the right one—yet a myth is perpetuated that we are still giving them money.
As has been said, there is increased independent oversight from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which, incidentally, reports to the International Development Committee, not the Government. That means there can be independent scrutiny of what our aid is being spent on . Things have also moved on in the sense that cross-Government co-operation has increased. I welcome the steps that have been taken to increase co-operation between defence, diplomatic and development activities, through the National Security Council. It is the right decision, and it ensures that we are co-ordinated across our international sphere. It is not a zero-sum game. I firmly support the 2% spending target for defence, but I also support the 0.7% aid target. I am in favour of supporting charities and those tackling poverty in my constituency, such as food banks, but I also support providing life-saving drugs to people dying from Ebola or HIV across the world. That is not a zero-sum game—we can do both. Indeed, if I want to ask why people in my constituency are living in poverty, I will have far more questions for the Government about some of their other policies than about what the international aid budget is being spent on.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern about the Government’s increasing tendency to double-count spending both to the 2% NATO target and the 0.7% GNI target?
Stephen Doughty
I think there is a danger of things sometimes being blurred, but there are activities that can legitimately be described as measures contributing to security and to development. It is not a zero-sum game. I saw that in Afghanistan. I saw the close working between our development staff, armed forces and Foreign Office staff—there is overlap, but we need to be cautious about completely skewing things in one or the other. As to proportions, the fact is that in 2014-15 defence spending was 75% of our total international spending. Aid, diplomacy and intelligence made up just 25%. That is a perfectly reasonable balance, and the co-operation that is going on is absolutely right.
The growing chaos in Yemen, parts of the horn of Africa, and north and central Africa, shows exactly the consequences of ignoring gross poverty and instability. Our aid is a tiny investment—less than a penny in the pound. It helps us to tackle threats. It is morally right and it shows us to be a compassionate and progressive global power. In my view it is madness to slash the budget that is focused on tackling those threats to our national and global security that drive people to flee their countries and drown, and that, most importantly, degrade us all.
Phil Wilson (in the Chair)
Order. I am going to have to drop the time limit for speeches to four minutes because there are still more than 20 Members who want to speak.
Amanda Solloway (Derby North) (Con)
As the chair of Conservative Friends of International Development I felt compelled to speak in the debate. Yesterday we celebrated Her Majesty’s 90th birthday. As always, watching and joining in with the celebrations, I felt incredibly proud to be British. To me, a part of being British is having compassion and helping those who are less fortunate than we are. I am fully supportive of the fact that our country supports those overseas who are less fortunate by giving 0.7% of our GDP in aid. I have always believed that this country should be nothing but proud of its work to support developing countries and those who are less fortunate than us, and proud of what it does in worldwide emergencies. Last year, when Ebola broke out in Africa, we gave support to treat and contain the disease. As the scale of the Syria crisis has continued to grow, we have given continuous support, and taken steps to react and to help the most vulnerable at the heart of the situation.
I have visited Rwanda with Project Umubano and seen first-hand how the country has managed to start rebuilding itself after such horrors, and I have never had any doubt that we should help those who are less fortunate than we are. I have also visited Jordan and seen refugees, in the camps and in the host communities, and have spoken to them about their aspirations to return home to the country they love. I have no doubt that we should be giving hope to those who have so little hope. We are often blind to the daily challenges so that many people face around the world—the humanitarian crisis that might not be reported in the news, and the underlying problems at the root of things in some nations that make a quick fix an impossible task.
I wholeheartedly agree that we must have a rigorous process in place to ensure that the right money gets to the right places, and I believe the Government should ensure that there is the right level of scrutiny. I believe that that does happen. It is, after all, the public’s money that is being spent. We must be able to demonstrate that it is being done effectively.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
Britain is of course a humanitarian nation, and it is right that we do our duty by the world’s most vulnerable, but there are legitimate concerns that the requirement to meet the target of 0.7% each year creates a risk that poor-value projects will be approved, and that money will be shovelled out of the door as the financial year end approaches. Does my hon. Friend agree that, if that target were to apply over a longer period, but allowing for annual variations to reflect need, that would give taxpayers greater comfort that British money was being spent properly?
Amanda Solloway
One thing we must do is protect the 0.7%. I am fully committed to the idea that we need to do that annually, because so many projects are needed each year. All aspects of the spending of the 0.7% are rigorously scrutinised. That is in addition to internal monitoring and evaluation to ensure that projects stay on track and deliver value for taxpayers’ money. We must also remember that the UK’s aid budget is without doubt one of the most transparent in the world. We have taken steps to ensure that taxpayers know exactly how their money is spent. The hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson), who has left the Chamber, spoke about making the way DFID money is spent more public, and I think we should do that.
Economic growth is undoubtedly the best way of driving people’s incomes and reducing poverty in the developing world. The private sector has a vital part to play in generating and sustaining economic growth, as it creates jobs and opportunities for men and women to support their families and build more stable futures. It is fast becoming a key priority of our international development programme and in the long term could result in less investment being required in many nations.
As a nation we have never shied away from helping those who need it most. Every day we do so much fantastic work. I said earlier that I am proud to be British, and I am. I am proud that we lead the way in providing aid to those who need it most, and proud that we enrich people’s lives and save people’s lives. I cannot support anything that detracts from that. A life is to be valued wherever we live in the world and I fully support the fact that we help and develop those who are unable to do that for themselves.
Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Mr Wilson. I draw the House’s attention to my relevant entries in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I visited Jordan last autumn with Oxfam to meet Syrian refugees, and I worked with the Aegis Trust charity, which does important work preventing genocide, including in Rwanda.
As Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, I welcome today’s debate and the high attendance and public interest. As the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) said, this is not a new issue. The United Nations General Assembly adopted the 0.7% target in 1970, and, as she said, Governments of all parties have committed themselves to it ever since.
Mr Mitchell
On the hon. Gentleman’s first point, about the number of people here today, will he join me in urging the usual channels to go back to the principle that used to exist of having an annual full-day debate on the Floor of the House on international development? Today’s attendance shows that we are missing that and need to have it restored.
Stephen Twigg
I will certainly do that.
The 0.7% target was first achieved by the UK in 2013. Just five other countries achieved it as well: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates. We need to recognise that there is genuine public concern—the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) spoke about the Twitter debate earlier this afternoon—with some saying we should simply not be spending that amount of money and some raising issues about what the aid is spent on. It is important that we engage seriously with those concerns that our constituents are raising. That is why the International Development Committee takes its scrutiny role very seriously. As others have said, we have unique support in doing that. Not only do we have the work of the National Audit Office, but thanks to the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), we also have the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. The onus is in particular on those of us who support the 0.7% target to ensure that the money is spent properly and that we deliver value for money. I pledge today as Chair of the Committee—I know other members of the Committee, from all parties, agree with me—that we will seek to ensure that that is delivered.
There are many practical examples of the real difference that this investment makes; I want to refer to a small number of them. One is Ebola, which has been referred to by a number of Members. Our report on the Government’s response to the Ebola outbreak praised DFID for playing a strong, leading role in co-ordinating the response in Sierra Leone, which made a real, practical difference and saved lives. DFID set up Ebola treatment facilities in Sierra Leone to improve the response, providing additional beds and greatly improving the country’s capacity to fight Ebola. On polio, the United Kingdom is supporting the programme for polio eradication, with the aim of ensuring the full vaccination of 360 million children by 2019. Those are real examples where we can make a difference to people’s lives.
Dr Philippa Whitford
Africa is now clear of polio, which is still present in the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If we take our foot off the gas, we will slide back. We will see outbreaks. It is not “job done” yet.
Stephen Twigg
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. In my experience, when we make these arguments and talk about challenges such as polio and Ebola, our constituents see the real, positive benefits of investment by DFID.
I will say something about the Syria crisis, because I think that as a country we can be proud of our Government’s response to the Syria crisis, both in Syria, with support for those who are internally displaced, but also, crucially, through the work being done in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon and Jordan. I saw that for myself when I went with Oxfam to Zaatari last year, and also when I visited families living in host communities. The practical differences to things like education, health, and jobs and livelihoods ensure that those Syrian refugee families are able to live the best life they possibly can in the most appalling of circumstances.
That is not just the right thing to do morally; it is actually in our interests to ensure that those people thrive. There is an economic case for that, but, bluntly, there is a security case for it as well. If we are supporting those families to stay in the region, they are less likely to risk their lives and try to come to Europe. I think we should be proud of that work. My Committee has decided that we will be conducting an inquiry into DFID’s work on education. Education is a crucial part of both humanitarian relief and development assistance in the long term.
I will finish by talking of the need to look beyond aid. We are not going to achieve a more equal world, or a world in which economies in Africa thrive as much as they do in other parts of the world, solely with aid. I want other wealthy countries to match our 0.7% achievement, but I also want us to recognise the role of remittances and the brilliant work that the diaspora communities do on that, and the importance of genuinely free and fair trade. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) reminded us about the key issue of taxation and country-by-country reporting, and also ensuring that countries can collect their own taxes. In the end, aid is important, but it is not sufficient if we are to address those issues. As a House, let us engage more with the public on a cross-party basis about UK aid and development and call on other countries to do more so that they reach the 0.7% target, but also remind ourselves that aid on its own is not going to deliver the end of poverty and a more equal world.
Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. For the most part, DFID delivers global goods, lifts people out of extreme poverty, champions the rights of women and girls, and delivers humanitarian relief when disaster strikes. However, support for helping the poorest people on our planet is harmed, and DFID suffers reputational damage, when behaviour that contravenes aid agreements is unchallenged and when, despite being presented with evidence, DFID takes no remedial action. There is no greater example of that behaviour than the support DFID provides to the Palestinian Authority. However, I do not wish to dwell upon that as my views on the subject are well known. Where I seek to take this debate is to how DFID spending can assist in the quest for a two-state solution—something that all of us believe in.
Will Quince (Colchester) (Con)
I had the great pleasure last year of visiting Israel and Save a Child’s Heart, a wonderful charity that has helped about 4,000 children, half of whom are from the west bank and Gaza. Does my hon. Friend agree that that is the kind of co-existence project that DFID funding should be supporting?
Dr Offord
I absolutely agree, and I, too, have had the pleasure of visiting that hospital. I am very proud of my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), who makes a monthly donation to that hospital out of his own pocket, which is something he should be commended for.
However, I do not wish to dwell on the Palestinian Authority and where they spend money. There is a need for greater support for individual projects actively promoting peaceful co-existence in the region, as Save a Child’s Heart does. That would support the UK Government’s own stated goal of securing a lasting and peaceful two-state solution, which, once again, is something that all of us in this room want.
Sir Alan Duncan
Does my hon. Friend understand the foundations from which he wishes to build that co-existence that we would all like to see? Will he unequivocally confirm that he endorses the Government policy that Israeli settlements on Palestinian land are wholly illegal?
Dr Offord
I can confirm that I think that. Indeed, the Israeli Supreme Court says that as well, so there is no misunderstanding about that.
In April the Minister announced that DFID is
“open to considering further support”
through the conflict, security and stability fund
“for strong co-existence projects that bring Israelis and Palestinians together”.
Chloe Smith
I agree with my hon. Friend on the thrust of his remarks on peaceful projects. Does he agree with me that this is an example of how we should be looking to move away from general budgetary support and to specific project support, which I believe has already been done in countries such as Rwanda and Malawi?
Dr Offord
I certainly agree with that sentiment, and the examples I wish to raise are of ongoing projects that do not achieve the aims that are sought.
Less than 13% of DFID’s £1.17 million funding of Israeli and Palestinian NGOs goes towards projects that bring the two peoples together. That represents around 0.2% of the £72 million that DFID spends in the Palestinian Territories. A number of NGO projects currently sponsored by DFID in Israel and the Palestinian Territories carry out laudable activities, yet have a questionable outlook of endorsing violence. Some of those NGOs engage in activities that undermine peace efforts and increase tensions, and a number are heavily involved in “lawfare” and the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
UK-funded NGOs have their own NGO, through something called NGO Monitor, that looks at how some of the funding is spent through the conflict, stability and security fund. NGO Monitor seeks to hold NGOs in Israel and the Palestinian territories to account, and regards UK funding to a number of those NGOs as
“a manipulation of the democratic process, an attempt to change ‘Israeli civil and military judicial practice and decisions’ and government policy”
and notes that some of those groups are
“engaged in anti-Israel efforts.”
NGO Monitor has also said that
“a significant proportion of the NGOs receiving British funds promote the Palestinian political narrative, focusing only on allegations of Israeli human rights violations.”
The UK Government currently funds 10 NGO projects in Israel through the conflict, stability and security fund: the Peres Centre for Peace, INJAZ, Kids Creating Peace, Yesh Din, Gisha, Peace Now, Terrestrial Jerusalem, the International Peace and Co-operation Centre, and Rabbis for Human Rights. Because of the limited amount of time, I will look at just one of those. Yesh Din describes its mission as working
“to oppose the continuing violation of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory... documenting and disseminating accurate and up-to-date information about the systematic violation of human rights in the OPT, by raising public awareness”.
In October 2013, members of Yesh Din took part in an Arab celebration on the ruins of a Jewish community in Homesh, with attendees desecrating Jewish symbols and waving anti-Semitic posters, including one depicting a Jew with a spear through his head. That is where our money is going.
I would like the Minister to hear our concerns today and not to continually view this problem through a prism of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Our money is going to some causes that I am sure he would be ashamed of. I hope that we can take that message to the Government today and make sure that we actually look at our spending.
Albert Owen (Ynys Môn) (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on opening the debate on this petition and on the manner in which he did so.
I welcome the commitment to 0.7%—a cross-party commitment, as has been said—and, in particular, the fact that the previous coalition Government and the current Government have enacted it. I have supported it for some time and have worked on it with others. I am also a member of the International Development Committee and have seen many of the projects that have been undertaken. We have a good record of scrutinising the Government on this issue.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty), who is not in his seat, I believe that our commitment of 2% to defence is important as well. Strong defence and security go hand in hand with development. The UK stands tall with five other countries in the world—Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden and the Netherlands. I understand the concerns of those who have signed the petition. Many of the points have been dealt with today, but perhaps not sufficiently for many.
Like everybody else, I want to see good housekeeping from DFID on ODA—that 0.7% of our GNI—just as I want to see good housekeeping on the 99.3% that the Government spend on other issues. We need to use our finances well and get value for money. Having listened to the previous speaker, the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord), I certainly do not want to see ODA going on terrorism, whether that be state terrorism, organisational terrorism or individuals and groups that conduct it. Nobody wants to see that, but we do have a good record in this country and we must be proud of it.
Unfortunately, I will not be able to stay to hear the Minister winding up, but I know that when we scrutinise him and his Department and raise issues, they come back with answers. It is very important that our job as a Select Committee to scrutinise gets taken seriously by this Government—that work is open and transparent to the public: it is on transcript—and that we work together with civil society. The Churches have been mentioned, and credit needs to be given to them. It is also important that we as parliamentarians raise the issues that our constituents raise with us. I recall that during previous campaigns—the millennium goals, Make Poverty History and many others—hundreds and hundreds of people wrote to us. Many of them asked us to have 0.7% in statute. We have delivered that; now we expect the Government to deliver value for money on that 0.7%.
The supporters of this petition need to understand that what we are doing abroad is good for this country, and I will finish on this point. We took evidence on the Ebola inquiry from British doctors and nurses who put their lives at risk in those countries, not just to stop the disease in west Africa, but to stop it crossing the globe to Britain. It is in Britain’s interest that the money is well spent. It is in the world’s interest, and, as a communitarian, I support my local community, the national community and the international community. As proud British, that is in our DNA. We must ensure that the Government give value for money, but we must be proud of 0.7% on ODA.
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Mr Wilson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on introducing this debate and on his excellent speech. There have been many excellent speeches; in fact, I am honoured to follow a very good one.
Across the House the word “pride” is mentioned constantly. Of course it is a source of huge pride that our country delivers this spending target, and that is absolutely right. I have not visited many of the international development projects that other Members have referred to, but I trust what they say entirely. Turning to my experience, my wife and I were in the Sri Lankan tsunami. It was Boxing day and I was standing on a beach when it came in. The very next day, someone with whom I had been swimming in the sea the day before—who confessed he was a Chelsea headhunter—got a box, put it in the middle of the restaurant area and said to every western tourist, “Put every penny you have got into there.” He was British. The British are good at this: we raise money, we are passionate about charitable giving, and I agree with that.
I accept that there is an overwhelming governmental mandate for this policy and I welcome the consensus across the House, but my concern is that there is a danger of complacency. We have a very large current account deficit in this country and a persisting public expenditure deficit in terms of public borrowing. Of course I have immense trust in the predictions of our Chancellor, not least in terms of the outcome of certain decisions we might be making shortly—unlike some—and I am sure we will go back into the black soon, but what if we do not and these issues persist? My personal view is that I would like there to be some consideration, when we protect Government budgets, that we do so on the understanding that some of it comes from a surplus. In other words, that it is clear we can afford it and that we are not borrowing the money and putting charitable spending on a credit card, which worries me.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I do not want to turn this into a political debate because it has been remarkably consensual, but let me tell the hon. Gentleman that I and many of my colleagues could give him a whole list of alternative things that we think the Government could make different decisions about rather than aid spending. He can wait for the Government to be at a point where they can say, “These are now lavish times: these are times when we are actually going to afford for children not to die of diarrhoea or afford for them to go to school,” but we will never reach that moment. He is arguing for the end of aid spending, not something else.
James Cartlidge
It is a political debate, and we have to debate this issue. Of course I am not arguing for the end of aid spending; that is a ludicrous thing to say. Japan, the United States, Italy, Portugal and Spain are not international pariahs and they spend 0.2% of their GDP on aid. That is disappointing, but that is a £8.5 billion difference. When we make a choice in this country to protect DFID when there is a deficit, it is a statement of fact that we will inevitably impose tougher reductions on other Departments. That means things like social care and long-term care of the elderly; we have to be open and honest about that.
That is my concern, especially in this political climate. The hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes), who is not in the Chamber any more, made the point that she had constituents who were concerned because we have food banks. Many years ago Charles Dickens wrote about telescopic philanthropy: the perception in humanitarian spending that we are prioritising the problems abroad rather than those at home. In those areas where there is an anger at politics and a feeling of disengagement—I fear I know how some of those people will be expressing that shortly—and in this climate we have to be very open and transparent. We have to show the public that we are debating these things and are prudent in our use of public finances.
Albert Owen
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to point out that charity begins at home, but it does not end at home. We as internationalists have an obligation and people understand that in this country.
James Cartlidge
That is a very fair point. We are in the era of Donald Trump—let us be clear that there is clearly anger out there at politics. We all know that and we therefore have a duty, even if we continue at this level—there is massive support for that and the Prime Minister has an incredibly strong mandate for it—to be seen to be debating it, to be very clear about every aspect of the expenditure, and to hold it all to account. That message must go out strongly and we should not just blithely accept this.
Dr Philippa Whitford
Does the hon. Gentleman not think that we also have a duty to explain what our aid does and achieves and that it is audited in a technical way? We do not actually talk about the fact that polio was nearly eradicated or about peace building in Rwanda. Future wars will be about water, not oil, so we need to include climate change and do the job of explaining to the public what our aid is trying to achieve.
James Cartlidge
I agree, and some other hon. Members will shortly have a chance to do that. I am aware that time is ticking by, so I will simply conclude: I support this, and the passion of our Government and of MPs across the House is very clear. The public must perceive that every aspect of it is prudently held to account and budgeted for. If we saw a deterioration in our public finances or any events coming up that might affect them, it has to be obvious that we would be prepared to examine every item of expenditure and not protect every Department in the way we are at the moment. We can afford to do that now, but we may not always be able to.
Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wilson, and to take part in this debate as a member of the Select Committee on International Development and because the Department for International Development in Scotland is based in my constituency.
[Mike Gapes in the Chair]
It is estimated that UK aid helps to save a life every two minutes. It has provided 13.2 million people with access to essential TB treatment. Since 2011, it has reached 62.9 million people with water, sanitation and hygiene interventions and has ensured the safe birth of 5.1 million children by making appropriate medical assistance available. However, aid from the UK does not just save lives. It helps to tackle social inequalities and to encourage prosperity. It supports those suffering from poverty to overcome hardships and helps to provide education opportunities to children, including girls, across the world. It increases people’s abilities and skills to earn a living, and generates employment, fosters trade and develops markets. It helps to address climate change, to reduce conflict and to increase stability across our world. All that is in the interests of developing countries and the developed world.
Evidence indicates that our aid is effective. Thanks to significant progress in international development, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty declined by 60% between 1990 and 2011. This means almost 1 billion people have been lifted out of poverty. To meet the valuable aspirations of the sustainable development goals, it is vital that the UK continues to meet our strong aid commitment of 0.7% and encourages other countries to follow suit.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
My hon. Friend is setting out the compelling case for continuing overseas funding at this level. Does she agree that there is real concern that the same section of the right-wing press is whipping up public concern based on misinformation to undermine the whole notion of foreign aid spending altogether?
Dr Cameron
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s intervention. She made her point very well.
Long-term planning realises sustainability and provides leverage to transform millions into trillions, which is required to achieve our sustainable development goals.
In the run-up to this debate, I was contacted by a constituent and former Minister, the right hon. Adam Ingram, who expressed concern about the spending of international aid via the Palestinian Authority. He requires further reassurance from the Minister on transparency and whether the payments are needs-based and affordable, alongside independent vetting.
I was contacted by another constituent who was keen for me to support foreign aid spending in this debate. In her email, she advised me that she cares about people living in poverty around the world and loves helping them with the UK’s aid budget. Importantly, she said it is good when politicians keep promises. I very much hope that we will continue to keep this one.
The Scottish Government’s international development policy and £9 million aid fund convey our party’s vision of Scotland fulfilling its place in the world as a good global citizen, committed to playing its part in addressing the challenges facing the world. It focuses on seven countries around the world and links with our world-leading climate justice fund.
As a country, we cannot act with credibility overseas if we are blind to inequality at home, but our ambitions for a fairer Scotland are undermined without global action to tackle poverty, to promote prosperity and to tackle climate change. As a Christian, I believe we have a moral duty to fulfil our commitment to achieving the sustainable development goals around the world. As humans, we share one planet and we must contribute to making it fair, healthy and safe for all.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. This has been an interesting debate and rather than being sniffy or patronising about The Mail on Sunday, we should thank it for raising the issue and giving a voice to the concerns felt by many people. I do not share those concerns. I have always robustly defended the 0.7% and will continue to do so, but in this age of Trump politics, or whatever they are, when many of the public are disenchanted with politicians, it is not for us here to be patronising and sniffy about those who have a different view. Instead of being rude about people with such views, we must go out and win the debate.
I have always been robust with my constituents. When one points out to them the spending on HIV/AIDS and fighting polio and TB, people say of course they want that to continue, but not the other bits—the bad bits and the cover-up bits. None of us wants that, but we must be honest about the fact there is some corruption and some misuse of our aid budget, and we must do something about that. I think the Minister and his Department have done a good job in trying to tackle much of that, but obviously there is still work to do.
Another point that we must make to constituents is that if we as a nation do not project through foreign aid our own values and those of western democracies, it will be left to others who perhaps do not share our values in spending money in poorer countries to project values that we would not wish to see projected further. Again, that is a point that constituents are responsive to. We should accept the genuine concerns in this area and we must be prepared at all times to justify our spending and to improve it where we can.
There may be some groans, but I will say something about funding to the Palestinian territories. I heard the Minister’s intervention and I think he is right in much of what he said in that the Department has tried to get a grip on this and is keen to do more, but concerns continue that while we might be able to say that British money is not directly funding individual terrorists in prison, it is perhaps displacing other funding in the Palestinian Authority general fund or elsewhere that is being used to fund terrorists. We should be concerned about that. I welcomed the article in The Jewish Chronicle last week saying that the Secretary of State and the Department are reviewing that.
As the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) said, there are people engaging in terrorist activities, including Hamed Abu Aadi who last year confessed—
Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
If I understand the hon. Gentleman correctly, having been corrected by the Minister and told that UK Government funding is not, for example, paying salaries to Palestinians prisoners, he is now conjecturing something else. On reflection, would he and others not think that hijacking this important debate effectively to give cover to the Netanyahu-Lieberman regime is a gross abuse of an important subject?
Andrew Percy
I mentioned patronising and sniffy, and the hon. Gentleman’s intervention is a prime example. It was so patronising it is not worthy of a response. Members are allowed to come to this Chamber and speak as they wish on a matter of international aid, and this is about international aid from British taxpayers’ money. The hon. Gentleman can patronise all he wants, but I won’t be silenced from saying what I think I am entitled to say in this Chamber on this issue.
Ian Austin
It is not just supporters of the Netanyahu Government who are concerned about this. The central point is that the Palestinian Authority receives our aid money because it has signed a memorandum of understanding with DFID which is underpinned by renunciation of violence and a commitment to peace. That is directly contradicted by funding terrorists, whether or not the money comes directly from the UK, and is directly contradicted by the Palestinian Authority’s routine incitement of violence. On both grounds, the Minister should be examining the matter in greater detail.
Andrew Percy
I am conscious of time, and I will perhaps give way to the Minister in a moment. The hon. Gentleman is entirely right in a lot of what he says. The Overseas Development Institute stated that our aid money to the Palestinian Authority had failed to promote peace and a peaceful attitude. There is more to be done.
I mentioned a terrorist who confessed that he had engaged in his behaviour to obtain payments. I also want to mention NGO funding, particularly the Ibda’a cultural centre, which will receive £5,602 from DFID this year. Last year, it hosted an exhibition to honour martyrs, including Mohanad Al Halabi, who killed one and injured 11. We must be careful about where our money is going and always be prepared to review.
Sir Desmond Swayne
Let me say that we take the issue of incitement very seriously indeed. With respect to the hon. Gentleman’s point about The Jewish Chronicle, I assure him that both I and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State keep that matter under review continually, precisely because it is so controversial. With respect to the matters raised in relation to integration and so on, I understand that I am receiving a delegation from the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) to discuss that on Wednesday.
Andrew Percy
I thank the Minister and I hope that he will look at the Ibda’a cultural centre grant that I mentioned.
In my last minute or so, I want to talk about some of the co-existence projects. We had a wonderful meeting last year in Jerusalem with a group of Palestinian and Jewish young people from MEET—the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow. It was a really inspiring meeting. Those Palestinian youth and Jewish youth were being educated together. Both were very open about what they thought about each other beforehand and how that project had helped to bring them together. We should be supporting projects such as that, as we should—in these last 46 and a half seconds—be supporting Save a Child’s Heart, which I am proud to serve as a UK patron of. It is a wonderful charity. I was very moved when we visited it last year, particularly when we were meeting and talking with the young Gazan children who receive treatment through it. That organisation supports heart surgery not just for Palestinian children—it is mainly Palestinian children, with Israeli doctors—but for Tanzanian children and Iraqi children. It trains doctors and nurses and is a project that has a reach beyond just Israel and the Palestinian territories. I hope that that is one of the projects we can look at funding in the future.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. First, I declare an interest as a former trustee of ActionAid and an ambassador for that fantastic non-governmental organisation, and also as president of the British and Foreign School Society, a grant-making trust that gives grants to developing countries across the world.
It is vital to say at the start of this important debate that I do not believe that aid is a panacea. I lament some of the adverts that we see on television every week showing emaciated black and brown children with bloated bellies, and, frankly, the poverty porn behind too many of our great NGOs. I am also concerned that, whether we are talking about Comic Relief or Sport Relief, there is an armchair approach to aid, whereby people just sit back, give money and do not ask hard questions about countries’ governance, transparency and trade—and in the end, it is trade that we want to see across the developing world.
That said, this debate goes to the heart of the poverty that still exists in our world. Across the world, 124 million young people are not in school and not being educated. This country has a proud tradition, but it also has a colonial past inextricably linked to that of many of the countries mentioned in this debate. As a descendant of people from one of those countries—my parents are from Guyana—I think it is important to put that on the table. As we move from empire to Commonwealth, we remain interconnected.
Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
The right hon. Gentleman is making an exceptionally important point: aid alone is not enough. One particularly clamant example that I can offer him of that is this country’s tax treaty with Malawi, which was entered into before Malawi was given its independence. The partnership needs to be recast as one of equals, rather than us having the relationship of exploitation that we had in the past.
Mr Lammy
I am grateful for that intervention. The right hon. Gentleman will also recall Jubilee 2000, the campaign to write off debt, and our deep history with many of the countries where there is that debt and that environment. Yes, there must be aid, but there must also be very important discussions—discussions that we are failing to have as a society about how these countries move into economically stronger positions.
Mrs Helen Grant
I hear what the right hon. Gentleman says about aid not being a panacea, and not being enough, but does he agree that legislation is quite useful because it provides certainty and predictability, and therefore allows smarter long-term investment, and so increased aid impact?
Mr Lammy
I do agree with that point, and that is why I stand by the 0.7%. That target was first established in 1970 by Jan Tinbergen, a Nobel prize-winning economist, and he came to that figure because he believed it was the amount that would allow developing countries to get into growth. That is why Britain should stand firmly in a leadership role. I represent a north London constituency that has seen two riots in a generation and that has deep pockets of poverty. Many of us in this House have talked richly today of travelling to developing countries; it is important that we understand that that is a privilege that many of our constituents do not have, and for that reason we play a leadership role in this debate. We lead and explain; we do not simply follow those who act understandably, given that they face poverty. However, we should always remember that constituents such as mine give far more in remittances to the developing world than is given in aid by the British taxpayer. The money is from people from all corners of the world who are working hard and paying their taxes, but also from those sending small amounts of money—indeed, I am one of those people—to relatives who barely have shoes on their feet. It is important to put that firmly on the table.
I remind the House that one of the biggest aid programmes was the Marshall plan. That was, in a sense, the birth of aid. It came at a time when this country was in rubble. We got $3 billion from the United States of America. That plan involved wheat, raw materials and industrialisation that was needed across Europe, and that money came through aid from the United States and birthed much of the current aid debate. It is important to preserve the 0.7%, which we put in statute, but also to have deep discussions about and scrutiny of where those funds go. Let us remember that this debate is not isolated. A long history ties us to these countries, which we now stand beside. We must remember our position in the Commonwealth, but also a history that carved up Africa with arbitrary borders and created lots of strife because of different tribal wars. For that reason, this is not the time to walk away from the important aid discussion.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mike Gapes (in the Chair)
Order. As there is so much interest in the debate, I will have to reduce the time limit on speeches to three minutes, and I will call the Scottish National party spokesperson, the Opposition spokesperson and the Minister from 7 o’clock, so I would be grateful if hon. Members could restrain themselves from intervening; then more of them may be able to speak.
Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on starting the debate off. We have heard many interesting speeches and lots of facts and figures from various hon. Members. I would like to bring this down to just one example, and if anybody feels, after they have heard this example, that we should not be spending 0.7% on aid, they must be pretty hard-hearted.
I have been a member of the International Development Committee for six years, and we visited Burundi—a country that is in a much worse situation than it was. Some members of the Committee were embedded with various families overnight. Everybody else in the group had a very happy family, with a mum, a dad and some very smiley children, but I was put with two girls, one of 22 and one of 14. The mother had died, as well as the five-year-old son, I suspect of HIV/AIDS. The girls could not afford to go to the funeral and did not know where their mother was buried. The father wanted to kill the children because they were living in their grandmother’s house and not with him. The villagers hated them.
We went to Burundi with the charity ActionAid UK, which was helpful in putting us with the families. These people had nothing. I asked the girls how often they were able to wash their clothes and they said, “Not very often. Probably about twice a year because we can’t afford soap.” Now, how many people in this country cannot afford soap? The only meal that they had was beans, rice, sweetcorn, and a bit of onion and tomato. They only ate that one meal a day, and they had only one bowl, which they shared with a neighbour’s child. The three of them sat around the bowl eating. They had three chairs, three forks, three spoons, three knives and a platform for a bed. The only other possessions they had were three guinea pigs. Unfortunately, I am not very keen on guinea pigs, so although I was quite happy to sleep on the floor, I had to ask to sleep on the platform because I could not bear the guinea pigs running around me throughout the night. Those guinea pigs were not for eating. They were there because the girls needed something to love, and something for affection. The guinea pigs did not run away. There was no door on the hut, as it was a mud hut. Those people lived, in my view, in absolute poverty. I saw nothing in that hut except those things. I saw no more clothes. Anyone who is not in favour of 0.7% should be ashamed.
Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I, too, am a strong supporter of the 0.7% commitment, but that is not to say that there are not legitimate concerns with which we must engage. The petition refers to painful spending cuts at home. At a time when food banks have become a normal part of British life and public services are facing drastic cuts, it is easy to see cutting the international aid budget as a simple solution, but it is not the right solution. Indeed, it is no real solution at all.
When people really see the benefits that the international aid budget delivers, they tend to come around to the same way of thinking. People see that cutting the funding that saves children from malaria, supports millions of children to go to school and provides access to clean water for tens of millions is not the right way to solve the problems that they face at home. Ultimately, we live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world and there is no excuse for us MPs not to deliver on international aid and end the need for food banks here in the UK.
There is some merit in the petition supporters’ argument that the focus should be on outcomes, and not just on spending targets. It is true that we should not just spend money for the sake of reaching a target. Each and every project should be carefully vetted and monitored, which is precisely why we have systems in place. Between the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, the Select Committee on International Development, the Public Accounts Committee, the National Audit Office and the eagle-eyed MPs in this room, the Secretary of State and her Ministers can hardly move for monitoring, but that does not mean that things do not go wrong.
MPs and newspapers are very good at highlighting when things do indeed go wrong. However, when things go wrong in the national health service, we fix it. We do not use it as a reason for cutting the NHS budget or shutting down the NHS. In the same way, when things go wrong with the international aid budget, we should fix it. We should not stop all the other fantastic work that is going on, and we have heard lots of speeches highlighting all that good work today. I agree with other hon. Members that being a leader on international aid is in our interests. Without international aid, problems and crises would become more significant, immediate and dangerous.
My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) was due to speak today, but unfortunately cannot owing to family circumstances. She wanted to deliver a message from the children of Wallacewell Primary School in her constituency, who have designed paper school satchels that my hon. Friend will deliver to the Prime Minister. Their simple message is that regardless of where children come from and how much money they have, they should all be entitled to an education. It is pleasing that the Chair of the International Development Committee agrees with those children and will be holding an inquiry on the subject. I give the target my full support, and I am pleased that so many other hon. Members do as well.
Sir Eric Pickles (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)
It is a long few years since I was at anything that you chaired, Mr Gapes. I think that last happened during our days at the British Youth Council about 45 years ago. I congratulate the Minister of State, Department for International Development, my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on his knighthood, which was announced over the weekend.
I, too, am very proud of the 0.7% spend on international development, but it is not unreasonable, during times of stringency, to address the quality as well as the quantity of that aid. The impact of our funding, especially on conflict-stricken regions, is of the utmost importance, and I particularly want to talk about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. DFID’s stated goal in aiding the Palestinians is to help to secure a lasting and peaceful two-state solution. That is very sensible, but I regret that the funding does not follow that laudable ideal. As the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) and my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) pointed out, we are talking about 0.2%, and that does not seem to be a point at which we can readily move on.
I must say to my right hon. Friend the Minister, with great affection and respect, that it is no good just saying, “We don’t fund terrorism.” There is a kind of knock-on effect. If my right hon. Friend is saying, determinedly, that not a single one of the civil servants whom we fund has committed a criminal act, and that their job has not been left open for them, that is a wonderful thing, but the report from the Overseas Development Institute says:
“For public sector employees the opportunity cost of conflict is lowered as their employment will be kept open when they return from detention, and their family will continue to be paid their salary”.
That needs to be addressed.
Richard Burden
Has the right hon. Gentleman read the ODI report entitled “Does the wage bill affect conflict? Evidence from Palestine”, from February 2015? It states that
“some of the factors linked to the development of grievances at least in the West Bank, including the construction of the West Bank Wall and the Palestinian prisoners, are associated with increases in conflict intensity. Removing these factors may well be a more effective strategy in reducing the conflict in the long-run than any employment opportunities provided by the public or private sector.”
Does he agree with that as well?
Sir Eric Pickles
I want a two-state solution. I want young Palestinians and Israelis to work together. I do not want to change Government policy; I merely want to see the actuality on the ground reflect it.
My hon. Friends have spoken with great powers of persuasion about the various groups that we have seen on visits to Israel and Palestine, particularly the Middle East Entrepreneurs for Tomorrow. There was one thing that really struck me about that. When I was talking to a young Palestinian, I said, “What’s the big difference?”, and he said, “I’ve never met an Israeli before. The only Israeli I’ve ever met is a soldier with a rifle and body armour. This gave me an opportunity to actually meet an Israeli.”
The organisation Save a Child’s Heart provides an opportunity for parents to talk about the future of their children, and about working side by side with Israelis. That must be for the better, but worrying reports have emerged that some NGOs that support the Palestinian territories have been promoting violence on social media pages. Surely it is not unreasonable for us to ask the Minister and his officials to check what is going on on those pages. Surely it is not unreasonable to say that if people are to receive money from the British Government, they should unequivocally renounce violence in all its forms and work for a two-state solution.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
I apologise for missing the opening contribution of the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) owing to a flight delay.
Like others, I am here because I have been contacted by a number of constituents, most of whom support the 0.7% commitment for many of the reasons that hon. Members have given. Indeed, Foyle is the constituency where the sixth fewest people have signed the petition. In fact, of the constituencies with MPs who take their seats here, only the two small island constituencies represented by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) and the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) have had fewer signatories to the petition. That is because the city of Derry has always had an outward-looking approach, and the diocese of Derry has always made the highest per capita contribution to the annual Lenten collections for Trócaire, the Irish equivalent of the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development. People support the 0.7% contribution not just because, after many years, it is about time that we finally stepped up to meet that long-standing commitment, but because they know that such a commitment will, of itself, be transformative. Aid should not just be transactional; it should be transformational.
The petition talks instead about taking action on a case-by-case basis. If we were to reduce aid by doing that, the situation would be impossible; the problems would far outstrip the solutions. There is a gear change that results from the sort of commitment that the UK has made—we would see that if we could get more Governments to follow the UK’s excellent example—as we have seen in recent years with the commitment to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has made a big difference.
Big differences have also been made on education; 20 years ago, one in 10 children died before they reached the age of five, and now that is down to one in 20. Of course, not only are more children reaching the age of five and going to school, but there are more schools for them. We need to do more. We should not be content to get more children, particularly girls, into education; we should move on to guaranteeing them 12 years of education. In responding to humanitarian crises, we should think about education, which is often one of the last things to be thought about because of all the other pressures and crises. Front-loaded commitments to a healthy level of predictable and sustainable aid can ensure that we make our commitment to the sustainable development goals meaningful. We cannot meet our goals through intermittent top-ups. The sustainable development goals need sustained aid at 0.7%.
Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)
At the risk of sounding like Mark Antony at the funeral pyre of Julius Caesar, I genuinely come here to praise international aid, but I come as a critical friend, in the knowledge that several hundred of my constituents signed The Mail on Sunday’s petition. As a general rule in politics, if we brush aside the fears of our constituents, it only damages the goals that some of us wish to further. I do believe in international aid. Today’s debate has been extremely good, but relatively few of us have acknowledged the views, if we are honest with ourselves, of millions of citizens of this country. If we believe in international aid and a 0.7% commitment, as I do, it is absolutely right that we try to acknowledge and address some of those concerns, so that the commitment remains for future generations to benefit from.
The concerns that I hear from my constituents fall into a couple of categories; we have discussed many of those concerns today. First, of course, are the concerns, some legitimate and some not, about waste, and the lack of scrutiny of some of the poorer decisions that DFID has made over the years, as well as the many good ones. There are also concerns about politicisation, as we have heard in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. We have already heard a lot of that debate, and time is pressing.
The other point I would make on behalf of some of those who are concerned about the 0.7% commitment is that the commitment may not be the best way to do government. Those of us who have pressed the Government to spend on particular projects know that, because of the 0.7% commitment, there is often a lower bar for getting a project approved in DFID than in any other Department; we all have to address that if we care about the maintenance of this public commitment. We have to be able to say to our constituents that this money is being spent as well by DFID as if it were being spent on the NHS, on education or by any other Department. One way of doing that is by measuring the 0.7% commitment not in one year, but over two or five years, or even over an entire economic cycle, so that we could be sure that projects were not being pushed through at the last minute, as we all know they frequently are, and that the quality of projects was sufficiently high to allow us all to stand tall at hustings and in conversations with our constituents, and to defend them, in the knowledge that they were furthering the cause of poverty alleviation across the world.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
Mr Gapes, I think this is the second time that you have been back in the Chair in Westminster Hall. It is good to see you.
International development aid is no different from spending in any other Department: Departments are accountable to their Ministers; Ministers are accountable to this House; and Select Committees scrutinise the work of Departments. I support the target of 0.7% of gross national income, but as the hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) and the right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) have said, accountability is needed within that process. The Public Accounts Committee recently said:
“The value for money for the UK taxpayer of the Department’s funding of UN agencies is undermined by the overlapping remits of the agencies and inflexibility in their systems.”
The Committee noted that there is something wrong, and there clearly is.
I have a couple of quick examples from Palestine. Two Palestinian terrorists who repeatedly stabbed two women, killing an American lady and leaving a British woman with life-threatening injuries, are receiving a salary from the Palestinian Authority. A convicted double killer—he was interviewed by a newspaper and confirmed that he murdered two people—receives a monthly salary. My constituents are appalled by the examples of DFID’s spend, which is why they support the Israel-Britain Alliance’s campaign to stop such abuses. My constituents are even more incandescent when they receive responses from British Government Ministers in both DFID and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office restating the collective denial that such payments are made.
Let us make this very clear to the Minister: we know that the Palestine Liberation Organisation pays the prisoners, and we know that the Palestinian Authority pays the PLO. We further know that the World Bank pays aid money to the Palestinian Authority. Finally, we know that British aid money is sent to the World Bank, which is clearly where the issues are. Will the Minister ensure that British aid money does not support Palestinian Authority incitement to commit violence? All he has to do is turn on his computer and visit www.palwatch.org to see for himself that the Palestinian Authority is misusing the funds given to it by Britain.
In Northern Ireland, parties to peace had to sign up to the Mitchell principles. They had to sign up to using democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues. In 2011, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the UN assessed that the PA’s governance functions were sufficient for a functioning state, but that it had to renounce violence, and it is clear that the PA has not done that to the extent it should have. I therefore call on the Minister to commit to implementing the recommendation of the 2014 International Development Committee report that set out how the payments-to-prisoners issue can be resolved.
I further ask the Minister to commit DFID to tackling the PA on the evidence of its incitement to and support for violence. If the PA does not end its support for the men and women of violence, our support for the PA must be reviewed. A demand without an incentive is worthless. Middle east peace will be achieved only if both sides participate in the process, yet DFID’s support for co-existence programmes between the Israelis and the Palestinians is pitiful. I ask the Minister to use some of DFID’s mammoth budget to help make those things happen.
Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on moving the motion and on doing the House a favour by encapsulating most of the key arguments. I look forward to seeing his words repeated faithfully in The Mail on Sunday next weekend.
Nothing antagonises our constituents more than the stories of hard-pressed taxpayers hearing that their hard-earned money has been spent corruptly. DFID is one of the most transparent Departments, if not the most transparent, in Whitehall, and it is precisely to promote the necessary openness that in 2010 we set up the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which has been much mentioned this afternoon. The commission was not entirely welcomed by the development community because it is independent and because it reports not to Ministers, who can sweep inconvenient truths under the carpet, but to Parliament—it reports not to DFID but to the International Development Committee. That Committee is not appointed by Whips; it is elected by its peers and encompasses a large number of independent-minded Members. The Committee is led, of course, by the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg) who, though burdened by being a member of the Labour party, is nevertheless a fearless, independent operator. I say to the House and to The Mail on Sunday that the ICAI is their friend. If there are allegations or suggestions of improper use of aid, it is to the ICAI that they should be referred.
Of course, the independent commission covers the whole budget, not just the money spent by DFID. Nearly 25% of money now goes through other Departments. I stopped aid to China and to Russia, which inexplicably was still receiving aid in 2010, and negotiated the winding down of the programme in India, which since the second world war had always been our biggest programme. If the Foreign Office chooses to spend money in China, or indeed south America, where DFID no longer has any programme, it is no good for the Foreign Office or other Departments to try to hide behind DFID’s skirts and coattails. They need to explain to the public why they are spending money. If they cannot do so, they should not be spending it.
I have a lot of sympathy with what my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) said. This is an important debate, and the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday have done a service by emphasising it. As a Ugandan Foreign Minister once said to me, Ministers in this country and in his go straight not because they see the light but because they feel the heat. The campaign led by the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday puts the heat on Ministers, who must respond to these matters. Although I do not have time to discuss it, I hope that The Mail on Sunday will allow a rebuttal of the wholly inaccurate points that it has made about the Centre for Global Development and the airport at St Helena.
Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)
Like so many other people who have spoken, I welcome and support the commitment of 0.7% of national income to foreign aid, but to depart from some of the comments that have just been made, and understanding some of the comments made earlier in the debate, I recognise that some of our constituents have concerns. However, I urge every Member of this House not to underestimate the power and the effect of the hysterical right-wing tabloid press, which has aggressively campaigned to discredit not just the 0.7% commitment but the idea of foreign aid altogether. That is not being snippy or sniffy, or whatever word was used; it is simply asking for more responsible journalism.
The commitment is the right thing to do. The UK has a good story to tell, and it is about time that we were on the front foot in telling that story, although of course we must ensure that what is spent goes where it is supposed to go. How much support we offer those much less fortunate than ourselves is a measure of who we are. As was said much earlier in this debate, the choice between austerity at home and aid abroad is a false one, and we should have no truck with it. We can gradually turn our backs and come around to the view that the people we are discussing live far away from us, and that it is not our problem, or we can continue to open our hands and hearts and recognise that such suffering in the world diminishes us all. It diminishes us even further if it is within our power to do more to prevent or mitigate it, and we do less.
I do not think that that is who we are. That is not who the people of Scotland are, and it is not who the people of the UK are. It is about time that we were prouder of and more vocal about the support that we give.
Ian Austin
There is a difference between being concerned about individual aspects of DFID spending and being opposed to international aid completely. The idea that the British people who have signed this petition are so stupid that they have been taken in by right-wing propaganda, and that we should dismiss their concerns out of hand instead of considering them and trying to address them with fair and reasonable answers, is completely wrong.
Patricia Gibson
What I am talking about is journalism that is not responsible. There are some—
Patricia Gibson
No, but there are some sections of the right-wing media where, if I read the football scores there, I would need to check them. I would not believe everything that I read in certain sections of the right-wing media.
Patricia Gibson
I am confining my remarks here to the misinformation perpetrated about foreign aid with the sole agenda of undermining that 0.7% commitment. That is despicable. In effect, it is waging a press war against the most vulnerable people on our planet, which is wholly outrageous, and we should be willing to say so.
Joan Ryan
As far as I can see, nobody in this room who has put questions about aid, particularly to the Palestinian Authority, and about the desire for transparency, is saying that the 0.7% is wrong. In fact, everyone who has made that point has expressed a firm commitment to the 0.7% and the desire for transparency.
Patricia Gibson
Absolutely. I have not suggested that we should not scrutinise the budget, and I apologise if I have come across as doing so. I am saying that the agenda of certain sections of the press is to undermine the entire ethos of the 0.7% commitment, and of foreign aid altogether. I recognise what the right hon. Lady says about nobody questioning the 0.7%, but we must be careful where that agenda takes us.
Aid at its current level must continue. To reduce it is to say that we have no particular commitment or humanitarian responsibility to those born into the very worst poverty. Although foreign visits might give an insight into such poverty, people in this room probably cannot comprehend it. We are talking about some of the least well-off people on our planet. I do not think we want to say that we do not have a particular responsibility to them. We must be very careful and mindful where the right-wing agenda in certain sections of the tabloid press takes us.
Jeremy Lefroy (Stafford) (Con)
I refer to my entries in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Almost all the work that I have seen carried out with the support of DFID tackles individual poverty. It also supports global public goods, which is in the interests of us all. As the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) mentioned earlier, if we take our foot off the gas with diseases such as polio, malaria or neglected tropical diseases, the tremendous work done over the last 15 or 20 years will be undone. We must continue it.
The same is true of the work on water and sanitation referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce). DFID’s work has reached 60 million people over the past four years—vulnerable people in remote rural areas and the most difficult of circumstances. We have heard about the work with Syrian refugees who can have an education as a result of the work funded by DFID. Just two or three months ago, the International Development Committee saw the tremendous work being done with children in the north of Nigeria to ensure that they have an education fit for the 21st century, and last year we saw forestry work done over more than 20 years in Nepal, increasing forestation there by around 15%. That is important in tackling climate change.
I want to mention five ways in which DFID could look for improvement. The first is always, where possible, to consider the use of returnable capital instead of grants. In many cases, grants are most appropriate, but in many other cases, particularly involving work with the private sector, it would be better to use concessional lending or returnable capital, which can then be recycled.
The second is maximum leverage. We find, for instance on health, that many of the countries where we work committed in Abuja in 2001 to spend 15% of their budgets on health, but are nowhere near that at the moment. If we can connect the work that we do with them with reaching the target that they themselves set, we will get tremendous leverage from our spending.
The third, mentioned by the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms), is effective partners such as BRAC. If we can use effective, low-cost partners that are prepared to work in difficult circumstances, we will find that our aid goes much further.
The fourth is to encourage the backing of small grants. Often, as hon. Members have mentioned, grants aimed at organisations working from our own constituencies can do a tremendous amount of good, perhaps matching the money that we raise locally. DFID says that that is sometimes too difficult for it to do.
Finally, DFID needs to be more rigorous in planning and more efficient in spending. There is much more work to be done on that.
Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy).
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), I have received many letters and emails from constituents about this debate, most of them agreeing that the 0.7% commitment to foreign aid should remain legislatively binding, which is a view I concur with.
Development aid is not the only answer but it is a major part of the answer. The UK is one of six countries now meeting the UN target of overseas aid and leading the way for other countries to follow suit. This commitment has helped to ensure that national contributions to foreign aid are a race to the top and not a race to the bottom. The Overseas Development Institute estimated that, in 2015, the funding gap for humanitarian crises was some £10 billion. Our support keeps the pressure on other countries to follow our lead and to close that funding gap.
Oxfam has told us that our development aid has helped it to deal with the Ebola crisis, and with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nepal. Therefore it is vital that the commitment to foreign aid spending remains enshrined in law, rather than being demoted to a policy commitment. Legislation provides a greater level of stability and reliability, allowing developing countries to budget for the long term rather than operating on a volatile year-to-year basis. It would be helpful if the Minister outlined in his response to this debate how that 0.7% has been spent and how having the commitment to that spend deals with development aid in a much better way than giving money on a one-off or yearly basis.
Foreign aid plays a dual role in meeting humanitarian crises and in funding long-term development in state-building. It also strengthens democracy and governance. It has been vital in helping some of the world’s poorest people, by funding education, healthcare and sanitation, and by enabling tens of millions of people to engage as citizens in the political process and to scrutinise their Governments, which is another benefit of aid. Having talked to Oxfam last week, I know that it estimates that, in 2014-15, the UK’s aid facilitated the holding of more transparent, free and fair elections in 13 countries.
According to opponents of foreign aid, it is the source of all economic ills, and this 0.7% of GDP could fund our NHS, build all the homes we need and end relative poverty. Although those issues are very important in their own context and in the UK generally, it is also important that we fund work in other countries.
Several hon. Members rose—
Mike Gapes (in the Chair)
Order. I am afraid that I will have to reduce the time for speeches to two minutes and even then I cannot guarantee that everyone will get in.
Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)
Our commitment to overseas aid was a manifesto commitment that I supported wholeheartedly, having been brought up in developing countries for the first 20 years of my life. It is our responsibility as one of the world’s largest and most prosperous economies to help those in need and those in danger of exploitation. We should feel a sense of pride and involvement in the amount of aid that we deliver and the benefits it brings, but obviously we need to do more at home to explain exactly how our aid is delivered, because sadly now it has become a target for the press. However, it is also important that we debate these issues, because we must always ensure that public money is well spent and directed to the right ends.
In fact, 86% of people believe in the importance of overseas aid. We are debating this petition because it has crossed the threshold of support, but I personally receive far more correspondence supporting the work of the Department for International Development than correspondence attempting to undermine it.
The work that we have done with Rwanda shows that even the most chaotic states can get on the road to recovery with the right intervention, and Britain has been the birthplace of many of the world’s most important charitable and voluntary organisations. Those organisations are key partners of DFID in delivering aid, as well as raising funds themselves.
However, this issue is never just about spending money; it is also about deploying British expertise that has been built up over decades. We are a trading nation. We must always be on the look-out for new markets and new partners to deal with. The investment in developing countries brings them into our markets, as we can see now across Asia. It is also vital that we get the world’s young into work, for their own dignity and personal development as well as for their economic future.
With the rise of the internet, people in poorer counties can see the lifestyle that we enjoy here in the developed world and it is no surprise that they want to migrate here. By developing other countries, we also help to prevent the large amount of migration that is denuding countries of their most valuable resource—their informed and educated population. Our foreign aid must be directed towards building the economies of developing countries and it must continue to do so until it is no longer needed.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
Nearly all the direct UK grant to the Palestinian Authority is provided through the Department for International Development’s “Statebuilding and Service Delivery Grant”, and the Minister must do much more to assure us that it is not simply being paid—untied and un-earmarked—into the central treasury account of the Palestinian Authority, and that the verification of the funds is more than simply a notional accounting exercise. The Overseas Development Institute concluded that it is of “questionable robustness” and “provides few fiduciary assurances”.
By contrast, as we have heard, just 0.2% of 0.2% of the money that DFID spends in the Palestinian territories goes to projects bringing Palestinians and Israelis together. I have visited the group that was mentioned earlier and that brings Israeli and Palestinian students together to break down barriers and acquire new skills. Actually, it would be quite useful if the Minister noted some of this down, so that he can answer the specific questions that he has been asked when he sums up at the end of the debate.
For example, can the Minister consider funding the Cherish Project and the One to One Children’s Fund, which tackle the mental health problems suffered by children affected on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Would he consider funding OneVoice, which gives mainstream Israelis and Palestinians a voice, helping them to campaign for a peaceful two-state solution? The Aviv Peace Impact fund creates jobs and boosts prosperity by investing in growing businesses that employ Palestinians and Israelis side by side. Also, will he go to Rawabi, a new city that I have visited, which has new homes for 40,000 people in the west bank, a hospital, sports and community facilities, a shopping mall, offices and a business park that will provide jobs and prosperity for thousands of Palestinians, but which needs support and investment? He ought to look at funding Rawabi.
I have some specific questions for the Minister. Will he publish the memorandum of understanding with the Palestinian Authority? Will he commit to DFID implementing the 2014 recommendations on prisoners?
Ian Austin
I agree with my right hon. Friend entirely and I am grateful for the extra minute that she has given me to speak.
I also want to ask the Minister whether he will tackle the Palestinian Authority on the evidence of incitement. We should use Britain’s aid spending to bring people together by promoting peace and co-existence, tackling poverty, and creating jobs for Palestinians by promoting trade and economic development in the west bank and Gaza. The British people would be proud to support projects such as the ones I have mentioned, instead of being so concerned about support for terrorists that they back the Daily Mail campaigns against international aid.
The truth is that British aid feeds 25 million under-fives, educates 11 million children, has helped 4.3 million babies to be born safely, has helped to tackle Ebola in Africa, feeds the starving, helps refugees and builds stronger economies around the world. It does all that and so much more, but I am afraid that it also funds the Palestinian Authority, which in turn funds terrorists, and that undermines much of the good work that it does.
Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)
Thank you very much, Mr Gapes, for calling me to speak. I will keep my contribution very short, very brief and to the point.
First, may I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on securing this debate, which is a really good idea? Secondly, I declare my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am the chairman of the all-party group on Zambia and Malawi as well. Indeed, I was in Zambia with the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) last summer, where we learned quite a bit about how it is that places such as Zambia are being affected very badly by tuberculosis and HIV. As hon. Members know, HIV ends up cutting down the immune system and makes a sufferer much more likely to get TB. During the course of this year, we have seen a lot of people coming into this country by ship and we do not know whether they are coming in with TB. That is one very good reason why we should most certainly remain committed to spending the 0.7%.
The other issue that I will talk about very briefly is the whole business of what is happening down in southern Africa, especially in Zimbabwe. I am the vice-chair of the all-party group on Zimbabwe—indeed, I will be going to Zambia and Zimbabwe, and hopefully Malawi too, during the course of the summer, including for the Zambian presidential election. There is a very bad problem developing with El Niño, which is badly affecting people. It looks as if 2.8 million households will face real difficulty, including difficulty in just getting food.
This issue is incredibly important and we need to take it seriously, and if I am honest I am rather surprised that we spend much more time talking about the middle east than we do talking about a really important part of Africa, which, frankly, is part of our home, because we have a responsibility there. Actually, my great-uncles were both deputy governors down in Malawi and I know the place very well indeed.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I pay tribute to you and to the previous occupant of the Chair for having been able to call so many Members—admittedly, though, not everyone who wanted to get in has been called. I am aware that a number of Members came along to show solidarity with the debate without any intention of speaking or expectation of being able to do so, but that emphasises the point rightly made by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) that this is the kind of issue that thoroughly deserves a full day’s debate on the Floor of the House. I am happy to back that call.
I refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Before the election, I worked for the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund and was the vice-chair of the Network of International Development Organisations in Scotland.
One message that comes through loud and clear from the debate is that aid works. No one is disputing that aid from the United Kingdom Government, and indeed from the Scottish Government, has saved and changed millions of lives around the world over the years. There is a consensus about that and there does not, fortunately, seem to be any suggestion that aid should stop altogether. The substance of the debate seems to have been the effectiveness of aid and the appropriate amounts of spending and, to a certain extent, questions of public support for aid. I think that there is public support.
The debate was triggered by a petition—these Monday debates are becoming something of a highlight of the parliamentary week, which is to be welcomed—but there is a difference between a petition that people voluntarily sign and broader indications of public support. Repeated opinion polls show that a majority of people in the United Kingdom, and indeed across OECD countries, support the principle of aid. The point about public understanding was made relatively early in the debate. Interestingly, in 2011 a Chatham House-YouGov survey showed that the average estimate of UK aid spending was £79 billion, when in that year the actual spend was £8.5 billion. Polling across OECD countries consistently shows that people believe their Governments spend between 10% and 20% of their gross national income on aid and think it should be between 1% and 5%. In fact, the public think that more should be spent than is.
In my own constituency, the sum total of 95 people signed the petition, and only 5% of the signatories came from Scotland, which is far less than Scotland’s proportionate share. Mention was made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) of how our hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) had primary schoolchildren who signed up to the Send my Friend to School campaign, and I have met primary schoolchildren from the Glasgow Academy who want to send the message to the Prime Minister loud and clear that children’s education must be an important aspect of our international development spend.
Three key points have been touched on in the debate, the first of which is the principle of aid itself and the importance of the target. The second is the impact aid makes and why it is in our enlightened self-interest to spend money on it, and the third is how we go beyond aid and the role of the sustainable development goals. I will try to touch on all three points and still leave plenty of time for other Front-Bench colleagues.
As I have said, there is a consensus that there is a need for aid. I join other Members in giving credit to Labour for the creation of the Department for International Development as a stand-alone Department, and to the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, first for maintaining DFID and secondly for passing the legislation that was in all the party manifestos. I hope that the commitment remains in those manifestos, for which people voted and which they, and Members in this Chamber, have endorsed.
The need for aid is clear, as we have heard in the many statistics, stories and anecdotes we have heard. As the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, 124 million children are out of school—63 million of them girls—and some 650 million people are living without clean water. That is why continuing to provide aid is incredibly important, and it is something to which the Scottish National party has given its long-standing support. Indeed, the White Paper on independence for Scotland suggested that an independent Scotland would want to go beyond the 0.7% target to about 1%.
If the principle is established that there should be aid, the question is how much and why. The 0.7% target was agreed 40 years ago. It is not just a target for the United Kingdom, as many Members have recognised; it is the target for developed countries around the world. It was calculated that it represented the amount of money that would need to be generated to end poverty and bring people up to an equitable standard of living comparative to that which we enjoy. If the UK had been meeting the 0.7% target ever since it was agreed in 1970, an additional £87.5 billion would have been made available for aid spending and perhaps some of that would have lessened the need for aid today.
Sir Desmond Swayne
Will the hon. Gentleman reflect on the fact that, if all the rich countries of the world had met that commitment when they made it, we might be dealing with very different problems now?
Patrick Grady
That is exactly my point. I did not necessarily mean what I said to be a criticism; I am trying to offer a bit of context about why the target is so important.
As the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) said, it is a proportionate target, so it will go up, or indeed down, depending on the strength of the economy. The hon. Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) made an important point about how the target, and that predictability, allows people to plan and provide the step change—the gear shift—that is needed to really make an impact. Speaking of the need for and the importance of impact, the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Oliver Colvile) was absolutely right to address the hunger crisis in southern Africa. Predictable aid flows allow agencies to put measures in place that mean that when disasters strike, the resources are there to be mobilised immediately, rather than our sitting back, as the petition seems to suggest, and waiting for something to happen before scrabbling around and figuring out how much aid we can spend.
Aid does work. We have heard the statistics. My hon. Friend the Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) said that every two minutes immunisation sponsored by a United Kingdom aid programme saves a child’s life. At the same time, no one is disputing that everything is not perfect, but my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East made the valid point that not everything is perfect in the NUS, or rather the NHS. Not everything is perfect in the National Union of Students either—[Laughter.] I do not see many petitions calling for the national health service to be shut down, although there probably are elements of the right-wing press that would support doing that.
It is right that questions have been raised about the use of funding in Palestine, and it is also right that the Minister has had the opportunity to respond. That is why we have structures of scrutiny in this Parliament. DFID is one of the most highly scrutinised Departments of Government but it is important to recognise the work that is done. Of course, DFID funds organisations by funding specific projects. It does not fund global headquarters for organisations. If an organisation wants to build a global headquarters, it has to get the funding from somewhere else and justify the spend to those funding sources. DFID gives money for specific projects that are fully accountable back here, and that is why we have this kind of debate.
A point that has so explicitly been made by many today is that this is not just a moral argument. Aid is in our enlightened self-interest. Some members clearly want to prevent migrant flows, displacement and the spread of tropical diseases, and investment through our international development funding is absolutely crucial to that. However, as has also been said, not least by the chair of the International Development Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), aid is only one part of the development process. We have to look at how we go beyond aid, and ultimately get to the stage at which it is not as necessary because countries are able to stand on their own two feet. There is a need for fair trade arrangements, support for civil society and good governance, the development of national infrastructure, fairer tax treaties—mentioned by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) —and fair and effective implementation of the sustainable development goals. A coherent policy approach across the whole of Government is something that the Scottish Government are keen to take forward, and I hope that the UK Government will do so too.
It would be useful to hear from the Minister when DFID expects to publish its bilateral and multilateral aid reviews. It would be interesting to hear any further reflection he can offer on double-counting towards the NATO and Overseas Development Institute targets, and to know how DFID plans to drive forward the sustainable development goals across Government.
I am a big fan of my tartan ties, and the one I am wearing is the Zambia-Scotland tie. As with many tartans, it is an expression of solidarity, and solidarity ought to be, as I said in my maiden speech, the basis of human relationships.
Mike Gapes (in the Chair)
Order. The sitting is resumed and the debate may continue until 7.54 pm. I call Diane Abbott.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on introducing this important debate.
I emphasise that it is possible passionately to support our commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid and yet feel very strongly about accountability and transparency, as I do. It is not only a question of the accountability and transparency of the Department for International Development, although I appreciate that it is doing a lot of work on that. It is about accountability and transparency in the big non-governmental organisations, which do excellent work but have more to do on transparency, and it is about the accountability and transparency of the UN institutions, which are often the least transparent actors in development.
I feel strongly about accountability and transparency not just on behalf of the Daily Mail readers in Hackney North but because my family and those of many of my constituents come from the global south. I assure Members that people who live in the global south feel as strongly about accountability, transparency, good governance and minimising corruption as any Daily Mail reader. That is the context in which I wish to make my remarks.
We have spoken a lot about aid, but development is not only about aid. It is worth reminding the House that Africa loses $58 billion more in flows out of Africa than it receives in aid. Aid spending is dwarfed by the financial flows out of countries in Africa. Every year, the continent receives around $30 billion in aid, but it loses $192 billion—more than six times as much as it receives in aid—in debt repayments, lost tax revenue, tax transfers, multinational profits and other financial flows.
When we discuss this subject, we should not think that aid is the only instrument of development. Aid is important, and I defend the 0.7% contribution, but there are other important issues for the developing world. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) pointed out, the value of remittances to some countries of the global south are even more important than aid. The value of those remittances is that they go directly to communities, with no top- slicing through bureaucracy. In the event of humanitarian disaster, it is often remittances that get to the affected communities faster than any aid.
As the Labour party spokesperson on international development, I have been privileged to have been able to make a number of visits to all parts of the world in the past few months and see for myself how DFID money is spent. I went to Uganda with the International HIV/AIDS Alliance to see some really impressive projects focused on women and young people with HIV. I went to Ghana with ActionAid, where I saw how important women’s health projects were funded. I have also been to Somaliland, where I saw evidence of the drought that is sweeping across eastern and southern Africa. Anyone who says our money is being thrown away should see, as I saw, the starving peoples who have lost their livelihoods because their livestock has perished. They are dependent on the aid funds that come from overseas.
Stephen Doughty
Is not Somaliland a perfect example, because our aid, security support and diplomatic support are working, together with the Government there, to bring peace and stability in a region that is not known for its peace and stability? It is a perfect example of how we are doing things right.
Mr Mitchell
Is the hon. Lady aware that Somaliland absolutely makes her point? It has a budget of around £50 million, of which Britain provides something like £10 million, while the remittance value is more than £400 million. That shows that we must all look at more creative ways of ensuring that remittances are well used.
Ms Abbott
I agree. I come from a community that sends remittances. Not only are they very important and the diaspora communities that provide them true partners in development, but it is important that they are used creatively. I have been to the camps in Lebanon with Human Appeal and I visited Syrian refugees in Turkey, so I have seen for myself how well our aid can be used and how important it is.
Some very unpleasant remarks have been made about the Palestinian Authority. I am all for transparency and accountability, but let us remember that United States Secretary of State John Kerry said:
“Prime Minister Netanyahu made clear he does not wish for the collapse of the Palestinian Authority”.
He pointed out that, without the Palestinian Authority, Israel would have to
“shoulder the responsibility for providing basic services in the West Bank”.
The ODI report on the matter clearly said that the UK support on the ground helped to prevent economic collapse and an escalation in violence.
Andy Slaughter
I wonder whether my hon. Friend shares my dismay that there has been a concerted campaign today to demonise the Government’s funding of the Palestinian Authority, which the Minister has rightly resisted. Does she agree that, if there is concern about UK and EU money going into Palestine, we should be most concerned about the demolition of Palestinian homes and villages funded by the UK to make way for illegal Israeli settlements?
Ms Abbott
My hon. Friend puts it very well. It is of no help to people in the region, particularly ordinary Palestinians on the west bank, to demonise the Palestinian Authority. I am confident that DFID is exercising scrutiny and is not giving money directly to so-called terrorists.
I said at the beginning that being committed to 0.7% is not the same as saying that we should not have more accountability and more transparency with all the key actors. I listened with interest to the testimony of Ian Birrell of The Mail on Sunday on 6 June to the International Development Committee’s inquiry into the Government’s use of private contractors. I want to let it be known that I am interested in the issues he raised. I share his concern that the Government might be allowing
“excessive profiteering off the back of British taxpayers on the one hand and off the backs of the poor”
on the other. Those issues are worth looking at. I know that the Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), thinks that, too.
I am also concerned about DFID’s use of the big four accountants, which I believe to be contrary to sustainable development. PricewaterhouseCoopers, for example, is involved in industrial-scale marketing of tax avoidance schemes for corporations in the global south. I have other concerns about how the Government are spending aid to subsidise the fossil fuel industry and on deportation deals and building prisons. However, having expressed my concerns, overall I think that every single speaker in this debate has spelled out how British aid has helped strengthen health and education systems across the global south and contributed to cutting extreme poverty between 1990 and 2011 by 60%. Our contributions to the global health fund and the Ross Fund have played an enormous role in the battle against the killers malaria, HIV/Aids and TB.
As it is, the UK spends less on aid as a proportion of gross national income than Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, Denmark and Holland, but we are the first country to commit to the fixed 0.7% provision. When aid is spent efficiently—that will often mean locally or through small grants, as has been said this afternoon—it builds capacity in local institutions and reduces poverty and inequality. When Labour formed DFID, we did not do so to set up an aid industry; we did so with the aim of ending aid dependency.
Supporting 0.7% does not mean that we can suspend our critical faculties in regards to how efficiently and well some of the money is spent, but we should be proud of committing to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid. The money we spend through aid often gives us more influence and moral suasion than some of the money spent on military adventures. I am glad that almost every Member who has taken part in the debate has supported 0.7%. Certainly on this side of the House we stand not just for a commitment to 0.7%, but for a continuing commitment to scrutiny and accountability. That is not just for our voters, but because the people of the global south deserve no less.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Sir Desmond Swayne)
It is a privilege to follow the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). She is very well informed, and she speaks on the subject with passion. If I may, I would like to take the speech of the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) as my own; it was excellent.
A number of my constituents have been driven into a state of apoplexy by stories of how their hard-earned tax money is shovelled out the door without scrutiny of any kind, particularly towards the year end. I am glad that I have been able to refer them to the dfid.gov.uk website, where they can find a point-by-point rebuttal of all the accusations.
I respect the petitioners, however, and I thank them for the opportunity that they have afforded us to debate this important issue. I am glad that a number of Members have used the opportunity to evangelise about international development aid, and I want the debate to go well beyond this Chamber. My ambition is to ensure that by the end of the Parliament, more people write to thank us for what we as a kingdom are doing on international aid than to complain about the level of it.
I have a duty to represent all my constituents—not only those who have written to me complaining about the level of international aid, but those who have been tweeting all day about how proud they are of our international aid. Equally, I must represent the views of the 99.99% of my constituents who have expressed no opinion whatever. I am glad that the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) reminded us that we have a leadership role as Members of Parliament; our job is to bring our constituents information, to persuade them and, dare I say it, to bring enlightenment.
The UK aid strategy sits firmly in our security and defence strategy. The 0.7% spent on international aid and the 2% commitment to NATO are the 2.7% that we spend, in our international interests, on securing a safer, more stable and more prosperous world.
Sir Desmond Swayne
I know what the hon. Gentleman will say, because we have had the argument before. We may secure our national interest through the ability to deploy lethal force, but I put it to the House that often, the deployment of soft power is a much more effective tool of policy. There is no doubt among any of us that it was in our national interest to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on securing an end to the Ebola epidemic. Without doubt, had it been allowed to spread, it would have come to us and caused terror and economic dislocation. Equally, our main effort has to be on economic development in the poorer parts of the world.
The reality is that in the end, everything is about jobs. In the next 10 years, the world needs 600 million new jobs if we are to avoid an army of underemployed young people who are frustrated and increasingly angry. We have to make investments. I am alive to the concerned expressed by my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) about development capital. We have to tackle the causes of poverty and injustice, because if we do not deal with those problems at source, we know where they are going: to our doorsteps and our shores. Aid is undoubtedly in our national interest.
Overseas aid is also undoubtedly controversial; it has to be. If I am spending British taxpayers’ money on helping the people of Bangladesh who live on the chars to deal with climate change and flooding, it is clearly not available to deal with flood defences in Durham, York or elsewhere. However, I put it this way: we have pledged to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development, which means that we have 99.3% to spend on ourselves. I do not know anyone who spends 99.3% of their income on themselves; I am not sure I want to know such a person, and I am not so sure that they would have any friends. That is equally true of a nation. What influence would we have in the world, and how could we carry our heads high, if that were the case, and we were to abandon this important pledge? It is important to focus what we spend, rigorously demanding value for money, and ensuring that we have the systems to secure that and to drive down costs, so that we get proper value.
I am sorry to see that my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) is not in his place, because he referred to a low bar. I invite him to see me in DFID to explain to me and my officials what this low bar is, because I am the “low bar”. I am the one who has to be persuaded that the projects are value for money, so I shall be very interested to hear his explanation.
The reality is that over the past five years, we have delivered education for 11 million schoolchildren; 69 million people have received financial assistance and services to trade their way out of poverty; 29 million people have benefited from our nutrition programmes; 5 million people, as my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) said, have benefited from having healthcare professionals attend at birth; 63 million people have had access to clean water; 15 million people have been able to cope with climate change; 44 million children have been immunised; and we have delivered emergency care to 13 million people in the wake of 33 disasters. That is a measure of the importance of what we are doing.
The bit of the development picture that people get is humanitarian relief. They put their hand in their pocket to the tune of over £100 million after the Nepal earthquake. What we need to get over to them is that the people who appear suddenly to provide that relief and do the search and rescue have to have their core funds covered throughout the year when there is not an earthquake. The success of our intervention in the Nepal earthquake was built on years of investment in resilience beforehand; there was a blood bank in place and a logistics centre for the distribution of emergency aid, which saved seven weeks cumulatively. People rehearsed and rehearsed how to deal with the aftermath. This is what we spend the money on. I believe passionately that we have to get the democratic legitimacy from our people by persuading them. The moment we explain this to them, they get it. We need to hold their attention and get the opportunity to do that, and this debate gives us that opportunity, so let us build on it.
Steve Double
I thank everyone who has participated in this debate. I am sure that we all agree that it has been an excellent debate with many passionate contributions. I also thank all the petitioners and the Mail for enabling us to have this debate; it has been absolutely right to hold it. We have had clear cross-party support for spending 0.7% of GDP on international development. It is absolutely right for genuine concerns to be raised. Those concerns must be addressed, and I am sure that the Minister has listened.
As the Minister has said, we should welcome the opportunity for this debate, because it allows us to celebrate all the good things that our nation achieves around the world using our overseas aid budget. Millions of people have been helped in so many ways, and the debate gives us the opportunity to spread the word. If there is one thing I will take from this debate, it is the need for us to communicate far better exactly how the money is spent and what it achieves on a global scale, as millions of people are helped. The point has been made many times that the more we can communicate that, the more the public will understand how important the funds are, and the more support there will be.
The debate has been great. I thank everyone who has taken part. There is a very clear message that I want to take away: we should not be talking about cutting the UK’s aid budget; we need to put more pressure on other nations around the world to increase theirs.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered e-petition 125692 relating to foreign aid spending.
Written Statements
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Post-Competitiveness Council
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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The Minister for Universities and Science (Joseph Johnson)
My noble Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) has today made the following statement.
The Competitiveness Council took place in Brussels on 26-27 May. Under-Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills, Baroness Neville-Rolfe, represented the UK during the internal market and industry discussions on day one, with Shan Morgan (UK Deputy Permanent Representative) representing the UK in the research discussion on day two.
The presidency presented on the recent Quantum Technology conference in Amsterdam. This was followed by a presentation by Luxembourg on high performance computing. There was no debate.
The next item dealt with the Commission’s online content portability proposal. I have previously made you aware of the UK’s interest in the speedy implementation of this package. The proposal means citizens will be able to watch films, sport and other subscription services while on holiday or working temporarily in another member state. Following interventions by a number of member states, the Council agreed a general approach to the regulation. The proposal will now pass to the European Parliament who will agree its position in the coming months which could mean implementation of the proposal by the end of 2017.
At the regular competitiveness check-up the Commission gave a presentation that highlighted the issue of EU productivity. The UK welcomed the presentation and highlighted the link between services and productivity; I spoke about the significant amount of evidence which shows how important services are to economic growth.
The following item was a policy debate on the better regulation conclusions. I spoke for the UK in support of the conclusions, which build on the Commission’s better regulation package released last year. I also welcomed the Commission’s commitment to reduce burdens on business through the introduction of targets.
There was a presentation by Slovakia as the incoming presidency of the Council of the EU. This was followed by a readout of the recent Friends of Industry conference in Warsaw. The final any other business item was on the principle of country of origin marking.
The final item on the agenda was a discussion on proposed revisions to the posting of workers directive. There was a divergence of views between member states. The explanatory memorandum for this proposal was submitted on 24 March.
The research day of the Competitiveness Council took place on the morning of Friday 27 May.
The plenary opened with a discussion on Framework Programme 7 (FP7, which ran from 2007-13) and the future outlook for research and innovation. Council Conclusions on this topic were approved, noting that the recent evaluation of FP7 will be an important input to next year’s interim evaluation of the successor Horizon 2020 programme.
The meeting also approved Council conclusions on research and innovation friendly regulation, following a short discussion on the subject.
The presidency then opened a debate on open science, noting that the Council conclusions called for a transition to open access to publications in Europe by 2020.
There was general agreement that the benefits of open access were achievable, though a number of member states highlighted concerns on practical issues such as remuneration systems for scientists publishing in open access journals. Following the discussion, the Council approved the draft conclusions. There followed a presentation from Professor John Womersley (Chief Executive of the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, and Chair of ESFRI, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures). Professor Womersley briefed the Council on ESFRI’s work to develop an updated set of priorities for European research infrastructure.
Commissioner Carlos Moedas followed this with a brief summary of the responses that had been received to the public consultation on his proposal for a European Innovation Council.
Finally the incoming Slovakian presidency outlined its priorities on research, which included "support for young researchers", "implementation of widening participation under Horizon 2020" and "improving the framework conditions for researchers in the EU".
[HCWS39]
Energy Council (6 June 2016)
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change (Amber Rudd)
Today, my noble Friend, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change made the following statement.
I am writing to report on discussions at the Energy Council held in Luxembourg on 6 June.
The Council, chaired by the Dutch presidency, featured discussions around a central theme of energy security.
The meeting began with the Council approving a general approach on the proposed decision with regard to intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) in the field of energy.
For the second agenda item European Commissioner Miguel Arias Cañete opened a policy debate on gas security of supply by calling for improvements to regional co-operation, solidarity and the transparency of commercial gas contracts. This was in order to address vulnerabilities that still exist in the case of major disruptions to gas supplies. Interventions from member states were mixed; some supported the Commission’s approach whereas others referenced the need for a more flexible, voluntary approach to regional configurations. There was further discussion on the concept of solidarity arrangements and how these would apply not only to EU member states but to energy community states; a group of countries from south-east Europe and the Black Sea region.
Later, the Dutch presidency presented their conclusions on electricity market design which they hoped would provide guidance to the Commission on their proposals due out by the end of the year.
In the afternoon the Council listened to presentations from the Dutch presidency on the security of supply of medical radioisotopes to promote a longer term, more sustainable market. This was followed by a presentation from the Slovak Minister on their forthcoming presidency’s work programme.
The Council ended with an update from Commissioner Cañete on recent events in international relations as well as progress on implementing the Commission’s strategy on LNG (liquefied natural gas) storage which is to be implemented later this year.
[HCWS38]
House of Lords
Election of Lord Speaker
Message from the Queen
The Lord Chamberlain (Earl Peel)
My Lords, I have the honour to notify your Lordships that Her Majesty the Queen, having been informed that your Lordships have elected the Lord Fowler to be Lord Speaker, has pleasure in confirming your Lordships’ choice of him as your Speaker.
Furthermore, I have the honour to present to your Lordships a message from Her Majesty the Queen, signed by her own hand. The message is as follows:
“I have received with great satisfaction the dutiful and loyal expression of your thanks for the Speech with which I opened the present Session of Parliament”.
Election of Lord Speaker
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)
My Lords, I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in offering our congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, on being elected Lord Speaker and in offering our support to him as he prepares to take on his new role. I would also like to offer on behalf of the House our thanks to my noble friend Lord Cormack and to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for standing in this election. Elections are only possible when there are candidates and we are very grateful to both noble Lords. I would also like to pay a very brief tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, as our most distinguished Lord Speaker. There will be a proper occasion for us to pay tributes after the noble Baroness retires as Lord Speaker—because she remains our most distinguished Lord Speaker until 1 September. In the meantime, I offer my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler.
Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)
My Lords, I concur with the noble Baroness’s comments. We welcome the opportunity at a later date to pay tribute to the work of the noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, and to thank her for it. As the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, said, we warmly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. His election shows the high regard in which he is held in this House. He will know that he has the support of the entire House as he undertakes his duties. He will bring both his personality and his political skills to the role.
What we have seen today is a parliamentary first in that this is the first time that a man has been elected to the role of Lord Speaker. Nowadays, there are few positions in public life of which that can be said. I add our sincere thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, for not only having put themselves forward as excellent candidates and given us an excellent choice but for the way in which they conducted themselves during the election, which was a great tribute to them and, indeed, to the whole House. Therefore, we thank them and offer our very warm congratulations to our next Speaker.
Lord Fowler (Con)
My Lords, as the Leader of the House has just said, the election may be run but I do not take over responsibility until 1 September. In the meantime, the Lord Speaker continues to preside in the excellent way we have all admired for the last five years. I would like to make three very brief points. First, I thank the House very sincerely for the exceptional support it has given me. I will do my utmost to live up to this trust.
Secondly, I thank the other two candidates: the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, and my noble friend Lord Cormack for the way in which the election was conducted. With the election over, the good news is that the bar on offering hospitality comes to an end and we can buy colleagues drinks. The bad news is that I seem to have inadvertently mislaid my wallet today.
My third, and entirely serious, point is this: my whole purpose from now onwards is to serve all the Members in every part of this House in times which may be crucial for the very future of the House of Lords. My aim quite simply is to be the loyal servant of this House. I thank noble Lords for their support.
The Lord Speaker (Baroness D'Souza)
My Lords, I, too, add my warmest congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Fowler. While I am somewhat sad to step down, I do so in the sure knowledge that he will be a most distinguished Lord Speaker and will bring new ideas and freshness to the job. I know, too, that he will be wonderfully supported by all the Members of this House, the administration and the staff of the House. I particularly thank the clerks and the doorkeepers, who are the most excellent—perhaps the world’s best—timekeepers. I offer the noble Lord my congratulations once again and hope that he has a very good innings.
Carers over 80: Support
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Wheeler
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what additional social care resources they will provide to support the numbers of carers aged over 80, in the light of estimates that half of those are providing over 35 hours caring per week.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord Prior of Brampton) (Con)
My Lords, we recognise the invaluable contribution carers make to society and that many provide long hours of wonderful care. We support wholeheartedly the implementation of the improved rights for carers established by the Care Act 2014, providing just over £186 million of funding to local authorities for these improved rights. We are committed to continuing to improve support for carers through the publication of a new national carers strategy by the end of 2016.
Baroness Wheeler (Lab)
I thank the Minister for his response. Research by Age UK, Carers UK and independent age charities shows that the older the carer, the more hours of care they tend to provide. That, surely, cannot be right. Many carers over 80 are providing as much as 50 hours of care a week, often without any support because they do not meet the new eligibility criteria and councils just do not have the money in their social care budgets. Will the Minister undertake to ensure that the new carers strategy tackles these high and increasing levels of unmet demand? With councils across the country having to cut back on carer support, what specific support and funding will the Government provide to help councils offer real support to carers?
Lord Prior of Brampton
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. Nearly half a million people over 80 are providing more than 35 hours a week of care to their partner or loved one, which is a huge commitment and often has profound implications for their own health and well-being. We are all singing from the same hymn sheet on this and I am sure that the carers strategy coming out at the end of the year will address the particular requirements of that age group. The Government will continue to support carers’ rights. I mentioned the £186 million being given to local authorities to do that.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, the Building Carer Friendly Communities research report for Carers Week last week reported that approaching half of older carers had not been offered an annual health check by their GP practices, and about half of older carers said that their GP practice had not told them where they could find help. What are the Government doing to encourage primary care to make sure that older carers get access to annual health checks and support?
Lord Prior of Brampton
My Lords, clearly it is essential that older people have access to at least annual check-ups from their GPs. A large part of the review that is being undertaken will be about how we signpost and inform people of the need to have these health check-ups. I am sure that will be a part of the strategy announced at the end of the year.
Baroness Greengross (CB)
Under the new legislation, the Care Act, carers have a right to an assessment of their needs. Will the Minister assure the House not just that those needs will be assessed but that enough resources will be put into the system so that they can be met?
Lord Prior of Brampton
My Lords, under the Care Act there is an assessment, eligibility criteria and a support plan. Clearly there is no point having a plan without the support.
Lord Watts (Lab)
My Lords, will the Government consider setting up an independent review to look at the sorts of budgets that local authorities will require to provide a decent service?
Lord Prior of Brampton
As part of the consultation that is being conducted in preparation for the publication of the strategy at the end of the year, the Government have called for evidence, looking at international comparisons as well as an economic review, which I am sure will take into account the issues the noble Lord raises.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, in recognising the serious concerns about people over 80, and people under 80 with health needs themselves, will the Minister assure us that the review will have regard to the number of children who are carers for adult members of the family? The needs of the parent are assessed, quite rightly, but the needs of the child or children concerned are not always taken into account. Can we have an assurance that the new strategy will cover both my noble friend’s Question and concerns, and the needs of children?
Lord Prior of Brampton
The noble Baroness is absolutely right. There are many tens of thousands of children who have very substantial caring responsibilities for their parents or grandparents. The impact on their education and future careers is certainly something that the strategy will want to take into account. Of course, the Children and Families Act sets out the rights of children. We need to assess them very carefully in the forthcoming strategy.
Baroness Bakewell (Lab)
My Lords, can the Minister tell us how much the group of people who are carers over 80 is saving the economy by offering their services?
Lord Prior of Brampton
I cannot give a specific figure for those over 80 but I think that, in so far as you can monetise something like this, the total amount for all unpaid carers is estimated to be around £1.3 billion a year.
The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston) (Con)
My Lords, I am so sorry to get up but we have not yet heard from the Conservative Benches. Although I recognise that there has been a series of Labour Peers it is the turn of the noble Lord, Lord Flight.
Lord Flight
Thank you. My Lords, does the Minister recognise that there are large numbers of older people who simply look after each other? This is at the heart of the institution of marriage and they may not be registered as a carer because they are of similar age and shape. This whole issue is about not just the carer situation but older people who happily look after each other in old age.
Lord Prior of Brampton
Yes, we are talking about not just people who are registered carers but in particular where older people are looking after each other reciprocally, whether that is within marriage or a long-term partnership. Again, you cannot monetise something like that. It is part of a loving relationship. One of the tragedies in this is that it can sometimes change that caring relationship of husband and wife to one of a carer and a cared-for person, which can have a quite difficult psychological impact on individuals.
Baroness Manzoor
My Lords, do the Government have any plans to provide respite care for carers, particularly where there are significant disabilities involved with the person being cared for?
Lord Prior of Brampton
Respite care is hugely important. I think that the better care fund provides about £130 million a year for respite care. Giving people time out is hugely important.
Turkey
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Sharkey
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the prospects for civil liberties and democratic governance in Turkey.
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Anelay of St Johns) (Con)
My Lords, Turkey is a democracy with multi-party elections whose Government have been democratically elected. In some areas, progress has been made on fundamental freedoms in recent years but, as the European Commission has highlighted, there has also been significant backsliding. As a friend and ally, we strongly encourage Turkey to continue work towards the full protection of all civil liberties, and will continue to do so.
Lord Sharkey (LD)
Turkey is a much-valued member of NATO and a much-valued ally of this country. It is vital to any solution to the crisis in the eastern Mediterranean. Will the Minister join me in condemning as shameless and irresponsible lies Vote Leave’s assertion that Turkey is joining the EU, and that the EU is about to be flooded with Turkish criminals? Is not the best way of engaging Turkey on civil rights and democratic governance precisely through the EU membership negotiations?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, I certainly support the noble Lord in his wish to put the record straight, which he has done. My right honourable friend the Prime Minister made it clear yesterday that although we continue to support Turkey’s accession process, at its current rate of knots it is not going to achieve accession until the year 3000—and along the way every single other member of the European Union, which includes us at the moment, has the right of veto.
Lord Balfe (Con)
My Lords, can representations be made about the increasing authoritarianism we see in Ankara these days, in particular the threats to the HDP which arise from the recent lifting of parliamentary immunity? Can the Minister also confirm that things are not helped when it seems that confidential telegrams from our embassy in Ankara are leaked to the press? Will the Government review the level of security governing the telegrams going to and from Ankara?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, my noble friend is right to draw attention to the issue of lifting parliamentary immunity for MPs. I understand that President Erdogan signed that measure into law last week, and it is a matter of concern: after all, in any modern democracy a candidate for EU accession should be expected to undertake legal processes transparently and to fully respect the law. I hope they do so in these cases. Regarding leaks, in this particular case, of course, it was a selective leak. The fact is that if the rest of the material had been published—I do not encourage that because these are confidential matters—it would have shown that the Government’s policy is and will remain to maintain current visa requirements for all Turkish nationals wishing to visit the UK, regardless of what arrangements other member states in the Schengen area may make for Turkey. Diplomatic telegrams, by their very nature, are a way in which our experts overseas advise the Government here of what is happening in the Governments there—it is not about UK policy.
Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)
My Lords, does the Minister acknowledge that many of us who still support Turkish accession believe that the policies of the present Government in Turkey—particularly on press freedom, the treatment of their critics and the immunity of opposition Members of Parliament—have set the process back a long way and that that setback makes complete nonsense of this idea that Turkey might join in 2020?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
The noble Lord is absolutely right. It is a matter of concern when one sees that Turkey is 151st out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index. That is not the sign of a country that is serious about wanting accession.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, following on from the last two questions, clearly, big decisions are being taken about Turkey’s relationship with the European Union, especially on the granting of visas. Are the British Government making representations to other member states saying that the granting of visas should not happen until things such as the lifting of immunity have been properly considered? It is outrageous that elected Members of Parliament are being hounded out of Parliament.
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, we certainly make representations to Turkey on the importance of maintaining human rights, and point out that any attack on human rights sets back its progress towards any hope of access to the European Union, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, set out a moment ago.
Lord Tebbit (Con)
My Lords, will my noble friend acknowledge the plight of many Turkish citizens who will find that the requirements of our conventions of human rights conflict in many ways with their ideal of how their society should be constructed and operated?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, it is important that any state that wishes to be a member of the European Union abides by generally accepted norms of human rights. That is something I fight for not only as a Minister but as a human being.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
I have not met a single Turk who believes that they are going to be joining the EU in 2020—I do not think anyone in Turkey believes that. However, the progressives who want reform want the EU to support the accession process, in order that Turkey should reform. The Minister will be aware that only one chapter out of 36 has been completed since 1987. In 1979, on her second day as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher was told in a memorandum:
“If Turkey abandons her Western orientation, a number of strongly adverse military consequences would follow for the West”.
Is that still the case?
Baroness Anelay of St Johns
My Lords, we certainly view the progress that Turkey can make if it opens chapters and successfully closes them as important for its progress not only towards becoming a member of the European Union, but as a stable state on the eastern edge of the European Union. Turkey is in a significant security position; it is a valued member of NATO and has the second-largest armed forces in NATO. The process of aiming towards European Union accession encourages democratic government and stability.
Drugs Policy
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Meacher
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to review their drug policies in the light of the United Nations statements at the UN General Assembly Special Session on 19-21 April.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport and Home Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, there are no plans for any review. The Government used the special session to share our experience of delivering an evidence-based, balanced drugs strategy within the UN drug conventions and to strengthen international co-operation in tackling drug harms.
Baroness Meacher (CB)
Are the Government aware that the UN high command turned their backs on the war on drugs at the UN special session of the General Assembly in April? Taking account of the UN call for evidence-based policies, and most particularly that priority should be given to health-based policies, does the Minister agree that it is now high time that we had a complete review of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which was of course written at the height of the war on drugs, at a time when we had none of the evidence that we have today about policies that are effective in reducing addiction, violence, corruption and the rest of the paraphernalia associated with the war on drugs?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I do not share the noble Baroness’s view that backs were turned. Indeed, there were specific outcomes from the special session. As the noble Baroness will be aware, the British Government led on action against drugs, in light of new laws on psychoactive substances, and we got some real outcomes on that. Also, while I know that the noble Baroness was disappointed on issues of both drugs health policy and human rights, the UK Government again led both the European Union and 29 other Governments in making a statement to ensure that there will be substantial outcomes from that session.
Lord Richard (Lab)
Is the Minister aware—I am sure he is not—that I find myself at a total loss to understand the Government’s policy towards the use of medicinal cannabis? Is he further aware that there is now a mass of medical evidence to show that, in certain cases, it can be useful and helpful? Is he also aware that, in relation to the legalisation of medicinal cannabis, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Canada, Israel, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Portugal and 24 states in the United States of America have all agreed that the medical evidence is strong and that medicinal cannabis ought to be authorised? Why on earth do the Government not accept the evidence and do the same?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The Government do follow the evidence. I am sure that the noble Lord is aware that a clear regime is in place, administered by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, to enable medicines, including those containing controlled drugs, to be developed. I understand that Sativex is the cannabis-containing medicine that is authorised in the UK.
Baroness Afshar (CB)
My Lords, is it reasonable that smoking, which is considerably more harmful, is allowed freely to kill people, whereas people who use cannabis, which is considerably less addictive and less harmful, are made criminals?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
On the first point that the noble Baroness raises, successive Governments have taken steps against the harmful effects of smoking. The ban in places such as restaurants is part of the health concerns underlining that. In a previous answer, I outlined the Government’s view on particular remedies that contain cannabis. Specific measures are in place if authorisation is required.
The Lord Bishop of Rochester
My Lords, I note the Minister’s disinclination to institute a review. None the less, I wonder whether he could assure the House that in some context or other, attention is being given to such matters as the information in a report by the charity Release published in 2013, which shows that black people were stopped and searched for drugs at more than six times the rate of white people, despite successive crime surveys showing that drug use in black communities is at a lower rate than in white communities?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The right reverend Prelate is right to raise this concern. Issues of stop and search have been prioritised; I recall that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has specifically focused on this area. I believe that, although in 2009-10 stop and search was about seven times as likely for someone of black ethnicity, that has fallen to four times more likely—but that is still four times more likely than anyone else.
Baroness Hamwee (LD)
Does the Minister agree that it is significant and a very progressive step that possession of a new psychoactive substance under the Psychoactive Substances Act is not a criminal offence? Does he not think that that is something that we should extend and build on with regard to other drugs?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I know that the noble Baroness was a very active participant during the passage of the Bill, and she is quite right to say that this is about not penalising possession but tackling the people who provide and supply such drugs. That is where the clamping down has occurred, and it is proving effective. On the other question, we continue to review and see the evidence, and we will be led by the evidence.
Baroness Greengross (CB)
Under the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001, some prescriptions for a controlled drug can be dispensed on the basis of a supervised consumption of the daily dose on specified days. This obviously would be to avoid misuse and any safety risks. Would it not be possible for the use of cannabis for medical purposes to be controlled by some similar arrangement? Would the Minister care to comment on that?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
As I said, there is a specific procedure in place. Another cannabinoid substance, Nabilone, is authorised in the UK and used in the treatment of cancer patients—but it is a synthetic compound, not related directly to cannabis. There are specific measures in place, and the Government believe those measures to be appropriate. If other such medicines need to be authorised, there is a process to be followed.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
My Lords, 26 June is International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1987. It is intended to serve as a reminder of the goals achieved by member states for creating an international society free of drug abuse. Can the Minister add any more to what he has already said, which frankly at the moment is not a great deal, about what new initiatives the Government are currently taking or about to take through the United Nations and on the international stage generally to help achieve that overall goal on drug abuse?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
As I have said already, and shall say again to the noble Lord, we led on the international response to new psychoactive substances. To highlight some of the other actions that we have taken together on the international stage, and through the UN, there is the formation of a UK-led International Action Group on New Psychoactive Substances; the establishment of a global early-warning system at the UN; the first two tranches of international controls on some of the most harmful new psychoactive substances; domestic control of more than 100 harmful substances by China; and five recent UN resolutions on new psychoactive substances. That has enhanced international co-operation, and Britain has led the way on these initiatives.
Refugees: Unaccompanied Children
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Roberts of Llandudno
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what arrangements are in place to fulfil their decision to welcome unaccompanied child refugees into the United Kingdom.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport and Home Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, we are working closely with local authorities, as set out in the Immigration Act 2016, and consulting non-government organisations, the UNHCR, UNICEF and relevant member states to establish the suitable processes to implement our commitment to transfer unaccompanied refugee children to the UK from Europe and resettle children at risk from the Middle East and north Africa region.
Lord Roberts of Llandudno (LD)
The Minister might be aware of UNICEF’s comment even today that we are “moving far too slowly” in this matter of bringing over unaccompanied refugee children. Is it not time that we worked with other voluntary organisations and other individuals who are eager to welcome these children and to be part of their resettlement in the United Kingdom? Would it be possible for the Minister to give us a timetable of exactly what we are doing and when, with a view to resettling not only these children but the 20,000 refugees whom we have said we will resettle during the course of this Parliament?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
As I am sure the noble Lord is aware, we are working with international organisations, NGOs such as Save the Children and the UNHCR. Specifically on the question he raised about settlement, we are consulting and working directly with France, Italy and Greece and are working with NGOs in this respect. I emphasise that ultimately it is important to get this right for those children’s sake. It is not a question of delaying or dragging our feet; it is about ensuring that the best interests of children are put first.
Lord Dubs (Lab)
My Lords, is the difficulty in identifying unaccompanied child refugees in France, Greece and Italy, or is it that there are not enough local authorities which are co-operating in finding foster parents?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I commend the noble Lord’s work in this respect and his consistent efforts on this issue. There is an issue about identifying the children who require such assistance. That is why we are working very closely with the French Government and my right honourable friend the Minister for Immigration visited Greece in May to discuss this issue. I assure the noble Lord that we are also working very closely with local authorities to ensure that the support they provide is effective and that we do not put undue burdens on them.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
My Lords, have any children arrived yet and, if not, why not?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
If the noble and learned Baroness is referring to the actual scheme, we are still finalising the arrangements. The resettlement figures across all the schemes for the year ending March 2016 are that 1,667 Syrians were resettled in the UK under the Syrian vulnerable persons resettlement scheme and that a total of 1,854 people have been granted humanitarian protection under the scheme since it began, including 1,602 who have arrived since October 2015. In the year ending March 2016, 49%—824—of those resettled under the Syrian VPRS were under 18 years old and 49% were female.
The Lord Bishop of Gloucester
My Lords, are the Government working closely with Home for Good, which has several thousand potential foster carers who are willing to assist with welcoming these children at risk?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
We are working very closely with several agencies, but I will write to the right reverend Prelate specifically on that agency. I assure her and all noble Lords that, where there are agencies and NGOs which can assist in this process—I return to the point made earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs—in the interests of the children it is important that we identify those children urgently and resettle them.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, the Minister will recall that Interpol said that around 10,000 unaccompanied children have gone missing. Can he tell us the fate of those children, whether other children been added to their number and whether we take seriously the problem of children simply disappearing into the ether?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, of course the Government take very seriously any child going missing anywhere in the world in any place. The noble Lord spoke specifically about the 10,000 mentioned by Interpol. I will write to him with an update on that number. The important thing to identify is that there are some people who are taking advantage of vulnerable young children—people traffickers in particular—and that is why it is important that we see the kind of co-operation we are now seeking across all European states, particularly with our partners in France and Greece, to ensure that we identify the children who are most vulnerable and resettle them at the earliest opportunity.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
Will the Minister explain what will happen to these children when they reach the age of 18? Last month in the Commons, the Minister assured MPs that he would not want to conflate asylum seekers without a valid claim, whom the Government would seek to remove at 18, with these children, yet the next day the noble and learned Lord, Lord Keen of Elie, seemed to be doing just that when he refused to give an assurance that the Government would not seek to remove these children. I am confused of Burtersett.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
When those children reach the age of 18, they will of course be adults and, as is the case under British policy, we will look at their circumstances. The noble Baroness has quoted two Ministers of the Realm who, in her words, have said perhaps slightly differing things. It would therefore be advisable for me to review both those answers and write to her accordingly.
Local Government Elections (Referendum) Bill [HL]
Cohabitation Rights Bill [HL]
Betting Licences (Category B2 Gaming Machines) Bill [HL]
Genocide Determination Bill [HL]
Digital Skills (Select Committee Report)
Baroness Morgan of Huyton
That this House takes note of the Report from the Digital Skills Committee (Session 2014–15, HL Paper 111).
Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)
My Lords, I am delighted to introduce this debate today, and I look forward to the speeches from all those participating.
This was one of those Select Committees where it is fair to say that collectively we started with a reasonably limited, though variable, amount of knowledge. It was an intense deep dive. For my part, I found the eight months stimulating, illuminating, fascinating and, yes, even enjoyable. This was in no small part due to the indefatigable work of our great team: our clerk Aaron Speer, our policy analyst Emily Greenwood, our assistant Thomas Cheminais, and our specialist advisers, Dr Carl Frey and Professor Andy Westwood. It was also due to the enthusiasm of my fellow committee members.
On a personal basis, I particularly valued the visit to the Hartree Centre at Daresbury near Warrington, where I properly understood the sheer scale and power of big data for the first time, but the whole range of visits and the huge amount of evidence that we received gave us real insight into the opportunities and challenges presented by fast-changing digital technologies. Every day we heard about new reports and read articles and—in the case of my noble friend Lord Giddens, who sadly cannot be here today—new books on the subject. In fact, it was possibly the first Select Committee where we received a book list from one of our committee members.
Whenever the digital economy or digital impact are discussed, two things also follow as night follows day: huge numbers are quoted of potential jobs lost, jobs to be created and the impact on the economy, and the Government of the day, of whatever make-up, have a slight tendency to puff out their collective chest and spout lists of taskforces, initiatives and pots of money being spent. What is clear is that the world is being transformed by the digital revolution, and all aspects of our lives—work, home, society, services and politics—will be touched. Citizens, users of services, as well as the wider workforce, need to be digitally capable. This is both exciting and frightening—a time of great opportunity and great risk—and the role of government in realising the opportunities and managing the risks is fundamental.
In the UK we are rightly proud of our innovators and inventors, creative talents and scientists. We are less good at scaling up our breakthroughs and initial investments and properly harnessing their value for the UK economy. Recent Governments of all colours have taken digital seriously but have also had the tendency to become captivated by their own hype, obsessed by Hoxton and hard hats and running away from anything that could properly be called a strategy or a system. Initiatives—some great—are launched, but do not join up sufficiently or are too short term and key personnel move on quickly. Often by their nature these people are restless innovators and entrepreneurs; they find the experience of government unappealing and their contribution can get lost.
The world is being transformed by a series of profound technological changes: the second machine age. Economists vary in the magnitude of change they envisage. Some believe that as many as 35% of jobs may be automated over the next two decades, while others put it closer to 10%, but all acknowledge that many jobs will change fundamentally, and a huge number and range will have a significant digital element. For example, in health we know of a huge range of new technical jobs and data at every level within the health service, and our experience as patients is changing too and is more reliant on digital. We heard of projected huge numbers of new digital jobs in future decades. Every employer to whom we spoke talked of there already being skills shortages now and of the desire to find employees with digital competence on top of strong basics, and with the softer skills of thinking creatively, working in a team and questioning.
At its most basic, all the changes in work and daily life need superfast broadband—the hard infrastructure. Explanations based on a percentage of the country that is better than it used to be will not do. The internet needs to be viewed as a utility, which means that it must be readily accessible to all or we will neither maximise our economic potential nor avoid increasing inequality. A huge range of goods and services are already cheaper or only available online, and many jobs already expect digital capability. The proportion will only increase at an exponential rate. Throughout our work we received less than convincing promises of internet solutions.
I promised the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, who is a member of the committee but currently engaged on the HS2 Bill, that I would emphasise that she in particular was very unimpressed by progress; we heard not only of rural locations with difficulty but many challenges even in London—the so-called not-spots.
On soft infrastructure, in broad terms the committee agreed strongly that the Government have a responsibility to accelerate the level of digital literacy across the whole population. We found the UK Digital Skills Taskforce’s three-band definition of relevant skills very helpful; namely, digital citizens, digital workers and, at the top of the scale, digital makers. We need to upskill and expand the numbers in all those categories. We were acutely aware of the imbalance between girls and boys at school, and women and men in the workforce, who are interested and engaged in technology. I am pleased that women are well represented here today.
We had good ideas about harnessing the potential of girls. We need better careers advice, role models, parental engagement and much more; the media have a huge contribution to play here, too, if we look at the recent rather good initiatives on girls and sport, which have had a real impact.
Government needs to scrutinise education and training from primary school right throughout adult life. It all has to be joined up. I will give one illustrative example. The introduction of coding in the curriculum is great, but it cannot be delivered without the necessary trained teachers—bluntly, the gap will not be filled by a bit of CSR, however good, in parts of a few of our cities. The committee was told by the National College for Teaching and Leadership that it had funded a total of 121 scholarships in computing in 2014-15, and the previous year 360 new computing teachers had entered the profession. By the way, there are 25,000 schools in England alone. I was with a group of excellent head teachers last week who cannot introduce the new computer studies courses in their secondary schools as they simply cannot recruit suitable teachers. This was in London—try recruiting in Hull. So what is the plan to sort this out nationally?
We suggested the introduction of a module into all teacher training going forward and potentially into all degree courses to enhance digital confidence. In parallel, we heard too of severe shortages in maths, physics and other subjects. At the same time, the Government are trying—correctly, in my view—to extend the amount of maths studied in schools and colleges, but this all needs to be sorted out properly as a whole.
We felt that post-school there needed to be a fundamental shake-up. We got the picture of a pretty slow-moving, underfunded and rather clunky skills infrastructure in many FE colleges and beyond. Of course there are notable exceptions—the new coding college, starting in the autumn, is great, but how can that approach be rolled out more quickly? The current area reviews of FE colleges are really just looking at the finances, not at quality and innovation in the FE sector. The vocational qualifications currently offered are not necessarily what business wants, nor are they fully understood by business.
New models of learning—online, short courses designed with employers—and new types of quality qualifications need to keep pace with evolving technology and technological change. Apprenticeships, high-level vocational courses and degrees need to deliver general digital capability across the piece and to develop specialists. All adults need ways to upskill throughout their lives. As in successful competitor countries in the EU, for example, there needs to be a sort of social contract between government, business and individual employees to share responsibility for this going forward.
We were also acutely aware of the need to ensure that the benefits of the new technological era were felt throughout the UK, and this will need government to be nimble in identifying potential, intervening when, for example, a particular local enterprise partnership is not working, connecting universities and business more effectively, and standing back when there is successful momentum.
Government has a huge responsibility to take a proper grip. It does not mean that government should do everything—far from it—but it needs to own the whole digital agenda. Sometimes the role of government means convening, pushing, investing, advocating and reallocating resources. At other times, it means knocking heads together across departmental and geographical boundaries. It means making hard choices and reforming long-established organisations. It means sticking at it, resisting the excitement of announcements and reviewing progress regularly.
We produced a far-reaching report back in February 2015 but we deliberately did not produce a long string of recommendations. Rather, we focused on the vital role of government and produced an illustrative blueprint of all that we believed needed to happen. We recommended that the Government use this as an aid in producing their own digital agenda, properly pulling together work across Whitehall and beyond. We stressed that this work could not be static: the pace of change is such that there needs to be a restless and relentless focus at the heart of government.
For that reason, we saw the need for a Cabinet Minister at the centre of government, wholly responsible for the work, rather than continuing with myriad Ministers, departmental briefs, teams, working parties and committees. We deliberately did not cast blame or dwell on what had happened in the past. Indeed, we were clear that the then Government, and previous ones, had done much that could be applauded, but it was rather piecemeal, often short term, tending to initiative-itis and not comprehensive. However, we were optimistic. Why not produce a report, we thought, aimed at the incoming Government of whatever make-up? The committee urged the new Government to seize this agenda, really get stuck in and not worry overmuch about defending the past. This was the chance to stop being either complacent or defensive—a tendency of all Governments.
We deliberately called out report Make or Break: The UK’s Digital Future, not to be melodramatic but to be clear that this is a moment of such colossal change and of such opportunity and risk that we saw it as a call to action. It is always easier for a new Government to be bold, and we wanted this one to be so.
The Government’s response has been somewhat patchy. On the plus side, responsibility for the Digital Economy Unit has been transferred from joint ownership of two departments to sole ownership of the DCMS. Whether this is quite the high-profile, centre-of-government location that we urged may be open to question. I do not need to tell many Members of this House that location in government really does matter, and clearly the Government’s own digital delivery is still owned by the Cabinet Office.
I was surprised by omissions in the Government’s response, which made me concerned that the necessary co-ordination is not yet there. For example, we were concerned that without sufficient attention to cybersecurity and internet safety, citizens and businesses may be too worried to exploit the benefits of digital technology. I happen to know that good work is happening on both. For example, I am aware of the good work being undertaken by the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, and others on internet safety, and yet this was not referred to in the response from the Government, so presumably is not understood as part of the overall government approach.
There have been some announcements relating to the hard infrastructure and internet access. These are welcome, but the details will definitely need careful scrutiny in this House to make sure that the reality meets the headlines, and Ofcom will need to demonstrate that it has been sufficiently radical in its approach.
The other day, I received a briefing from the DCMS, for which I was very grateful. However, I confess that my heart sank somewhat when the first sentence read, as usual:
“The UK is a well-connected nation”.
So we should be and so we must be, especially when our competitors are investing so heavily. But what is meant by “well-connected”? The briefing then stated that:
“9 out of 10 homes and businesses can access superfast broadband and this will reach 95% by the end of next year”.
The report urges that superfast internet provision should be viewed as a fourth utility. I believe that the Government share this view, but that means a very fast progression to 100% coverage.
As to our proposal for a comprehensive government digital agenda, I was very pleased to hear that the Government were proposing to produce such a strategy. Indeed, I was happy for this debate to be delayed to be able to see the Government’s proposals, and, as I said, bits have already been announced. Our committee recommended the production of a new digital agenda as a top priority for the incoming Government—that was last summer—and a report to Parliament this summer on progress on that agenda. But we cannot have a progress report as we still have no strategy.
On 29 December 2015, the DCMS said that a new agenda would be set out “early next year”. Then, at a Select Committee session in the other place on 8 March this year, the honourable Ed Vaizey MP said:
“We have written the digital skills strategy. When you can expect it to appear is anybody’s guess. I thought we would publish it in February. It was in the famous Downing Street grid. It fell out of the Downing Street grid for reasons that I cannot fathom. If you were a theologian, you would have better ways of understanding how the Downing Street grid works. There is a rumour that it may appear in the Budget and there is a rumour that it may not appear in the Budget”.
It did not appear, and it has not yet.
Can the Minister tell us when the digital strategy will be published? Does she share the committee’s sense of urgency? Does she believe that there is proper co-ordination across government, including the Treasury? Has every relevant department fed into the production of the strategy? Specifically, will it include full details of soft infrastructure—education and skills—as well as hard infrastructure? Will that input come from the DfE as well as BIS? Does she support the idea of updates to Parliament rather than, as Mr Vaizey said, “updates to the PM”, so that the digital strategy, when produced, does not become fossilised on a shelf alongside previous similar publications?
I urge the Minister to reply to this debate in as open a way as possible. I know that the upskilling of young people and the wider workforce, for example, is of real interest to her, but unconnected initiatives will not deliver what we all know is needed. There is commitment on all Benches to this agenda, but to move forward successfully there needs to be openness and honesty about what is and what is not yet working. There is no room for complacency. That point was underlined by the report from the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on digital skills, which came out today. It reiterates the urgency of this agenda.
I am sure that the Minister’s brief will have a mass of detail of current government action. However, our committee is urging a step change—as we said, a call to action. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and ask the House to note our report.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, www.chrisholmes.co.uk: if I am not in the Chamber, that is where you will find me. That underpins much of what our report was about. There is no separate world of digital. What we all need to be completely seized of is the “everythingness” of digital.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for securing this debate and for her excellent chairing of the Select Committee. My only slight disappointment comes this afternoon, when, in the light of her previous incarnation, she was not able to share with your Lordships’ House any insight into the operation of that Downing Street grid. I also express sincere and heartfelt thanks to everybody who supported the committee in its work, not least the clerks, policy advisers, experts and everybody who enabled us to cover such a significant amount of written and oral evidence during our enquiry.
The title of the report says it all: “Make or Break”. It is that significant; it is that serious. There can precious be any issue more significant, or that more underpins every element of every issue society currently faces, than the digital opportunity or the potential consequences of not realising that opportunity. I will restrict myself to just a few areas. I know many noble colleagues will cover other elements within our committee’s deliberations.
There will be no digital economy and regular economy: there will just be the economy, with digital underpinning it all the way through. As we have already heard, up to 35% of jobs could be in danger of automation. Whether that figure is 10% or 35%, there is a really significant underbelly to that number: the kind of jobs that will potentially disappear as a result of automation are many of those which, for the past 40 to 50 years, have been the guarantors of social mobility. It is not only that 35% of existing jobs may disappear; it is a question of the kind of jobs and the impact that will have on our society. We have already seen the positive impact the legacy of the work we did with the Digital Skills Select Committee has had on the Social Mobility Select Committee, which I was lucky enough to be part of in the last Session.
While 35% of jobs may be in danger of automation, by the same token, around 1.1 million new jobs in digital could be required just by the end of this decade—jobs we currently might not even know the name of. That demonstrates the disruptive nature of the process we are engaged in: that this is not just about the labour market and the impact on the economy, but how it feeds back into education, careers guidance—the “everythingness” to which I referred. If we get this right, UK GDP could increase by £63 billion. Even if that figure is contested or somewhat overblown, it is still a massive potential boon for Britain.
Turning to the internet—the hard infrastructure that will enable this—we have seen a significant rollout of superfast broadband, but what about the 5% who still will not be covered? What plans are there to ensure that everybody, wherever they may be across the United Kingdom, will have potential access? Similarly, what plans are there to ensure not only superfast broadband, as measured at the top end, but reliability, so that you can access broadband at high-demand peak points—the so-called golden hour between teatime and bedtime, or, for the more middle-class among us, between suppertime and bedtime—when your provider may tell you that you can experience superfast broadband, but actually you experience no broadband? It is not just about speed; it is also about reliability and consistency, whatever the time of day or night.
Turning to inclusion, we will see the benefits of this technology—this revolution—only if everybody can participate in it. We cannot afford to artificially build steps in cyberspace. For disabled people, it is understandable—though increasingly unacceptable—that buildings built 400 or 500 years ago may in parts be inaccessible. It is utterly unacceptable if websites are still being designed that are inaccessible to millions of users. What is being done to ensure that accessibility is a key part of all and any training for web developers and web designers?
Our report found that, of the 4,000 young people who took the A-level computer science exam in the summer of 2014, fewer than 100 were female. There can be no greater example of what needs to be done to ensure inclusion and diversity to enable the country to benefit from this digital opportunity. If we do not do that, we will only half-achieve and lag behind other nations that have inclusion more firmly hardwired throughout their societies.
On data, in recent years, taking the example of the NHS, all parties have done precious little more than “big up” the spending figures: “£8 billion? We will do £9 billion!”. That is all very well if it means more money going into the NHS, but one thing that truly has the potential to drive and potentially save the NHS is the use of data, not just to reflect and represent but, crucially, to plan and predict—and across not just the NHS but the whole of Whitehall and local government. The opportunities available now were not available even two years ago, never mind 20 years ago. What are the Government doing to ensure that, wherever and whenever, big data and little data underpin every decision across Whitehall?
Will there be an economic boom? Will there be increased connectivity, collaboration and creativity? Will there be an inclusive, internet-underpinned modern digital Britain? The opportunity is there, but it will not happen merely as a matter of course. When will the digital skills strategy be published? What will be in it and how much of it will address the recommendations set out in our report? Similarly, what is likely to be in the digital economy Bill, particularly on internet infrastructure, to which I referred earlier? What will be addressed in that Bill?
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said that, as with many things, night will follow day. Who can say what the next decade will be like? But I can assure noble Lords that when I sit down, Knight will follow Holmes.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my friend the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. He was my friend even before he chose to join the wrong political side when he came into this House. I agree with much of what he said and I pay tribute to this fine report and the chairmanship of my noble friend Lady Morgan. I was especially pleased to see the emphasis on hard infrastructure in the report. I personally think that it is a higher priority for us to connect everyone with reliable high-bandwidth broadband than to connect a couple of urban areas through High Speed 2.
I was particularly pleased to see mention of soft infrastructure. I am the chair of the Tinder Foundation, which has an amusing name these days and delivers digital inclusion largely on behalf of government but for other people as well. We try to get online those people who currently do not have the skills and confidence to be online. We get about £6 million to £8 million-worth of government money to do that, for which we are very grateful.
I also certainly endorse the call from the Science and Technology Committee of the other House today that we need to continue our efforts to ensure that the 10 million people in this country—the committee puts the figure at 12.8 million, but that is probably overegging it—who at the moment are excluded from the digital world. That costs them dear financially, culturally and socially.
I will focus most of my comments on education, and the implications for that in the report, where perhaps I would have hoped for the committee to be even more radical than it was. I shall start with some statistics from the Tech Nation 2016 report prepared by Tech City in partnership with Nesta to remind noble Lords of quite how important this area is. There is some easy stuff around the digital tech economy being worth 1.5 million jobs with job creation between 2011 to 2014 running at 2.8 times the rate in the rest of the economy, and that digital tech industries had a turnover of £161 billion and grew 32% faster than the rest of the economy in that time. But what particularly struck me is that 41% of digital tech economy jobs exist within traditionally non-digital industries. That underscores a really important perspective for noble Lords, which is that this is not a sector. We cannot think of digital as just another industrial sector; it is universal and is of universal importance.
The noble Lord, Lord Holmes, talked about digital jobs growth and the deskilling effect of digital at the same time. I know a number of roboticists and I am full of wonder, trepidation and fear at what robots can now do. I am excited by the potential of artificial intelligence to help us mere humans be more effective in what we do, but I am nervous that technology is and will continue to take jobs of brain as well as brawn and will continue to hollow out the labour market. But I am also one who thinks that the dystopian future is a choice and that we can chase after a more utopian one in the labour market. There will be enough work, but in terms of the effect on unemployment the key will be to have in any particular geography the right mix of the supply and demand of skills to service the labour market.
I was interested in the publication a couple of weeks ago by Professor Lynda Gratton, professor of economics at the London Business School, and a colleague who is a professor of economics at Oxford, of a book entitled The 100-Year Life. In combination with the debate around the effect of technology, it is significant to start thinking about the fact that in this country, a child born today has a more than 50% chance of living to 105. What that means is that a child starting school in September is likely to continue in work until the turn of the century, because there is no way that we will be able to finance the long retirements that many of us understood as being the promise when we went to school: work hard, get a decent qualification, go to a good university, choose a career, get a final salary pension scheme, get a 25-year mortgage, pay it off, retire early and look after our kids—great. That is clearly over.
Lord Maxton (Lab)
Before my noble friend leaves that point, there are those who predict that the age of 105 is way out and that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born and is probably in their mid-30s.
Lord Knight of Weymouth
My noble friend may well be right, but the point I am making is that we need to think about this in the context of 60-year or 70-year working lives—possibly longer—and of continually having to reskill as we are continually deskilled by technology. That has profound implications for our education system. I think it will mean that qualifications as proxies for skill will become increasingly inadequate, and that increasingly we will need employers to credential skill because we cannot wait for our cumbersome qualification system to keep up. Apprenticeships are part of the solution, but they, too, can be cumbersome. We need much more agility in our skills system. We need more modular skills badging so that we click through digital badges and see the portfolios that are behind that of the skills that people have and what they are able to deliver with them.
I also believe that we will shortly move on from the traditional CV, with employers being able to click through into those portfolios and, essentially, sift through data mining. If employers start to move away from sifting using qualifications, the fundamental basis on which our education system is built starts to erode quite rapidly. That means that we need to think carefully about each stage of education and the consequences in this century as the digital revolution starts to explode.
On higher education, it is starting to feel insane for a young person to frontload their very long working life with a huge amount of debt by going to university in their early 20s when they need to have a lifelong relationship with university that could last 60 or 70 years. For further education, working out the closer relationship with employers that the report talks about and reflecting employer-accredited qualifications rather than waiting around for awarding bodies is key. For both those sectors—if it does not cause my noble friend Lady Morgan too many nightmares—we should revisit the principle of individual learning accounts and see whether there is a system of financing skills that is individualised, and that is an entitlement that we may all have and can draw on through a long working life.
For schools, we need to profoundly challenge a system that is so content-heavy and geared around our ability to regurgitate and memorise content, and move to a system that gives us the resilience to work freelance, because that is the nature of this economy, to start and to close businesses and charities, and to deal with having to reskill as we are deskilled constantly through life. We need a school system that is less about the standardisation of an industrial age and more about designing learning around individuals. We now have the technology and the tools. We can use the technology we are talking about to deliver a more individualised education.
I see a radical agenda that is non-negotiable. The report’s title gives us a hint that its authors perhaps think the same. I will close by quoting from a blog published in March last year on Medium, a blogging platform. It says:
“As the waves of digital disruption wash across our shores, we need to ensure that our government, our institutions and our teachers are not applying old norms and ways of thinking to new technologies, new business models and new economic realities ... We need to ensure that we focus our resources not on protecting the past from the future, but protecting the future from the past. This isn’t simply about learning to code. It’s about learning new skills. New ways of thinking. New ways of learning”.
I am very happy to say that the author of the blog is in government. It is the noble Baroness, Lady Shields. I hope that the education department is talking to her and listening to her wise words.
Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, who is doing extremely valuable work. His participation in debates of this kind is extremely valuable to the House and his contribution will repay careful study.
I was one of the willing flock of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, in the committee. I enjoyed the experience; I cannot say that about everything I do here, but we who served at her feet, under her chairmanship, observed a master class in getting Members of the House of Lords in committees to agree to only five recommendations on a subject as wide digital skills. She deserves a parliamentary award of some kind and she did it without offering any physical violence that I could see. It was an extremely useful and interesting experience.
A couple of things occurred to me which follow on from what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, was saying. Digital matters move so fast, and are so disruptive and transformational that our policy-making in the political process struggles to keep up. That is a problem for everyone. Change moves at such a pace that we need to make an even bigger effort to stay on top of it and its consequences for our citizens.
Another couple of things struck me forcefully in the course of the committee’s work. I remind colleagues that this is a United Kingdom responsibility. Although there are devolved legislature responsibilities in some of these matters, we need to bear in mind that there is a United Kingdom dimension to this, so the co-ordination of what is going on in other parts of the United Kingdom is important. For example, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to reporting requirements. There is an annual report in Scotland on exactly this subject and has been for a number of years, so there is best practice in other legislatures. Some of them are newer, so they have had a chance to start some of these things with a clean sheet. We can learn from what is happening in other parts of the United Kingdom.
The other thing which astonished me, because I did not know about it and I am ashamed to admit that now, is the imbalance in gender in the digital skills domain and the paucity of women students coming through and taking up careers. The imbalance is scandalous and something serious and urgent needs to be done about it.
My interest in being on the committee was really quite different. It was based on something that the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, rightly mentioned in his concluding remarks. I could see from my interest in social protection and social policy that the exclusion issue was starting to have an impact, for example, in the rollout of universal credit, where the government service, rightly, is being mounted on a digital-by-default basis and therefore the 10%—or 12%, or whatever it is—of the client group applying for universal credit are at a signal disadvantage. I have come to the conclusion, working closely with the people who are rolling out the new universal credit system, that it is unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to cope with digital by default without personal assistance and support. The Government have put some work in hand to attend to that; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is part of it—that is another important part of the work he does.
If that was the interest that stimulated my membership of the committee, my view was completely changed on the importance of soft skills and the digital agenda. It is not just about making sure that digital exclusion is eliminated, although there is absolutely no justification for the level of digital exclusion we have in this country at this time. We have to look at a future in which the children who are taking up their education at primary school now have been educated for jobs that simply do not exist: that is how dramatic the changes that we face are. I learned an enormous amount about that and have a new interest in the subject as a result.
This report is absolutely realistic and grounded in what is possible. Of its five recommendations, the fourth is addressed to the Liaison Committee of this House. I do not know whether anybody has written to the chairman of the Liaison Committee to warn him about this. To reiterate what I said earlier, we make the point that our processes in this House need to start appreciating the significance to everything that we do, politically, of changes in the digital world.
The report’s recommendations are entirely realistic and rightly accept that there is financial constraint. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said in her excellent speech, the report recognises that much has been done, that connectivity has been a priority and that the Government can claim to be doing lots of things. However, as regards advances that have been made since the publication of the committee’s report just before the last election, the Government’s manifesto was far too focused on connectivity and hard infrastructure. That was followed by the Budget in 2015, which was the first opportunity for the new Government to come forward and advertise the priority they were prepared to give to the digital agenda, particularly the digital skills agenda. The 2015 Budget allocated a little more money for ultra-fast broadband in Cornwall, some extra money to the Cabinet Office for the excellent work it has done in the Government Digital Service and some money to notable hubs. We are lucky to have such well-developed hubs in the United Kingdom.
There was not very much in the Budget, but what disappointed—if not astonished—me was the November comprehensive spending review. It was full of all sorts of stuff such as northern powerhouses and this and that but, despite planning the United Kingdom’s financial expenditure profile for the next three years, it made no reference at all to a co-ordinated digital strategy. It is astounding that the Government did not take the opportunity provided by the comprehensive spending review to put in place a co-ordinated, joined-up strategy, given that they had the committee’s report and had obtained information from the people who came to us as witnesses. That was followed by the 2016 Budget, which concentrates on government efficiency, although I am not against government efficiency through digitalisation.
My charge, therefore, is that we have wasted two years trying to get something that demonstrates the Government’s direction of travel and the priority that they are prepared to give to investing in this work. The Minister has the possibility to remedy some of these issues by going back to the department and arguing the case for the digital economy Bill announced in the Queen’s Speech to have a long enough Title to enable us to address some of these strategically important aspects. My spies in the department tell me that there is quite a restrictive approach to getting broadband out, although the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is absolutely right to say that connectivity is important.
However, we need the opportunity to hold proper discussions in this House. I am not suggesting that the Minister goes looking for a Christmas tree Bill to hang everything on. I promise her that we will approach it with the same discipline that we showed in achieving the five recommendations. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, will be sitting behind us to see that we do not get out of hand. There is a clear opportunity here to give the House more confidence that the Government know what they are doing, are committed to the agenda and are willing to take this issue forward with the urgency suggested in our report and that of the House of Commons. It is neat that the chairs of both reports were women; that gives me some encouragement and is the way it should be. I hope the Minister will take that ask seriously so that we can have a continuing discussion on this important subject in your Lordships’ House.
Lord Janvrin (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood. Like him, I had the privilege of being a member of the Select Committee. I join him and others in paying tribute to our chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and our advisers and staff. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, really drove the committee, and it was a huge pleasure, privilege, learning experience—everything else—to be part of that team.
Briefly, I will draw attention to two issues in what was a very wide-ranging report. Before doing so, I, too, would like to mention a bit of the context in which we are operating, because I will return to this point of urgency at the end. In our lifetimes we are seeing all sorts of megatrends—globalisation, demographics, climate change, et cetera—but the trend that is undoubtedly having the largest and most direct effect on our daily lives is the second machine age, the digital revolution. Our lives are being and will increasingly be transformed by the increasing processing power and interconnectivity of the mobile world: big data, the internet of things, advanced robotics—artificial intelligence that will lead to the automation of knowledge work as well as physical work. It is not for nothing that these are described as disruptive technologies.
These technologies present opportunities as well as challenges. The opportunities to manage old age, to encourage innovation and enterprise, to address issues of productivity, and to improve social interaction are all part of the life that we are seeing evolving. But the challenges are huge, and they were identified in our report. I draw particular attention to the infrastructure challenge to provide digital access to all and the whole question of skills—to produce, in the very useful terminology of the UK Digital Skills Taskforce, the,
“digital makers … digital citizens and digital workers”,
who we will need now and in the future to ensure economic and social progress. It is very timely for this House to focus on how we can meet these challenges on the day that the Science and Technology Committee in another place has issued its report on what it describes as the “digital skills crisis”.
The two issues from our report that I want to focus on are the importance of lifelong learning and the role of the Government. Both have been well touched on, not surprisingly, by other speakers. The report has much to say on the demands of the educational system, and I listened very carefully to the expertise of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on this issue. We spoke about the importance of seeing digital literacy in the same way as maths and English: as the core of the educational curriculum. We looked at how you provide teachers to do that—who teaches the teachers? Others have made the crucial point about the importance of encouraging more women into the digital world.
The point I want to focus on is that in this new digital age we must recognise that formal education at school and, indeed, university will probably prepare many people only for their first job. As the report suggests, if something like 30% of the jobs currently around will not exist in 20 years’ time, many in the UK workforce will have a massive need for opportunities to reskill throughout their working lives. When we talk about digital skills, the question of lifelong learning needs to be addressed with urgency, and I would like to highlight what the report says about this.
First, there is a need for a cultural shift to prepare learners to learn for themselves. Is there scope for more activity from the behavioural economists and nudge units to work out how to bring this about? Part of that is the importance of online learning. Many excellent sites exist, but much more can be done, so the whole question of how learners can learn for themselves needs to be addressed. Secondly, there is the importance of the further education sector in making lifelong learning accessible, in the redesign of courses, in ensuring that digital skills are part of any reskilling package, and in making shorter, more targeted and modular courses available in new ways and at new venues. In looking at how further education can cope with this reskilling process, there must be closer involvement of business in the design, delivery and funding of courses. It is recognised that the debate about digital skills is about not just schools and universities; it is a lifelong learning process that will now be part of all our lives.
My second area is the Government’s leadership role, as I mentioned. It was a constant theme of our report that the Government have a role as the conductor of the orchestra. They are the essential enabler in bringing together their efforts, business, education and the third sector—we should never forget the third sector in all this—to orchestrate what they are doing to reskill or upskill, to have a skills agenda and to solve the skills challenge. As other speakers have mentioned, our recommendations therefore focused on the Government producing a digital agenda to have that orchestrating role of bringing together other actors to ensure that we address the skills challenge. We mentioned the need for senior ministerial oversight at Cabinet level. Above all, we stressed the importance of priority and urgency.
It was a little disappointing that the Government’s response to our 144-page report, published five months later, was four and a quarter pages long and that we have had to wait until now for news of the digital economy Bill, which will undoubtedly be important in addressing some of the infrastructure challenges. However, we are still waiting for the digital strategy. It is very good news that it is in the pipeline and we all look forward to what the Minister may or may not say in trailing its publication.
We owe it to a huge number of people to get this right. We in the post-war generation have been brought up to believe in linear change—that yesterday is probably a good guide to tomorrow. But the second machine age means that we are living in a completely different world of disruptive change. There is therefore a question of how we produce the flexibility and pragmatism, the imagination and innovation and the willingness to take risks in an age of change and uncertainty that this skills challenge will require. A lot of people are going to need a lot of help. The Government have a crucial role in orchestrating the response, the way to address this problem. I look forward hugely to hearing that sense of priority from the Government in how they will address it.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)
My Lords, I begin by declaring my interest as the chief executive of TalkTalk, an internet service provider, and as a trustee of Doteveryone, a digital charity set up by my noble friend Lady Lane-Fox. It is a huge privilege to speak in this debate, not least because of the fantastic work the committee has done shining a light on Britain’s digital skills challenge. It is an excellent report and I am only sorry that my own endeavours in the digital world have meant that this is the first time I have been able personally to participate.
It will not surprise your Lordships to learn that I am passionate about the ability of the internet to change lives for the better. At its best, the digital world can advance human knowledge and understanding, enable business to thrive and spread prosperity, and bring families and communities together—not just digitally but physically. It can be a tremendous force for good. It is also something Britain can be brilliant at. We are already firmly established as one of the leading global clusters for the tech and digital sector, and are sucking in talent and innovation from around the world. That is fuelled in part by our insatiable demand for digital services, whether click and collect retailing, takeaway apps that link SMEs to consumers, or innovative transport apps that link open source data to allow us to transit London faster.
Britain spends more online per head of population than any other country in the world. That is testament to the dynamism of our digital economy, which is driving job creation and prosperity. Research from Tech City UK and Nesta showed that between 2011 and 2014, the tech and digital sector created jobs nearly three times more quickly than the wider economy. Crucially, they are fantastic jobs: the average salary in the sector is £50,000 a year, 36% higher than in the rest of the economy. It is also making our public services more efficient and responsive. The Government’s digital by default programme is transforming how citizens interact with the state, making it easier for people to get the support they need and saving nearly £2 billion a year that can be reinvested in front-line services.
We can be proud of what Britain is already achieving, but we cannot unlock our full potential as a digital nation if we allow that digital revolution to not be an inclusive one. As the committee’s report highlights, the unequal distribution of digital skills means we are at risk of leaving some groups behind. The report forensically sets out the detailed picture, but in the interests of brevity, and not wishing to repeat what other noble Lords have said, I will highlight a couple of areas that particularly concern me.
The first one is the disadvantaged groups. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, pointed out, 10 million adults in the UK lack basic digital skills as defined by Doteveryone. That means they do not know how to send an email, do a web search or fill in a job application online. However, those 10 million people are not evenly spread across the population. Nearly half are in disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. The disabled and women are disproportionately likely to be offline. As workplaces and public services become digitised, we risk exacerbating existing social divides, making it harder for vulnerable groups to find work or to access the services they most depend on.
My second concern is gender. The committee is right to highlight that women are disproportionately likely to lack digital skills or to pursue technology careers. Believe me, I feel it: as a female chief executive of a digital company, I am quite a rare breed. Sadly, it came as little surprise to read in the report that just 10% of app developers are women. Without more young women studying STEM careers at school and university and being encouraged into technology careers, that is simply not going to change and our digital future will be one-sided.
The third concern is business. The transition to online is a challenge for any organisation. I run an internet service provider, and we are still learning how to use the very product we sell. No organisation makes the transition from nondigital to digital without assistance. This is particularly true of Britain’s SMEs. Research by Lloyds shows that more than a quarter of SMEs do not think that the internet is relevant to them. That is despite the fact that the most digitally mature SMEs are a third more likely to be growing.
Put simply, the digital revolution is at risk of being a partial one. Without addressing the growing gulf in digital skills, we risk permanently disadvantaging some groups. That would be a tragedy for those individuals but also artificially cap Britain’s potential to be the world’s leading technology and digital economy.
I believe that universal digital literacy will be every bit as important as basic literacy was during the industrial revolution and that if we do not grasp that now, it will be too late and other countries will get ahead of us. What should we do about it?
Too often, debates about the digital economy and digital skills focus on infrastructure. I run an infrastructure business, so of course I think infrastructure is important, but it is not the only thing that will drive basic digital literacy and skills. We must not conflate the supply of infrastructure with the ability to use that technology.
The vast majority of the 10 million people without basic digital skills have access to superfast broadband today if they want it. Many live in households with superfast broadband connection, but they do not know how to use it. They are scared of it; they think it is not for them; they lack the skills to make use of the digital world, not the infrastructure. We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that extending coverage is a substitute for tackling the digital skills deficit.
The committee is absolutely right to call for more robust intervention to address the digital skills challenge. I welcome the vast majority of the report’s recommendations, and I hope they find support from all sides of the House. I want to highlight three specific things to focus our efforts on universal basic digital literacy.
The first is a strengthened government strategy, perhaps to take advantage of the fact that the strategy has not yet been published. I encourage my noble friend to ensure that the digital strategy contains a detailed plan for universal basic digital literacy. We will never turn people from digital citizens to digital workers to digital makers if they do not have the basic digital skills. Co-ordinating that—the role that government can play as the convener, the challenger, of the private sector and the third sector—is hugely valuable.
I defer to the great experts in this House on education, but it is also essential that we focus on equipping our young people with the skills they will need in tomorrow’s economy. That can be done together with the private sector, so I welcome the proposals for greater contact between tech companies and teachers, including industry support to reform FE courses and to roll out industry-endorsed qualifications. That will be essential.
Finally, I focus on one essential as a businesswoman, which is money. We have to be honest in acknowledging that eradicating digital exclusion will not be free. I am mindful of the pressures on very limited government resources, but I feel that there is scope to review the case for investing in universal basic digital skills.
The Government expect to save £8 billion over the lifetime of this Parliament by moving services online. That will not be possible if 10 million adults remain digitally excluded. It is not expensive to teach people to use the internet. Research from the Tinder Foundation has shown that it can cost as little as £47 to open up the digital world to someone, to give them those skills. Clearly, that investment would reap rewards for the individual but also by unlocking that efficiency for government, and set us on the path to becoming a proper digital leader. We are willing to invest in higher-end digital skills development; why are we not so keen on investing in basic universal digital literacy?
I conclude with a note of optimism. We have a digital skills challenge, as all nations do, but I am hopeful that if we embrace the digital revolution, as we embraced the industrial revolution a century or more ago, we can emerge as one of the strongest digital nations—not just for the few, not just for one sex, but for everyone. I believe that digital skills can play a role in uniting the country and helping us all to prosper, and that is a prize worth striving for.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston (Lab)
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on her chairing of our Select Committee and her excellent introduction to the debate. Much will have changed in the ever-expanding digital world in the 16 months since our report was published. We offered our conclusions to, and drafted a digital agenda for, whichever Government might be elected at last year’s May general election. As the noble Baroness said, at the end of last year DCMS promised that a five-year digital strategy would be published in early 2016. Apparently, it was completed in February but has since been stuck awaiting approval from No. 10, quite the opposite of the urgent action called for in our report. I therefore take this opportunity to remind your Lordships of some of the reasons why the committee recommended that an ambitious government-led digital agenda should be given a high priority.
Our report, Make or Break: The UK’s Digital Future, advised the new Government to establish a single cohesive digital agenda. The need for a more cohesive approach was emphasised by many of our witnesses, who complained not of government or public service inactivity but of the bewildering number of old and new initiatives, good, bad and indifferent. We were also told that a shared vision was lacking of what the digital revolution might mean for people across the country, for their families and their jobs, for the economy and, indeed, for the future security of the UK.
We heard from respected economists that an estimated 35% of current jobs in the UK could be automated over the next two decades. Since then, that prediction has been given widespread coverage in the media. A recent headline in the Times claims that,
“Robots could exterminate the middle class”.
Another warns of,
“The robot coming to take your job”,
with the strapline underneath:
“We are on the cusp of a techno-revolution that could make us all redundant”.
According to the Financial Times just last month, we are completely unprepared for the “robot revolution”.
The digitalised transition is happening so quickly that millions are being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide, especially the elderly, the unskilled and the underqualified. At the higher end of education, an increasing number of graduates cannot find stable or rewarding jobs. Parents worry about how to guide their children towards a career path with prospects. Research published today by Citizens Advice reveals that 800,000 workers are on zero-hour contracts, 1.1 million more are on temporary contracts, and another 2.3 million are working variable shift patterns, making a total of 4.5 million in insecure jobs, feeding public anxiety about the changing economy and the impact of the digital revolution.
Add to all that social and personal insecurity the threat of cybersecurity; business data are stolen and banks are robbed by cybercriminals, while financial scams go unreported. Terrorism, money laundering and all kinds of criminality thrive anonymously on the so-called “dark web”—and, we are told, it could get worse. Last week Robert Hannigan, the head of GCHQ, said that the arrival of quantum computers inside the next decade will crack even the most sophisticated encryption and undermine the foundations of internet security.
In these increasingly unpredictable times in international affairs and democratic politics, the internet and social media add to the growing public anxiety. Given the disruptive potential of the digital age, with its novel technologies and unintended consequences, our report encouraged the UK Government to take a much stronger leadership role. Our committee voiced concern that the UK might be left behind in the new digital era and that we were at a tipping point. With exquisite timing, an updating of our February 2015 report is published today by the Commons Committee on Science and Technology. Its findings reinforced our concerns. Some 90% of jobs now require some degree of digital skill. The UK needs another 745,000 workers with digital skills by 2017. The digital skills gap costs the economy £63 billion a year in lost income, and the Commons committee reckons that 12 million British adults lack basic digital skills and that 6 million have never used the internet. Those are alarming statistics, but, sadly, the Commons committee says that it doubts that the Government will give,
“sufficient weight to the vital areas for change that we have highlighted”.
As a member of your Lordships’ Digital Skills Committee, I share these doubts. I hope that in his reply the Minister will tell us whether the Government’s digital strategy, when it is finally published, will reflect the priorities of the Lords and Commons committees and will actively promote the cultural change required to meet the challenges of the new digital age.
Lord Foster of Bath (LD)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, who served as a member of the committee—or the flock, as my noble friend Lord Kirkwood put it. I begin by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, on the work she has done and acknowledging that in a brief contribution it is simply not possible to do justice to such an excellent and wide-ranging report.
One thing is clear from the contributions we have already had, and it will no doubt be echoed in those which are to follow. There seems to be unanimity in your Lordships’ House that we are living in a rapidly changing world and a rapidly changing world of work, a world in which skills, and digital skills in particular, are the currency of the 21st-century labour market. As we deal with that digital revolution and the revolution in artificial intelligence that is coming rapidly up behind it, it is clear that we need people with digital skills to help UK plc keep pace and thrive. Frankly, we simply do not have enough of them. That is why we need that digital skills revolution and, as the report so eloquently puts it, a single digital agenda without which the economic future looks rather bleak.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, referred to the Tinder Foundation, which he chairs. He will be well aware that, together with Go ON UK, it carried out research which demonstrates not only the scale of the task but the real benefit of us tackling it. It looked into the social and economic impact of a lack of digital skills on both the individual and the country as a whole. The report calculated that the cost of investment in skills and devices would be £1.65 billion up to 2025, but it showed that the benefit to individuals and the country would amount to £14.3 billion over the same period; a cost-benefit ratio of almost £10 for every £1 invested. Clearly it is an investment worth making.
There is no shortage of suggestions about how we should move forward or of reports. As we have already heard, only today the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee issued its report Digital Skills Crisis, which talks of the need for a step change to halt the digital skills crisis and bring an end to digital exclusion once and for all. It clearly echoes the views of your Lordships’ Select Committee.
The timing of our debate is particularly fortuitous because it precedes the publication of the Government’s long-awaited digital strategy. I suppose we can only hope that the only reason it has not yet appeared in the Downing Street grid is that Mr Ed Vaizey was determined to hear the pearls of wisdom from your Lordships before finalising it. I hope we will see it soon. That is what so many of the reports say. They all have a number of common threads. They all say that currently we have a pretty good record. For instance, they recognise that, helped by our amazingly successful creative industries, we have the largest digital economy in the G20. As the Government’s response states, we are a founding member of D5, the network of some of the most digitally advanced Governments in the world, and we are also becoming a major attraction for inward investment. Venture capital in London’s tech companies is now 20 times what it was just five years ago. However, all the reports are clear: that record is at risk. We have heard many statistics today showing that, for instance, 16% of the population remain offline; 23% of adults, half of them working age, do not have the required level of basic digital skills; 90% of all new jobs require digital skills, not just in some niche area, as the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, but across all sectors; and, crucially, nearly three-quarters of large UK companies say they are suffering from a gap in digital skills.
The reports are all clear that this is a constraint to growth and must be addressed. Rightly, they all point to some excellent work that is already being carried out by Google’s Digital Garage Academy, Creative Skillset, the BBC and many others, on which we can build. However, they all point to work that needs to be done right across all sectors, in schools, colleges, apprenticeship schemes, universities and businesses, not forgetting the work with SMEs in attracting more women, as we heard, and in ensuring that we have the digital infrastructure. As we heard earlier, from the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, there is also the whole issue of lifelong learning.
I have time to touch on only two subjects, schools and infrastructure. In schools, while I welcome our new world-beating computing curriculum, of which we should all be very proud, we should also acknowledge that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said earlier, we need to achieve universal digital literacy. That means we need to place digital and technology skills alongside literacy and numeracy as the three building blocks of all education and employment.
There is another matter that is not touched on enough. Here I echo the remarks by other Members about our education system, which is currently so content-heavy. There is a real problem in our schools at the moment. We still have the industrial revolution model of,
“Ram it in, ram it in!
Children’s heads are hollow.
Ram it in, ram it in!
Still there’s more to follow”.
We need to be concentrating on creativity, imagination, innovation and risk-taking. One great thing we can do is to use the digital revolution and the technologies that it has presented in our schools to help us to achieve that, with much more individualised learning. An individualised learning approach could, for example, go out of its way to help children with special educational needs. However, we also have to pick up the point made by others about the chronic shortage of qualified confident ICT teachers, and recognise that many of those who are in post do not have appropriate qualifications. We need to recruit and train more specialist ICT teachers, and to provide those already in post with improved continuing professional development.
The Commons report today makes another important point not covered in your Lordships’ report:
“Given that digital skills are of the highest priority to the future of the UK economy and the future chances of young people, we find it surprising that computing is not explicitly considered in Ofsted’s schools inspection framework”.
The committee goes on to recommend that it should be. I agree, and I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to this idea. I certainly hope she will respond supportively.
On my second chosen area, infrastructure, I am concerned that we have a lack of ambition. Clearly so is the committee, referring to the claim of 10 million UK premises, homes and businesses currently unable to access superfast broadband, and quoting the Times, for instance, saying that the UK’s broadband speeds are stuck in the slow lane. The response that we currently have from the Government seems very limited: a universal service obligation of just 10 megabits per second, way behind what some other countries are offering. We need to do better and to be more ambitious, and we need to adopt the approach of the committee, which defines the internet as a utility service available for all to access and use. To achieve that, we need to pick up a point, which again was raised by other noble Lords—we need to concentrate on demand stimulation. If more people understood the benefits they can get from high-speed broadband, more people will take it up and the unit costs will go down. There are many ways of doing that: one great example is the BBC iPlayer, which has driven up demand.
I want to end by asking the Minister two questions about the BBC which are relevant to this debate. Earlier the Minister announced that there was a settlement for BBC money that would be earmarked for assistance with broadband rollout. Yet more recently she announced in your Lordships’ House the establishment of a contestable fund for programme production which will use £20 million of unallocated funds from within that earmarked BBC money. Money that was originally earmarked for broadband rollout will now be used for what I have to describe as a pet government project. Can the Minister explain why the Government have put that pet project ahead of getting on with the vital issue of broadband rollout?
My second question is on upskilling and demand management. The existing BBC charter has within it a digital purpose. Part of that requires the BBC to take,
“a leading role in the switchover to digital television”.
Clearly, that has been done very successfully and does not need to be replicated in the new charter. However, the other part of the digital purpose says that the BBC,
“in promoting its other purposes”,
should be,
“helping to deliver to the public the benefit of emerging communications technologies and services”.
The recent BBC White Paper makes no reference to any similar purpose for the BBC in the future. Can the Minister explain why not and will she at least confirm that the BBC will continue to have a role in research and development and technological innovation, and that nothing in the new charter will prevent the BBC continuing its excellent work to drive digital take-up and skills with developments and initiatives such as Make it Digital, which has reached 23 million people so far, or its digital traineeships for young unemployed people?
I hope that the excellent Select Committee report, and several others that echo its recommendations, will have significantly influenced the Government’s digital strategy, and I hope that we will not have to wait much longer to find out.
Lord Aberdare (CB)
My Lords, it was both a privilege and a great pleasure to serve on the Digital Skills Committee, which was brilliantly chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, with a first-class support team. I echo the tributes already paid to them. I also pay tribute to my colleagues on the committee, including the noble Baroness, not least for already saying just about everything that I had planned to say myself.
The widespread concern about and importance of the issue we were addressing was indicated by the fact that, in our relatively short existence, we received oral evidence from 59 witnesses, together with 111 written evidence submissions. I share the disappointment that the Government’s response to our 144-page report was a mere five pages long, with few specifics relating to skills as opposed to hard infrastructure. The fact that we have had to wait until today, a full 16 months after publication, to debate the report is also disappointing—although, in trying to refresh my memory of it, I have found its recommendations even more relevant and urgent now. Of course, our findings have been strongly reinforced by the just-published report of the Science and Technology Committee in another place, which is appropriately entitled Digital Skills Crisis.
The digital economy represents both opportunity and crisis for the UK. If we get it right, it can give a powerful boost to UK productivity and competitiveness, and to our future economic success. If we get it wrong, we will inexorably be left behind in the global race. There are two essential elements to getting it right: access to digital services—which essentially comes down to broadband and mobile coverage and speeds—and having the skills needed to understand, use and develop those services effectively and securely, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, emphasised.
We are reasonably well up with the field at present in terms of our broadband and mobile infrastructure, our wide take-up of digital technology, especially among the young, and our traditional strengths in creativity, design and innovation, as well as in sectors such as financial services, science and education. At the same time, we have heard that up to 9.5 million people in the UK lack even minimum digital skills, and 30% of SMEs do not have a website. The “make or break” challenge for government is to ensure that we keep pedalling fast enough to stay up with the peloton—there are plenty of other countries competing in the race.
Nowadays, almost every occupation requires digital skills, from baking to banking, construction to chemistry, farming to fashion and healthcare to hospitality—I could go on. These skills, especially at the higher levels, are in seriously short supply, with 72% of large companies and 49% of SMEs suffering from technical skills gaps, and skills shortages being cited by employers as their number one risk. According to techUK, unfilled roles requiring digital skills are already costing the UK economy some £2 billion a year.
I will comment on just three aspects of what is needed, two relating to skills and the third to broadband connectivity. The first is the education and training challenge presented by the digital revolution. If we are to be a leading digital nation, every single aspect of our approach to education and training will need to be adapted to reflect the needs of the digital economy and to develop the skills that employers will need—from primary school through to university and beyond. As we have heard, digital literacy must be recognised as on a par with English and maths, to be addressed appropriately by all educational courses and providers. I shall give a couple of examples from the report of what that might involve.
First, there is likely to be a growing need and demand for new sorts of learning: shorter, more modular and more targeted courses, including at further and higher education institutions; greater focus on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship; online and self-learning options—for example, via MOOCs, massive open online courses; a greater focus on “learning to learn”, as the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, pointed out; and much greater engagement with employers in both the design and delivery of courses. Every school should have an employer governor with digital awareness.
There is also a need for more digital apprenticeships. According to techUK, there are currently not enough new apprenticeship standards in areas such as cybersecurity, big data analytics and programming. All apprenticeships, in whatever field, should include a digital skills element. The Government’s commitment to 3 million new apprentice starts in England by 2020 is welcome, and the new apprenticeship levy should ensure continuing availability of funding. The process of defining new apprenticeship standards is, rightly, employer led, but how will the Minister ensure that it requires minimum levels of digital, as well as literacy and numeracy, skills and that the new standards are up and running faster? The report from the other place makes some useful suggestions on how to enhance digital skills through apprenticeships. Indeed, it echoes many of the points made in our report with equal force and, if anything, even greater urgency.
My second comment relates to cybersecurity. This often seems something of a poor relation in the glamorous digital world, but it is crucial not just in terms of national security matters, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, but to tackle the growing threat of cybercrime—there were 44 million reported cyberattacks in the UK as far back as 2011—to protect online safety, whether from scams or online bullying or pornography, and to maintain personal privacy through security of data and transparency about how it is used. Everyone who uses digital services needs to be aware of these issues and to have the skills needed to assess the risks of digital systems and to use them safely and securely—another education and training challenge, not least for SMEs. Beyond that, there is an opportunity for the UK, with its expertise in this area, to gain commercial advantage through developing and marketing advanced cybersecurity skills. How will the Government seek to promote the culture shift that is needed—yet another one—in attitudes to cybersecurity?
Thirdly, I come to broadband. It became clear in the inquiry that good, reliable broadband access should be recognised as a utility service as essential as electricity or water. So I welcome the broadband universal service obligation proposed in the Government’s planned digital economy Bill, with its guaranteed access to at least 10 megabits per second broadband.
The UK currently has reasonably good broadband coverage and speeds, but it was something of an eye-opener to find that, in a table of average broadband speeds in 33 European capitals, London came only 26th. Countries ranked above us for overall digital proficiency include Switzerland, Singapore, the USA, Finland, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. I ask the Minister: are we trying just to keep up or even to catch up, or are we seeking to get ahead of the field in order to fully capitalise on our digital strengths? Should not we be pushing for fibre connections to every home, for example, rather than just to the nearest street cabinet? In that way, even in rural areas, such as where I live in Wales, everyone would have access not just to superfast but to ultrafast broadband, with speeds of 100 megabits or more; or even to hyperfast or gigabit broadband, with speeds up to 1,000 megabits, in line with the Minister Ed Vaizey’s ambition to become a “Gigabit Britain” over the next five to 10 years. South Korea has already announced plans for a national 5G wireless network offering 1 gigabit speeds by 2020.
That leads me finally to the Government’s role. As we have heard, the digital strategy, promised in a number of debates from last autumn onwards, has still not appeared. Whether or not that is because of the mysteries of the Downing Street grid, I am not sure. However, what does this say about the priority being given by government to this absolutely essential aspect of our future national competitiveness, whether in or out of the EU—although I believe that the challenges of meeting our digital skills needs would be considerably greater outside the EU? The inquiry recognised that the Government cannot address this issue on their own. There are essential roles for education, employers, third-sector bodies, local and devolved government, and the regions—indeed, for all of us. But somebody needs to set the tone, or to act as “conductor of the orchestra”, as the report puts it. That can only be the Government. At present, the tone seems to be disappointingly muted.
The brief response in July has little specific to say about skills. It focuses on the formation of a new digital infrastructure and inclusion implementation task force, mentioned no less than four times in the five pages. I understand that this body has been constituted as a Cabinet sub-committee and will include eight Ministers. This might go some way towards meeting the report’s central recommendations for the Government to develop an ambitious digital agenda for the UK, driven by a Cabinet Minister and regularly evaluated and reported on. However, where is the vision for the future? Where is the transparency about what the Cabinet sub-committee is doing? Where is the trumpet-blowing about the key importance of digital skills? Where is the leadership to drive and encourage the vital contributions of all the other players in the orchestra?
The Government’s approach to grasping the opportunity presented to the UK by the digital economy seems to me, on current evidence, to be half-hearted, even though their heart is in the right place and they are undertaking and supporting numerous worthwhile, albeit piecemeal, initiatives. I hope that the Minister will be able to convince me that I am wrong, and that the long-awaited digital strategy this summer will really get to grips with issues such as those I have mentioned, while demonstrating a new level of commitment and urgency in addressing this “make or break” challenge.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I share my colleagues’ thanks to the most excellent staff and the support that we had on the committee and to all who contributed to our deliberation. Most of all, however, I thank our chair, who did a superb job in holding the committee together and getting it somewhere sensible—she really should be chair of Ofsted. I also share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, on the Government’s lack of response. There really is a role for the Government to play in taking leadership and steering the country into and through the digital age. However, when you find out that HMRC still does not have email, you realise that there is a bit to do. We have an Investigatory Powers Bill coming to this House soon which has been drafted without any concept that perhaps the individual citizen needs protecting too in their daily life on the internet. There really is a lot to do, and to have a directed and centralised will in Government to push this through in all departments is a change which is needed. I am very disappointed that the Government have yet to pick this up.
I hope it will be uncontroversial if I say that the Government, when dealing with IT and the consequences of IT for the country, need fewer national, top-down rules and more principles that get worked out locally, with users, so that they actually work on the ground. We are seeing too much centralised thinking, creating a set of rules that the rest of the country is meant to go by. When you come to put this into place, given the local job picture and the training facilities available, it just does not fit. I very much hope that the Government will take the opportunity to support local digital skills partnerships as they emerge. I know that several are under way.
I was very impressed by what the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, had to say, not that I agree with him entirely on the subject of the role of knowledge in the curriculum. There is a great deal to be said for knowing things before one spouts opinions but, when it comes to education bearing on digital skills, we have to take a very radical view of what the right structures are. There are university courses out there which are teaching Flash, for goodness’ sake. People are paying good money to be taught something which is certifiably useless to their future career.
Education for the operational level of IT is naturally much shorter than a degree. A lot of the jobs available are essentially technician-style jobs: you need maybe six months of intensive education, a couple of eight-week bursts of blended learning and a bit of experience in between. With that, you can take someone who is NEET and turn them into a useful employee. You do not need long courses, and anyway what is the point of them? The whole of someone’s life when they are in IT is going to be learning and relearning. I am sure it has happened to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just as it has happened to me. I am having to learn another computer language now because the ones I know are out of date. This is the same for everybody involved in IT: it is an absolutely non-stop, continuous package of learning. To think that you can learn three years of it at the beginning is just mistaken. There are some things about computer education that are permanent: the way to program well; the way to manage a project. Those things change slowly, but the individual packages, programming languages and sets of data that you work with change all the time. That needs to be much more directed towards a lifelong process.
In the report, we call for learning to be based much more on industry requirements—on a fast, up-to-date response to real demand. One example of the way in which the Government are standing in the way of that is the prohibition on funding industry-designed courses. In large chunks of IT, industry courses—things from Cisco, Microsoft, Apple or whatever—are the way that the industry operates. They are what employers want. That is the currency out there. It is a global industry. We cannot change that by fiat in the way that we can change a GCSE spec. We have to fit in and work with the way the world works. If we are educating an apprentice in some generic course that does not focus on an industry-understood capability, all we are doing is turning out people who are not fit for work. They will have to be retrained as soon as they are hired. The industry response to that is to say either, “Hire someone from India if we can”, or, “Export the work to India, because we need the capability and we need the thing done now”. We have to look at how we are working within the realities of the industry and we need short, sharp, totally up-to-date courses, which cannot be devised through the standard ways of Ofqual and slow government processes. They have to be what is accepted by the industry now.
The other thing that distresses me in the way that the Government are proceeding at the moment is how apprenticeships are evolving into myriad tiny compartmentalised qualifications, with job descriptions that probably will not be there in two years’ time. We are in danger of breaching the 1,000 barrier in the number of apprenticeship qualifications out there. It is looking to be worse than the qualifications pattern that underlies it. In IT, few digital jobs do not access other parts of the world. Most of the jobs that we are creating are not just IT but tied into other bits of the real world. Teaching a motor mechanic how a car works, for example, is half IT at the moment.
There is an idea that you can compartmentalise things. The committee visited an entirely undecorated computing department at Imperial where you would think that the arts did not exist at all. That is not where IT belongs. It is part of all our lives. Apprenticeships specifications that are too narrow and rigid will not last. They will not have value for the people who take them because they will be out of date and irrelevant in two or three years’ time. We have to write the specs broadly and allow them to be things that will last. They probably need to last 10 years before someone’s experience in life outlives the fact that they started as an apprentice. They have to have more breadth and reliability than they do now.
Beyond that, I very much hope that the Government will support the efforts of the Tech Partnership to help people initiate an interest in IT careers. It is wrong to think that we can do it through the educational system. It is too slow and it misses too many people. An awful lot of people out there, particularly women, could have taken an IT career early on but did not take the right route. There are lots of people who want to change career, who have got bored with what they are doing or are returning to careers after a period out of work or doing other things, who will have no great concept that a career in IT might be for them. A short introductory course that they can do, and at the end of it have confidence that IT might be for them and that it might be worth taking up an apprenticeship or longer course, is enormously important. TechFuture badges, to echo something that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said, will become a way in which people’s skills are judged and evaluated by future employers. The Government are getting behind that through the Careers & Enterprise Company and the enterprise passport initiated by my noble friend Lord Young. That is an important way to go, as are the two-day back-to-work courses. People who have never done IT before are given a chance to see if that is a skill set that they might have. The Government need to find ways to make such opportunities easily available to people all through their lives because we will not tackle the skills shortage we have in IT just through education. We need to recruit an awful lot of people who think that they are past that stage but now find they need to do something else.
Lord Maxton
My Lords, I start by thanking my noble friend Lady Morgan—or “Sally”, as I would call her—for the excellent report and for the way she introduced it. I am not the only noble Lord to speak who is not a member of the committee, but I am certainly one of the few, and I hope that noble Lords will therefore allow me to range a little wider than the report itself.
First, I have a confession to make. I know that in this House I am considered to be something of an expert with my iPad, iPhone and computer. I can use them. I know that people laugh at me when I pull my iPad out of my pocket in the Bishops’ Bar. I produced it at the dinner table and played one noble Lord a song on YouTube that he had asked for.
Lord Burnett (LD)
I have not had a chance to thank the noble Lord. As I remember, he kindly played “Stardust” by Nat King Cole for me.
Lord Maxton
Exactly. That makes the point that I am considered to be almost a nerd by some people in the House of Lords, and certainly I describe myself as the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. But my confession is that while I know exactly what I want to know and how to use a computer, I do not have the foggiest idea of how a computer works. I know how to work it, but I do not know how it works. I can drive a car. I know how to drive it, but I have no idea how the internal combustion engine works. I can turn my television on. By the way, I can even record a programme at home in Hamilton from my iPad or my iPhone from here. I can stand here and record a programme at home. I can do all that, but I have no idea how a television works.
The point I am trying to make is twofold. First, there are two elements to the educational programme that we require. I think that the report highlights that, but so far the comments have been about education in IT skills rather than how to use IT. That is an educational process which ought to cover the whole of the population, not just the few who will be involved in IT skills. We have to ensure that everyone has the computer skills that are required. They do not have to have the actual coding skills that are needed by some experts. It is something that is now desperately important. In fact, my own view is that as a democracy and as political organisations, we are failing to keep up with what is happening in the world of technology.
It was not entirely a joke when I intervened on my noble friend Lord Knight and said that the first person who will live to 150 has already been born and is probably in their mid-30s. That happens to be the case if the developments in genetic engineering continue. We are likely to find genetic cures, which by the way require the use of the internet and computers in order to bring everything together—otherwise it would take hundreds of people years to develop genetic engineering. But those cures are just around the corner. Are we designing our political structures around the fact that people will live to 150? No, of course we are not.
On education, are we talking about the use of computers in education, rather than training people in the skills required in terms of computers? No. I have not picked up a book in the last three years. Why? It is because I read all my books on a Kindle. I read quite a lot, but I read on a Kindle. Why are we not introducing Kindles in schools? Why are we not showing children how we should be doing certain things in schools? Why are teachers standing in front of a class telling children something that they could find out from their iPad by asking the question on Google?
Why do we still vote by putting a cross on a piece of paper with a pencil when we could be using the internet to cast our votes electronically? To be honest, our younger people now laugh at the fact they have to go to a school to vote. That is one of the reasons they do not vote. If they could vote electronically by using some form of ID to ensure safety, they would.
So we are in danger of our democracy failing to keep up with where we are going in technology, with smart cards. We are failing to keep up with the way technology is moving. We have to try to ensure that we move forward all the time and that we keep up with technology. We should educate people in two ways: first, we should educate all people to use the technology; secondly, we must have a skilled workforce. We need to have both education systems working, but the second one does not require everybody receiving the same education as everybody else.
Baroness Janke (LD)
My Lords, I too did not take part in the Select Committee, but I will speak on some of the issues raised in the very comprehensive and excellent report, in particular developments in my city of Bristol. I have been told by key members of the digital community that the city council, through its Bristol Futures division, provided leadership, support and space for partnerships between business, the universities and the voluntary sector to make impressive progress on the digital agenda. This community has harnessed the energy and imagination of individuals’ enterprises to bring a creative and innovative culture to the city that has resulted in national and international recognition as the UK’s leading smart city alongside London.
Some time ago, the council had the foresight to acquire a 75-kilometre-long fibre and communications network from Rediffusion, a cable TV pioneer. This is known as the BNet. It is currently managed and maintained by a consortium and supports the council’s ICT requirements, including telephony, data, traffic-related network communications and CCTV. The consortium will use spare capacity to offer new superfast and ultrafast broadband services to Bristol’s businesses. This, of course, will generate revenues for council services. It is hoped that the consortium will also develop the additional 60 kilometres available to expand broadband and superfast broadband to more SMEs.
As I have said, Bristol, with London, is the UK’s leading smart city. The city has achieved this accolade through the use of the BNet, Bristol University’s £12 million computer, and a new city operating system that stores and analyses data. Bristol is sometimes described in publications as a giant laboratory for a range of innovative projects using big data, including how to solve problems such as traffic congestion, air pollution and assisted living for the elderly. These systems are also used to collect and analyse data from the city’s trial of self-driving cars.
In terms of regional clusters, Bristol-Bath is one of the UK’s leading centres for technology businesses, according to a Tech City and NESTA report published earlier this year. Bristol and Bath outperform London as the most productive cluster, producing £296,000 of sales per employee, as against London’s £205,000. It is important to many of us in cities in England, particularly, to point out just what can be achieved outside as well as in London. This progress has been achieved by very strong collaboration and close working relationships between the world-class universities, businesses, local councils and the local enterprise partnership. It is fair to refer to my noble friend Lord Foster’s plea about the BBC: it is no secret that the BBC in Bristol has also driven the digital agenda here and added to this culture of innovation.
However, this success is not evenly shared across all the neighbourhoods and communities of the city. Bristol City Council has developed a digital inclusion programme to improve access to skills, connectivity and equipment. A computer reuse scheme was launched in 2011, through which redundant council PCs are refurbished and made available to those most at risk of being digitally excluded. More than 3,000 PCs have been made available over the last five years. Training and software packages were provided by local firms, by which I mean firms within the deprived communities of the city. Between 2011 and 2015 the council ran a digital skills programme providing 10 hours of basic training to older people and disabled adults and their carers. Citizens Online and BT supported the programme and with the help of 66 volunteers more than 2,100 people were helped to get online. In addition there are a number of very innovative local projects, again run in the city’s most deprived communities, particularly through the Knowle West Media Centre.
The results of this work are now becoming visible. Official data from ONS show that in the first quarter of 2015 91.3% of Bristol adults—that is, 328,000 adults over 16— stated that they had used the internet in the last three months. The percentage of people who have ever used the internet has been rising faster in Bristol than nationally, and Bristol has the lowest percentage of people who have never used the internet of all the English core cities. So in terms of the objectives of the report there are practical trials and practical experience that need to be shared and I believe that collaboration and sharing, together with autonomy and freedom to innovate are key if we are to drive the digital agenda forward.
However, despite the need for basic digital skills—I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, in her plea for these—there is also a need for increased access to tailored IT skills for different groups. Basic IT skills are vital for those who are not yet digitally included, but many young people, particularly those in deprived communities looking for work in digital, creative or IT, would benefit from access to affordable, accessible training in more advanced and marketable skills, such as data analytics and coding. These, however, can be very expensive and if they were available in local venues and priced attractively, this might increase the pipeline of young people entering the workforce from more deprived areas. I hope that the Minister will take on board some of the experiences from Bristol and that we will work on sharing some of these experiences.
I welcome the report’s recommendations, particularly the need to support existing successful university/business/LEP and local authority partnerships. I believe that there is the imagination, creativity, energy and enthusiasm in our cities and regions to achieve a step change in developing the digital economy at a pace that would enable us to catch up with international competitors. However, that needs support, encouragement, the sharing of good practice, space and autonomy without the dead weight of some of the conditions and restraints that are sometimes forthcoming from government, which usually inhibit creativity and slow momentum. As the report says, we are at a tipping point and the Government need to play their part in ensuring that the UK is not left behind.
Lord Haskel (Lab)
My Lords, as many noble Lords have said, this report was inspired by the speed at which our lives at work and at home are being digitalised. We started work two years ago and reported eight months later, which was before the last election. The new Government, in their brief response, agreed with all our five modest recommendations. That is good, but we are still waiting.
In essence, we said that our economy called for national self-improvement in understanding the digital world and in acquiring the skills to deal with it. We also called for better infrastructure. Today, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee confirmed our view in its report. I hope that the digital economy Bill will deliver on these reports. However, as I say, we are still waiting.
This was a fascinating committee on which to serve. I am grateful to all our witnesses, who were evangelists for the cause of digital education. I am also grateful to Emily Greenwood and Aaron Speer, my noble friend Lady Morgan, who led us, my fellow committee members and our specialist advisers.
As my noble friend said in her excellent introduction, this is a huge topic, so we tried to deal with it in logical steps. We looked at learning digital skills at school, then the pathway from schools to work and higher education and helping those already at work to acquire these skills so that they could become more productive and employable, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said. When we looked at the world of education, I think we were rather surprised and encouraged by the number of initiatives. Since we wrote our report, these have multiplied and developed. In the debate on polytechnics a month ago, several noble Lords spoke about the importance of teaching digital skills at school. What came out of that debate was that many schools have discontinued design and technology in favour of digital skills. Apparently, this is partly because of teacher recruitment. We need both; it is not either/or.
However, there is good news. Since we started on our report, some 8 million schoolchildren have been given a BBC micro:bit or Raspberry Pi or something similar. Presumably, this is part of the BBC’s digital purpose, about which the noble Lord, Lord Foster, spoke. All this is being done to encourage children to learn coding and acquire digital skills. The ambition must be for this to be part of the school education of every child under the age of 16. However, it needs to be part of an overall scheme. Our report and that of the Commons both emphasise the importance of this hands-on skill becoming an integral part of education.
Helping this along is the European Space Agency—there is no escape from the referendum. Schoolchildren and adults are inspired by space travel. Thanks to the European Space Agency, every day you can see pictures of Tim Peake in his orbiting space capsule, which are specially prepared for his primary school’s project. He has become not only an astronaut but an educator, sending our children messages of encouragement. This is worth any number of lessons. Both he and the founder of Raspberry Pi—which is, incidentally, a charity—were both in the Birthday Honours List, and I hope noble Lords will join me in sending them congratulations.
As my noble friend Lady Morgan said, we also emphasised the importance of teaching the teachers. We welcomed the initiatives to provide this help, but recruitment is obviously a problem and we suggested solutions. The Commons report also speaks of recruiting problems. Reluctantly, I fear we may find that testing for these skills may be the way selected to help with teacher recruitment because testing always helps with recruitment.
In our report we spoke of the complicated and confusing pathway for non-academic students from school to work. This has been mentioned on many occasions in your Lordships’ House. The most recent was the report in April by the Select Committee on Social Mobility, mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and what a good report it is. It describes the transition as,
“complex and incoherent, with confusing incentives for young people and employers”.
This is no way to ensure that these young people are properly equipped with digital skills—skills they are going to need whatever they do—and this transition needs urgent attention.
As other noble Lords have said, we made the point that these skills will be the basis of many new jobs. Indeed, since we wrote our report, estimates have been made that some 60% of the jobs that people will be doing in 10 years’ time do not even exist today. The Commons report speaks of 750,000 workers with digital skills being required in the next two years. We all agree that the way to future-proof our young people must be to teach them digital skills, so I welcome the new National College for Digital Skills, which starts work in the autumn—a nice but rather rare example of evidence-based policy-making, if I may say so—but more is needed. The Government need to appoint a Minister to bring all this together—a conductor, as the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, put it.
We spoke about including a digital element in all apprenticeship schemes. Since then, a target of 3 million apprenticeships has been set and there is to be a levy. I hope the levy will encourage employers to see that the digital skills relevant to their particular industry will be included, but are these skills included in the quality standards that the Government are setting for these apprenticeship schemes?
In our report, we spoke of the way companies, especially small and medium-sized companies, will use digital skills to become more productive, innovative and market orientated. We also saw some routine accountancy and financial work and medical diagnostics being done by machines programmed by clever experts. This has progressed far more quickly than I expected, using big data techniques. Indeed, the Management Consultancies Association says that one-third of its members’ work, both public and private, is now digitalising products and services, so they, too, need digitally skilled recruits. All this reinforces our argument about the changing nature of work and the need for digital skills—again, confirmed by the Commons report.
Like my noble friend Lord Knight and the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, what surprised me is the rapid development of artificial intelligence. The visit to Hartree hinted at this and what the noble Baroness, Lady Janke, just told us about Bristol confirms it. If artificial intelligence continues at the same speed of travel, as I am sure it will, perhaps we should have given more thought in our report to the moral, social and ethical values of these digital skills. These same skills can find the connection between our genes and a disease to cure our illnesses, as my noble friend Lord Maxton told us, but they can also send autonomous weapons into battle—a chilling thought. So let us learn from the campaign on the public understanding of science, in which many noble Lords participated. People want to understand as well as to benefit from these new digital skills, and we must explain as well as provide. We have learned that if the public do not want it, the technology becomes discredited.
Another area within the social aspect of digital skills that requires careful thought is the so-called world of transactional employment—that is, casual work done over the internet. Thousands of people now work full-time or part-time in this way. Upwork alone has 20,000 on its list. You would certainly need digital skills to operate on these work platforms. However, together with digital skills, the Government need to ensure that these people could work inside the social safety net, rather than outside it as they seem to be doing at present.
Ours was a timely report, hugely relevant to the modern worlds of education and work and backed up by today’s Commons report. But these worlds are moving on and developing fast, so the time cannot be far away when another committee will have to continue the work where we left off. Perhaps the time for the next committee to start work will be after the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury, reports on technical education and after we have seen the details of the promised digital economy Bill. I think that it will require a committee of this House to ensure that society and digital skills keep in step and develop together, so that we will all benefit.
Lord Clement-Jones (LD)
My Lords, I start by congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, and all her colleagues on an excellent report and on today’s debate, which has been so excellent and thought-provoking. At times, in fact quite frequently and understandably, it has been underscored by considerable impatience. It is a shame that it has taken quite so long to debate this report.
In his contribution the noble Lord, Lord Knight, emphasised that digital is not really a sector any more but all-pervasive. This is illustrated by a recent report by McKinsey, saying that some 50% of the world’s traded services is already digitised and that 12% of global trade is conducted via e-commerce. Moreover, 3D technology will ensure a huge impact on physical trading flows in the years to come. I have just come back from China, and it is sometimes worth looking at how the UK is perceived from the outside. The UK’s digital economy is recognised as a world leader, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said. At 10% of GDP, its percentage is larger than that in any other G20 country.
The noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Haskel, lightly touched on the European Union aspect. In that context, I have considerable concerns that Brexit would have a major impact on our digital sector, including our software industry, particularly in respect of its inability to take full advantage of the European digital single market. Furthermore, Brexit could easily shrink the talent pool available to companies in the sector.
I hope that many of the points made by the committee’s digital future report will be incorporated in the forthcoming digital economy Bill. We all look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. For example, there is still time to rethink the ambition for the universal service obligation. At present, rollout will happen only on request and may not mean 100% coverage. Superfast broadband of at least 25 megabits per second is a utility, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said. It should be universal and the Government should be investing in it. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said, this is not just about infrastructure. My noble friends Lord Kirkwood and Lord Foster and the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, emphasised that exclusion is also a major danger, with 10 million people possibly being excluded. I very much like the emphasis placed on universal basic digital literacy, which we must emphasise in our public policy. The case for the investment payback was illustrated very well by my noble friend Lord Foster.
The report rightly places emphasis on the importance of regional clusters for digital development. It is not only the northern powerhouse; as my noble friend Lady Janke made clear, Bristol is also leading the way in becoming a smart city. Links with local universities are crucial in each case. But as the committee also points out, there is a great need to link industry and local government far more effectively with further education institutions as well. I welcome the funding of incubator facilities in Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, but I hope that, when elected, each of the mayors in those cities will appoint digital champions for their city regions and combined authorities to work with education and research institutions and private sector organisations.
There is so much interest outside the UK in the digital developments taking place in our cities that a point of clear contact is absolutely crucial. I hope that, following the Nurse review, the new UK research and innovation body under the leadership of Sir John Kingman will have a major impact on digital research strategy by building links between business and the research base, as he says. Will the Government set up a ministerial committee to provide oversight and co-ordination, as recommended by the Nurse review? Many noble Lords in this debate have asked for a much better method of co-ordinating government efforts in this area.
Above all, however, the Digital Skills Committee’s report draws attention to our major digital skills gap that, more dramatically, was called a crisis by the Commons Science and Technology Committee. Perhaps the Government have been guilty, as in the words of an advertisement, of turning a drama into a crisis. Recent estimates suggest that the UK is already losing a potential £2 billion a year from unfilled roles requiring digital skills, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, said. The scale of the growing gap over the next decade cannot be underestimated. In that context I welcome the recognition in the Birthday Honours List of Eben Upton, a pioneer of the Raspberry Pi computer that has helped so many young people to acquire digital skills.
More generally, however, is the DfE satisfied with the implementation of the computing curriculum? Is it really making an impact on growing the pipeline of digital talent in the UK, especially in the light of the committee’s finding that,
“Many teachers are not confident or equipped to deliver the new curriculum”?
The committee rightly stressed the importance, as did many noble Lords today, of encouraging women to enter the tech sector to bridge our digital skills gap, while techUK recommends that tech businesses, LEPs, local authorities and schools should collaborate to support organisations that provide events to show young girls the opportunities that digital and tech can offer. There are many other ways of introducing young women into the tech sector, such as the Government’s Your Life campaign, which a number of noble Lords commended. There is also techUK’s important back to work programme, which provides women returners with the tools and assurance they need to apply for tech sector roles. We need to redouble our efforts in that respect.
I accept that agility of education and training is needed, as emphasised by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. The noble Lords, Lord Janvrin and Lord Lucas, used the phrase “lifelong learning”, which must be one of the lessons learned from the committee’s report. However, there is a great need for more digital apprenticeship. What progress is being made by the new Apprenticeship Delivery Board? The apprenticeship levy could have significant unintended consequences for the tech sector: techUK has pointed out that tech companies will be some of the largest contributors to the levy but under current proposals will struggle to find relevant apprenticeships to train their workforces. I entirely take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that these apprenticeships should not be too narrow in their scope. What are the Government doing to address this?
Again, seen from outside the UK, are we doing enough to exploit our knowledge and research? We have a competitive edge in many areas, not least e-government. I would have been more fulsome about the Government Digital Service were it not for last week’s events, but the fact is that across government something has been created that other countries want to emulate. In 2013, the Government set out their strategy for their own digital services, but we now need a much broader strategy for how we as a nation can capitalise on our digital services and skills worldwide. I welcome the move of the Digital Economy Unit into a single department, but it needs to be much more assertive in promoting UK digital services and know-how internationally. I have almost lost count of the number of noble Lords who mentioned this, but when can we finally expect the digital strategy paper to be forthcoming? Will it be this summer, as promised in the Government’s response to this report, or slightly later? I look forward to hearing what the noble Baroness has to say on that.
The committee did not dwell on the intellectual property aspects, and the noble Baroness will be pleased to hear that I will not dwell on them today. Nevertheless the protection of intellectual property in this context is extremely important. Looking at the impact of digital, this is just a first step. Like a number of noble Lords, I am beginning to be concerned about how little planning for the next stage—that of artificial intelligence and robotics—we are doing. The pace of change is speeding up. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, used the phrase “failing to keep up”, and I entirely agree with that. The combined impact of digitisation and robotics, with AI, will mean the hollowing-out of many low-skilled jobs but also of many professional and managerial jobs. How much attention are we giving to educating our young people to enable them to benefit from this new world and adjust to it? We need to become expert in the use of information and data in making judgments. We will need to excel in creativity and the use of our imagination: EQ will be as important as IQ. Like my noble friend Lord Kirkwood, I look forward to a Select Committee on that subject to build on the work that this committee, and I very much hope the Liaison Committee will take note.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)
My Lords, we in this House are rightly proud of our committees. We understand that the reach of their work goes much beyond these four walls, and it is important that we support them and continue with them. Nothing could give me more pleasure than to introduce as excellent a report as the one we have been discussing this afternoon. We must thank my noble friend Lady Morgan and her committee for undertaking this very substantial piece of work, and thank the committee members for their individual contributions. It is quite clear from listening to the debate today that although these things take a lot of time it was quite a pleasurable gig: you can tell from the remarks that people enjoyed being gathered together by my noble friend Lady Morgan. The description of her as organising her flock is perhaps the key to how they have managed to come up with such an excellent report.
However, as has been said, the report has not been matched by the Government’s response, which I will come back to later. It is not just length that matters—although it is interesting that the discrepancy in page numbers is so large—it is the fact that it was delayed, did not deal in detail with the very large number of recommendations and failed completely to engage with the revolution that the report suggested is necessary if we are going to tackle the digital future that we face as a country and as individuals.
The report, taken as it stands, is still highly relevant despite being published in February 2015. It is refreshing because of its wide reach and the fact that it made every attempt to look in depth at the issues that it addressed, not just in its analysis of the problems but in the possible solutions. It has blue-sky thinking, which we always want to see in these reports, and has very practical proposals about how the recommendations could be made to stick. Of course the basis for that—as it is for all good policy-making—was the evidence that they sought. They not only sat here and received papers and presentations but went out and learned what was happening on the ground. That has all come out in this excellent report. It was supplemented by another good idea, which might be taken up more generally, which was to ask those who submitted evidence to put down a list of key asks. In other words, it made them do some of the hard work that often has to be done in government by refining the broadness of the thoughts so that there was a specific list of ideas from each of those who gave evidence. I think anybody who needs their thinking on this area gingered up could read those key asks and have a very good idea about the temperature out there and what people want to see happen.
When my noble friend Lady Morgan was asked about her report in an interview, she said:
“This report is a wake-up call to whoever forms the next Government in May”—
this was prior to the last general election.
“Digital is everywhere, with digital skills now seen as vital life skills. It’s obvious, however, that we’re not learning the right skills to meet our future needs”.
Interestingly, the newspapers picked up three of the main recommendations in the report. The first was the recommendation that runs throughout the report—although it is in no sense the totality of it—that the current approach in the UK to educating people of all ages needs a radical rethink. Secondly, current internet provision in the country needs a step change—a major boost not just in speed, although that is important, but in bandwidth. An important point was made in the opening speeches—for example, that made by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes—about the danger that if we do not consider coverage and inclusion, not just in physical terms but in terms of groups, gender and previous experience, we are all going to be the losers. I want to come back to that point.
The third point that the papers picked up, which is important and the key to this debate, is that the Government have a key role here. Two very interesting points were picked up in the reports I have read; indeed, they were picked up in the report from the Select Committee in the other place today. A digital agenda goes way beyond what any individual department can achieve in Whitehall. We are talking about a radical rethink of the basic structure under which we undertake education and training and operate our industrial capacity. That cannot be done by any one department, however well resourced: it has to be done by the Government as a whole taking a vow that they are going to do something significant and do it with vigour and for the long term.
Listening to the debate today, I was interested to hear what individual Members of your Lordships’ House picked out and wanted to support. It is in some sense demeaning to pick just a few things from the report because, as I have already said and others have mentioned, it is a very rich resource for people interested in this area. We are talking about very complex issues, but it is interesting to see how the key issues have come to the surface for a number of those who have responded. The first, which again underlines so much of this, is the way in which the economy is changing. Many jobs are going to change. Automation is a risk but may also be an opportunity, given how many jobs will have to change and become different. My noble friend Lord Knight said that he was confident that brawn as well as brain would be required in the future economy, but I think we all feel that in some sense we would not be doing the best by our country if we could not provide opportunities for people to engage themselves in improving the quality of the work that they undertake and how they do that.
This takes us into the question of skills, which the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, just mentioned and which was picked up my noble friend Lord Knight. In thinking about skills, we have a tendency to do two things. First, we apply it sector by sector, which as has been said will not work in this situation. Secondly, we tend to build a skills infrastructure to operate as if it were some object to be applied in the pursuit of an operation. I do not think that is right in this situation. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, picked this up. I may not go all the way with some of the things he said, but he certainly had the right idea that we are missing a big trick if we do not understand how industry wants training to happen and how those who have skill needs may need to tap into it in a way that is not currently seen in the system.
Other points were raised that make this a very important area. There is a need for more agility in training schemes. In a click-through world, we need to think differently about how the outputs of training applied to people will affect their resilience to cope with a changing world, the portfolio of skills they may need, the fact that people will often be operating in a freelance as well as an employed capacity, and reskilling being the norm, not just occasional.
Many noble Lords mentioned schools and the need to think through the implications in that area. Of course, trying to change school curricula is, as we all understand, an extremely difficult ask. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will give us a sense of how that battle is going, because I suspect it will be a battle royal right across Whitehall.
The idea that one should raise digital literacy to the same level as numeracy and literacy, which I absolutely support, goes against everything that professional educators seem to want out of the education system. That does not mean to say that it is wrong, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, also picked up. We have to think this through, because if we are right about how we will operate in a future world, we have to regard that as the central nut to crack, and therefore apply all the force required, and to think through the implications and the collateral damage that may happen.
Curiously, the innovation and creativity that will probably be key to that is absolutely what occurs when one works in the digital world, but the report is right to pick up how difficult it will be to get the teaching force up to the level required, and, I would say, although it is not mentioned specifically in the report, the need to ask parents to think again about how they support their children.
I had a very good example of that around the dinner table at the weekend, when my wife and I discovered to our considerable dismay that the emails that we had finally got around to sending to our children to get them to do even things as simple as coming downstairs for dinner are no longer applicable as they have not read emails for years. They said, “What are you doing? It is all instant messaging”—and other apps that I could not possibly mention for risk of being sued. If we cannot even do this in our home when we are quite computer literate, we are obviously a long way from the place of this debate.
A lot of noble Lords talked about the internet and the infrastructure that will be necessary to support this work. A lot of good things were said today to which I hope the Minister will respond. The internet as a universal service obligation is what is being proposed, but the questions remain: about speeds and bandwidths, reliability, whether it will really get out to the final 10%, and, if it is to be cost-constrained, what the cost will be and how it will it be justified.
As I said, accessibility is not just about hardware, it is also about making sure that those who might otherwise be excluded by background, gender or previous experience also get the chance to be part of the information society. The underlying question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare—a very good one—was: will we be playing catch-up in this game or do we really intend to lead?
The report is very strong about women’s difficulty in getting digital jobs and how they are therefore being excluded. The problem is not just at school, although that is highlighted, the lack of career paths or the way in which subjects are differentiated between schools that teach mainly boys or girls. There is a wider concern here about making sure that we all understand what is important about the technologies and where we are going.
Those seem to me to be the key points that have been picked up today. They are important and we look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. The Government’s initial response was very weak; I hope that she will be able to remedy that today. As was said at the beginning of the debate, the Government are rather good at being captivated by their own rhetoric and failing to deal with the detail. This is not a time for rhetoric; this is the time for real understanding of what is in the digital agenda paper that we are promised. Will it be optimistic and inclusive of all the issues that have been raised today? Will it really tackle the question of how the whole Government can move on this, or will it fall into the problem well illustrated by our current difficulty, which is that the Government appear happy to resist the committee’s call for a Cabinet-level Minister to be responsible for driving this agenda forward? They say that it is perfectly okay to have a Minister of State reporting to two Secretaries of State, because that means that the effort is well resourced at the top level. It will not work; you need powerful committees and departments to make this work and get it through.
I raise some minor but important issues. Will Parliament be consulted on this, will we get updates, or will we have to wait for periodic responses and debates? When we get to the crunch, will there be a commitment to our people to make a real step-change in skills and infrastructure? Will we make it or break it?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Baroness Neville-Rolfe) (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for calling this debate and for her lively and interesting speech. I share in the heartfelt thanks of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond to the Select Committee, its staff and advisers for a very perceptive and wide-ranging report on the digital future. I have very much enjoyed the comments today of so many of the committee’s members and other noble Lords. You all know how passionate I am about digital, so to spend an afternoon listening to experts on the subject is for me a delight.
Moreover, last week, the European Union published a paper on digital skills and this very morning—with exquisite timing, as the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald of Tradeston, said—the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report on related issues. All this attention shows the widespread realisation that this subject is of major importance, and the urgency of the issues before us all today. The noble Lord, Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope, rightly mentioned digital progress in other parts of the country. I was very impressed by the work done in Glasgow on digital health when I was lucky enough to attend the Commonwealth Games.
The fact is that digital skills are of major and increasing relevance to everybody’s lives. As far as work is concerned, they underpin increases in productivity, but that is by no means all of it. Social life is increasingly dependent on digital, as we have heard and, as the report said, the impact of new digital technology is all-encompassing. Opting out is not possible. The noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, rightly said that the Government have a key role.
The truth is that almost everyone—all those below retirement age and many above it—need to improve and develop their digital skills. Necessarily, many institutions, organisations and businesses—in fact, probably most of them—must be involved. Of course, the Government are a key institution.
Digital is also a key driver of UK growth and innovation. As my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe said, we spend more per head online than any other nation and—which I had not heard before—we have the largest positive digital balance of payments in the world. Digital also accounts for more than 8% of exports and for 1.4 million jobs. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, gave a Tech City figure that was higher than that, but they are probably both underestimates, as an extraordinary process of convergence is taking place. Traditional industries such as consumer electronics, healthcare, domestic heating and banking are now adding as much value in their computing as in the original product.
Our work on the digital single market in Brussels recognises this revolution, in which the UK can achieve a lot, an experience which our revived car industry has already shown. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Macdonald, that the UK should be at the helm of this digital revolution. Indeed, only a month ago I was in Rome, hosting a UK-Italy conference with 60 SMEs, ensuring that the UK is at the forefront of shaping this sort of industrial change. As the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, said, there is so much interest in UK experience overseas—and next week I am at an OECD meeting on the subject.
Since the Committee published its findings in February 2015, we have taken action which addresses key recommendations from the report. The committee called for greater government co-ordination. After the election, in May 2015, we created a digital skills epicentre—maybe it could be more proactive—in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, with my colleague in the other place, Ed Vaizey, leading the charge. My noble friend Lady Shields, who was here earlier, brings her huge experience to the piece, not only in changing the Government’s approach to internet safety but, as we were hearing, reaching parts that others do not reach with her blog. We have support from the Secretary of State, who is more experienced on culture, media and sport matters than many others before him. Of course, I have my own experience of business—some of you may have heard of Tesco clubcard—and international experience of digital.
This set-up was further strengthened in November by transferring responsibility for digital inclusion, now known as digital engagement, to my colleague, Ed Vaizey, in his role as Digital Minister. Because the Government have recognised the critical importance of digital skills and infrastructure, we have established a cross-government digital inclusion and infrastructure taskforce. Chaired by Ed Vaizey, it is tasked with making sure that we deliver on our digital policy commitments, such as rolling out universal broadband and better mobile phone connections, and actively tackling digital exclusion.
The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, asked amusingly and graciously when we would be publishing our long-awaited digital strategy. We will be publishing it shortly—and I mean shortly, not at the end of the year. The Government have been working with numerous stakeholders to build this strategy. We have been working extensively with other government departments, as noble Lords would expect, including BIS, DfE and the Treasury—actually, right across Whitehall, in all its nooks and crannies. We will set out a clear digital agenda for government over the course of this Parliament, which will include soft infrastructure with skills and education as key strands. So we will present a joined-up strategy and provide more information on how we intend to report progress, since, as several noble Lords have said, regular evaluation is important. We will set out the Government’s ambitions for this Parliament on the whole digital agenda, including on skills and infrastructure, which we have debated today.
We are clear on the scale of the task we face; it is large. This debate, to my mind, could not come at a better time. Finalising our strategy, we can take account of the expertise of noble Lords and, of course, of the Commons Science and Technology Committee report, published today and chaired by another talented woman, Nicola Blackwood, as has been said. I shall personally make sure that my friend Ed Vaizey reads the “pearls of wisdom”, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath.
Most importantly, the report called for the Government to share their digital agenda. We will do just that through the publication of our digital strategy, which will set out Government’s ambitions for this Parliament for the whole digital agenda, including on skills and infrastructure. We believe this will help to secure our position as a digitally innovative nation.
I move on to infrastructure. To make the most of the internet, people must be able to access it. I have often spoken myself about the importance of this fourth or fifth utility. We are on track to reach our aim of 95% broadband coverage by the end of 2017.
On the question asked by my noble friend Lord Holmes about the last 5%, we have given more funding to areas with coverage below 90% to increase their coverage levels to at least 90%. In very hard to reach areas, we are running pilots with suppliers to identify the best way to reach those, and which will inform future government investment. Through the digital economy Bill we will be introducing measures to implement a broadband universal service obligation by 2020. This will oblige providers to provide households and businesses with a broadband connection of a minimum speed, regardless of location. I am sure there will be many opportunities to debate the detail.
To respond to my noble friend Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope and my noble friend Lord Holmes, the Bill we have in mind will be wide-ranging. In addition to measures to increase connectivity, including the USO, there will be changes to the electronic communications code to make it cheaper for operators to acquire land, which will help with internet rollout, and there will be measures to enable us to use government data to deliver public services.
The UK needs digital skills at every level. There are the basic digital skills needed by all individuals, which my noble friend Lady Harding described so convincingly, making the business case in her inimitable way, for more investment. Then, there are the higher-level skills already required by many jobs—I would say most—and, thirdly, specialist and advanced skills required by experts. There about 1 million of them needed by 2023.
My noble friend Lord Holmes asked me a lot of questions. We certainly recognise the importance of ensuring that the internet is accessible to all, which is why all new digital services from the Government must meet the digital-by-default service standards. There are also many vital business initiatives in this important area.
It is widely recognised that basic digital skills may soon become as important as maths and English. Accordingly, many people have upgraded their skills in recent years and the Government have provided funding to help. Since 2010, we have provided £36 million to partners to support 1.5 million people to gain basic digital skills. That includes the Tinder Foundation, which the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, chairs, and which we should not compare or confuse with the dating website of the same name!
Of course, we have more to do. Data from Ipsos Mori and Go ON UK suggest that 23% of adults lack basic digital skills. To meet this challenge, the Government are working with a network of private and voluntary organisations to develop initiatives that will reach as many people as possible. For example, Lloyds Banking Group is training 20,000 digital champions to support the digital skills of customers and the wider community. That is a good example of corporate philanthropy.
As acknowledged by the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, we have reformed the school computing curriculum, so that it provides young people with computational thinking skills needed for the future of work. The number of students taking the computer science GCSE has risen markedly, and we should not forget the totemic and substantive importance of every new primary school child, including my own granddaughter, now learning coding.
I shall reflect on the wider points made by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, about the balance in the curriculum. Certainly, digital is extremely important to the curriculum, which is acknowledged in all the countries that I travel in and in our own work in the Education Department.
Reforms to technical education will be announced in our post-16 skills plan, to be published later this year, and feature in the Higher Education and Research Bill, already introduced in the other place. Reformed apprenticeships, which several have mentioned, will enable employers to collaborate to create standards that are relevant to the digital revolution and meet their needs. As a former employer, I believe that that will be a priority in the new employer-led apprenticeship environment. So I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Aberdare and Lord Clement-Jones. Ten standards have already been created for digital, with more in the pipeline, and of course we have set up the Institute for Apprenticeships to safeguard quality.
The noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked about the cost of debt to students. The innovative digital degree apprenticeship is two-thirds funded by government, with one-third and a wage paid by the employer, so this route is providing high-level digital skills at no cost to the apprentice and enables young people from all backgrounds to gain digital skills. I hope this will be a new avenue to the digitalisation of our workforce. We have already established the Ada National College for Digital Skills, which opens in Tottenham Hale in September 2016, and aim to reach 5,000 students within five years, 40% of them women.
In higher education, Professor Shadbolt’s review has provided some important recommendations on improving the employability of computer science graduates. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will be interested to know that we are working with stakeholders to take these employability success factors forward. I fully agree with the noble Lord, Lord Janvrin, about the importance of equipping people with the digital skills they need throughout their lives. We are holding a summit on lifelong learning in July, which will explore this important area further.
Several noble Lords mentioned diversity. It is vital that girls and boys recognise the opportunities digital skills offer. I will not repeat all that has been said, but I should add that my honourable friend Ed Vaizey chaired a summit recently with industry better to understand the issues which might be limiting the numbers of women in digital roles. We will be taking that further. We recently announced our ambition to see a 20% increase in the proportion of girls’ A-level entries in maths, science and computer science by 2020.
The Government are also taking action to ensure we are developing the specialist digital skills that are so essential to the economy, which includes the work the Government are doing on data and artificial intelligence. On cyber, there is a £1.9 billion programme over the next five years with a lot of opportunities being proposed.
In the interests of time, I will write to the noble Lord, Lord Foster, on the BBC. It is something that we discuss often in this House, and I would like to answer the questions he raised.
In closing, I repeat my thanks to the committee and to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, for their excellent contributions on a vital topic. As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, I think it was, implied, the report has matured, rather like good wine, and it feels even more relevant today than it was in February last year. What about that for an excuse for taking time to provide time for a debate?
Since the report’s publication, we have further improved government co-ordination on digital skills and have continued to make our education and training systems more relevant to the needs of employers. While on most measures we compare well with other EU countries of a similar size, there is a vast amount still to do, and that is why we will shortly be setting out our ambitions in our digital strategy and explaining how we can seize the current and future opportunities that the digital revolution offers.
Baroness Morgan of Huyton
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in an excellent debate. I thank the Minister for her reply and for the spirit in which she replied. These speeches have shown, as ever, the wealth of expertise and experience in this House and the strong consensus that exists across all Benches. I hope that this debate gives power to her elbow to get a comprehensive, practical, agile agenda published and moving. It is crucial to the UK’s future success. Finally, it is important that as a House we return in future to this subject to assess progress.
Orlando Terrorist Attack
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Transport and Home Office (Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon) (Con)
My Lords, with the leave of the House, I shall now repeat a reply to an Urgent Question delivered in the other place by my right honourable friend the Home Secretary. The Statement is as follows:
“The attacks in Orlando on Saturday night were utterly evil, and the Government condemn them completely. At least 49 people were murdered, and a further 53 people were injured, many of them seriously. These people were enjoying a night out when the attacks took place. Our hearts go out to them, their families and their friends.
This is the deadliest mass shooting in US history. It was an outrage committed to spread fear and was born out of hatred. As President Obama has said, the US authorities are treating it as a terrorist attack, and Daesh has claimed responsibility. It is clear that such an attack has its roots in a twisted ideology which counts homophobia as a cornerstone of its warped world view. This was not just an act of terror, but an act of homophobic hatred, and I want to make clear to all LGBT people in Britain, and around the world, that we will not tolerate such bigotry and violence. We will work closely with the United States, and we will continue to offer it our assistance and support. We stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies and friends in the global fight against terrorism, fear and hatred.
As the investigation into this attack continues, more information will emerge. However, we are not aware of any British nationals being caught up in the events on Saturday night. As should be expected, in the light of this attack, UK police forces will be further reviewing plans for large-scale and other public events over the coming days and weeks. The police are not advising any organisers to cancel or postpone any LGBT-related events.
Honourable Members of this House will be aware that since the start of 2015 we have seen 16 terrorist attacks in Europe, including in Brussels and Paris, and Tunisia, which all saw British people killed or injured. There have been attacks further afield, including in Bangladesh over the weekend. In the past 18 months, the police and security services have disrupted seven terrorist plots to attack the United Kingdom. All were either linked to or inspired by Daesh and its propaganda. The threat from international terrorism, set independently of Ministers by JTAC, remains at severe, meaning that an attack is highly likely. In March, the murder of prison officer Adrian Ismay reminded us that the threat from Northern Ireland-related terrorism also remains.
Mr Speaker, each time I come before the House following a terrorist attack, I do so in the knowledge that people have died and others are suffering. I know this House and people around the world, of all faiths and none, will want to join me in condemning this attack. This Government are determined to defeat the insidious ideologies that drive extremists. Let us be clear: there can be no justification for the mindless slaughter of innocent people. There can be no hiding place for those who perpetrate these acts, and there is no doubt that we will fight and we will prevail against the doctrines of hate and fear which lie behind such attacks”.
Lord Rosser (Lab)
My Lords, we endorse the words of condemnation that have just been expressed about the homophobic terrorist atrocity in Orlando, and we express our condolences to the families of those who have been murdered. Our thoughts are with those who have been injured and their loved ones, and with the people of Orlando, in particular, and of America as a whole.
We are not, as we know only too well, immune from such atrocities and hate crimes from those who want to divide, not unite our communities. We seek to create an environment where no sections of our community are demonised or feel threatened or discriminated against, since we recognise that if we can achieve that goal it will encourage and deliver the tolerance and understanding of each other which is the hallmark of a stable, safe and decent society. Bearing in mind his own responsibilities for community cohesion and addressing hatred and prejudice, will the Minister say what further steps the Government will now consider in this vital area in the light of the Orlando atrocity?
We in this country believe in the importance of severely restricting access to and the possession and ownership of guns as an essential prerequisite to our reducing the likelihood of such terrible events here. Do the Government now consider, in the light of the Orlando atrocity and other terrorist atrocities being committed elsewhere in the world, that further measures are needed to help to ensure the safety of those attending imminent forthcoming Pride celebrations, or are they satisfied with the present security arrangements in place?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord. I am sure his sentiments and his unequivocal condemnation of this heinous crime resonate across the House. On the issue of community cohesion, we celebrate Britain for its diversity and the strength of its people of all backgrounds, races and faiths and of different sexual orientations, who come together and who celebrate and define what Britain is today. The Government are totally committed to ensuring that we continue to protect that so we can continue to celebrate what Britain stands for in the modern world today.
On the question of firearms, as noble Lords will be aware, the UK has some of the toughest gun laws in the world and we are determined to keep it that way. The Policing and Crime Bill will introduce changes to firearms legislation, including a new offence of unlawfully converting imitation firearms into firearms, and tightening definitions on, for example, antique firearms. The UK is also co-operating with Europe to prevent the movement of people and weapons linked to terrorism.
On the noble Lord’s final point about the LGBT community and issues relating to Gay Pride, as I said in the Statement, UK police forces will be further reviewing plans for large-scale and other public events over the coming days and weeks. While that remains an operational matter for the police, they are not advising any organisers to cancel or even postpone any LGBT-related events.
Baroness Barker (LD)
My Lords, earlier today on Twitter, David Morgan said this:
“If you’re not gay you might not know how rare it can be to feel welcome and safe in a space. To be gunned down in one of them is horrific”.
That is why today members of my community are shocked and we mourn, just as we did 17 years ago when the Admiral Duncan pub was bombed. What have the security services and the Government learned in the intervening period about how to prevent hate crimes being perpetrated on minority communities?
Will the Government consider convening a meeting with leaders of faith groups and the LGBT community so that we might begin a dialogue about how the many millions of moderate members of religious groups can be assisted to detect and prevent the radicalisation and hatred to which some members of their communities are sometimes vulnerable, so that as a result of that work we might have communities that are diverse, inclusive and safe for all?
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
The noble Baroness makes a very valid point. On the issue of recognising current threats, I fully respect and appreciate that many people within the LGBT community are feeling vulnerable. I know that in the UK we have seen certain attacks against people of particular sexual orientations or from communities defined by particular faiths, with a rise in anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. It is perhaps only those communities that truly recognise what they live under. That said, I recognise also that Britain remains a place where people feel safe and secure. It is the Government’s responsibility to ensure the security of every citizen, and we will continue to do so. Let me be clear: irrespective of who you are and your cultural background, faith background, sexual orientation or gender, Britain celebrates its diversity. That is a strength of our nation and we will protect it.
The Lord Bishop of Chester
My Lords, on behalf of those who speak from these Benches, I express our utter abhorrence at what has happened. Indeed, I endorse the Home Secretary’s unambiguous use of the word “evil” about those acts.
I wonder if the Minister could take a little further what the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, has just said about the importance of engaging with the leaders of faith communities to address how we can live in a way that fundamentally recognises the universal human rights in our society from which we all benefit. This is an attack on our civilisation. At root it is a hatred of our civilisation, and anyone who can get to the bottom of that with a united front against it, alongside all the security measures that need to be taken, will really make some progress.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I agree with the right reverend Prelate. The noble Baroness raised this issue, and I will take it back and put it into play. One of my areas of responsibility at the Home Office is as Minister for Countering Extremism. That means meeting the challenges of extremism in all its ugly guises and bringing together voices to unite against extremism. The noble Baroness’s suggestion, endorsed by the right reverend Prelate, is something that I will take back. We will look to make progress with faith leaders, and those of no faith. This goes way beyond any faith; it is about how we as a country come together. People of faith and no faith should stand united against all kinds of evil.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, my noble friend will be aware that I and several hundred gay rugby players were partying in gay nightclubs in Florida only last week and the week before. We are therefore very conscious of the events of the last two days. However, it is a hate crime. The target happened on this occasion to be the LGBT community, but it could have been any other community on another occasion. Will the Minister please encourage a British response to this? That means not just saying, “We will ensure that Pride is safe”, but encouraging the nation at large to come out and show its support for Pride events, wherever they may be, because British people are not cowed by such events.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
First, I say to my noble friend that our reports say no British citizens were impacted, and I am pleased to hear that all are safe. That said, he is right. I agree with his sentiment that we as Britain deal with these issues head on, and that means bringing people and communities together. The best response to any extremist or terrorist threat is to unite against such threats. By doing so, as we have done previously and are doing again today, we will show extremists of any guise that we will defeat their voices of evil.
Lord Cashman (Lab)
My Lords, as a member of the lesbian and gay community, I recognise that this attack on our community is an attack on us all, but does the Minister agree that we must not match hatred with hatred? We must inform and educate, and, above all, we must ensure that this extremism is not represented as coming from any one religion, theology or community. We must show that we have the quiet determination to resist it and ensure that such actions never happen again.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I totally agree with the noble Lord’s sentiments, and of course agree that no religion endorses such acts of evil and hate. Recently we have seen sectarian issues arise here in the UK and indeed my own Muslim community was impacted in that way recently by the incident in Glasgow. Actually, my Ahmadiyya Muslim community puts forward a great slogan: “Love for all, hatred for none”.
Lord Boateng (Lab)
My Lords, I was a Home Office Minister when the Admiral Duncan pub was attacked, and I remember those times very well. The only answer can be target-hardening, making sure that the police have the resources to do so in conjunction with the community and, above all, making it very clear that whether black, white, gay, straight, Muslim, Christian or Jew, whatever we are, we are one people and we will not give in to this sort of hatred and terror.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon
I totally endorse and agree with the sentiments expressed so eloquently by the noble Lord.
EU: Energy Governance (EUC Report)
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Baroness Scott of Needham Market
That this House takes note of the Report from the European Union Committee EU energy governance (6th Report, Session 2015–16, HL Paper 71).
Baroness Scott of Needham Market (LD)
My Lords, I am grateful to have the opportunity this evening to debate the sub-committee’s report on energy union governance. It is some six months since our report was published, although having just heard that the Digital Skills Committee has waited some 16 months for its debate, perhaps I should not grumble as much as I thought I would. However, I make the general point that Members of this House put a huge amount of effort into Select Committee reports, the staff work extremely hard, and outside witnesses and organisations take a great interest in the work we do, so it is a great pity when the House does not find time to debate these closer to publication. Nevertheless, I am pleased to be able to present the report this evening.
For any Government, nothing is more important than keeping the lights on, but we are trying to maintain a supply which is not only secure but affordable for consumers, whether they are individuals or businesses, and which is environmentally sustainable. That challenge—that trilemma—has focused minds on the benefits of co-operation as a means of achieving those goals, and the EU energy union is one vehicle for that co-operation.
I have had the privilege of chairing the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee for three years, and I can honestly say that it has been the most rewarding and fulfilling experience I have had in my 16 years in this House. But now I have, sadly, been rotated off. It is a painless but not entirely pleasant experience, and I shall miss the work a good deal. The members of the committee have always been immensely supportive, and one of the great joys of the work is that we have never been hampered by discussions or debates of a political nature. Our debates are robust at times but have always focused on the issues, and are all the better for that. I therefore extend my sincere thanks to each current member of the committee and to those who, like me, have been rotated off.
I also place on record my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Boswell of Aynho, the chairman of the European Union Committee. His leadership, encouragement and personal support have been a great help to me. My noble friend Lord Teverson, who I see in his place, has now taken up the position of chairman of the committee and I have no doubt that he will enjoy the experience as much as I have and bring to it his great knowledge of the wide range of subject areas covered by the sub-committee. He served in the European Parliament and previously chaired an EU sub-committee. I wish him well. He, like all of us in this House, will be supported by efficient, knowledgeable and highly-skilled staff, whose commitment to our work, and indeed to the House, is absolute.
As your Lordships may know, the remit of the sub-committee includes agriculture, fisheries, environment, energy and climate change. The subject of the short report for debate this evening is firmly within the realm of energy. It is clear to most of us that energy policy in the 21st century cannot be formed from an isolationist perspective. The European Commission’s energy union strategy recognises this reality and attempts to ensure that Europe has a secure, affordable and low-carbon supply of energy. It aims to deliver energy security, reduce emissions and provide a better deal for consumers, and uses energy efficiency measures, the completion of the internal energy market and research and innovation to deliver this. An agreed EU energy governance framework will be essential to underpin the relationships between the EU institutions on the one hand and member states on the other. Such a framework will seek to meet the energy policy objectives of both the EU and member states but also to respect member states’ national sovereignty.
Before I go on to speak about the report itself I will make one or two comments about the background to it. The committee’s report was published in December and was the result of a short inquiry following a stakeholder seminar and a ministerial evidence session, as well as written submissions. The inquiry was timely; the European Commission published the first state of the energy union report last November and is expected to bring forward legislative proposals on energy governance later this year. Our report offers some thoughts and recommendations ahead of those legislative proposals. I extend my thanks to the specialist adviser to the inquiry, Antony Froggatt, whose comments and guidance on complex and rather technical matters were invaluable.
Our report called on the European Commission to ensure that the proposals for a future energy governance framework include legal clarity, a respect for member state sovereignty, a strong focus on security of supply, a commitment to the consumer, real ambition for decarbonisation, and increased regional co-operation. Indeed, we argue that the EU-wide binding 2030 renewables target will not be delivered unless it is backed up by a monitoring and enforcement mechanism which acts as a guarantor for the agreement and ensures that member states share the effort equitably.
The European Commission response was received on 3 March and was largely supportive. The UK Government’s response to the report was received on 29 February and was accompanied by a covering letter from Andrea Leadsom. It would be fair to say that the response has focused on current UK Government policy and the domestic measures which are already in place. In many cases the response simply avoids commenting on specific EU-level conclusions and recommendations. Overall, it lacks detail and comprehensive engagement with the arguments put forward by the report. I fear that this is due to current circumstances and that the Government are nervous about saying much at all because of the way things stand now. Nevertheless, I will make four points and I will be grateful if the Minister could reply to them at the end of the debate.
In paragraph C of the response, the Government avoid commenting on the report’s headline recommendation that the Commission should be able to propose new measures to guarantee existing EU-level commitments. The response contains a broad statement that agrees with the streamlining of reporting requirements. However, we argue that given the political importance of the EU-wide binding renewables target of 27% by 2030, it is noteworthy that there is no elucidation of the Government’s position. While we know that the Government are sceptical of the sort of enforcement measures proposed by the Commission, we would have hoped for some real engagement with the recommendation, even if only to disagree with it and to suggest what an alternative might look like.
In paragraph B the Government are silent on the committee’s recommendation that they should be transparent, timely and comprehensive in reporting their own progress against each of the dimensions of the energy union. Can the Minister say what the Government’s policy on this is?
In paragraph D the Government comment on bringing forward new renewable support schemes to bring forward additional offshore wind generation. However, they seem to have confused ongoing industry support with the more important need to maintain investor confidence through long-term and consistent policies. This point about investor confidence was a major theme in the committee’s 2013 report No Country is an Energy Island, and its conclusions are as valid now as they were then.
Finally, the Government’s comments on capacity markets are at odds with the view of the sub-committee in a number of areas. The sub-committee recommended that there should be a common framework at EU level to assess the need for and the means of achieving adequacy standards which secure availability of supply without escalating prices to consumers. The Government appear to disagree, arguing that this is a political decision that cannot take place until the internal energy market is completed. In fact, in the sub-committee’s view this is a technical task and would contribute to the completion of the internal market. The Commission agrees with the sub-committee that a common framework within the EU should be developed. Therefore are the Government really opposed to common adequacy standards? On measuring generation adequacy, the Government seem to agree with a common methodology at EU level but also seem to want national assessments. There seems to be an inconsistency here. Finally, on energy storage and demand-side measures the report argues that they should be given equal access to domestic capacity markets. The Government point out that these are already eligible to participate in the capacity market but do not comment on the inequality which we have highlighted.
I have one final point about the UK Government’s overall approach to regional co-operation. The previous report authored by the sub-committee on regional marine co-operation, The North Sea Under Pressure, concluded that no existing body or mechanism has a sufficiently broad remit to facilitate the political co-operation required to make the necessary step change in management of the North Sea basin, and we argued for the re-establishment of a North Sea Ministers’ conference. This recommendation was rejected by government on the grounds that such co-operation was taking place elsewhere. I fear that our calls have fallen on deaf ears. Last week the Vice-President for Energy Union and the Commissioner for Climate Action, with Ministers from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, signed a political declaration and action plan on North Sea co-operation. The declaration will facilitate the building of missing electricity links and allow more trading of energy and further integration of energy markets. Reinforcing regional co-operation will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve security of supply.
The UK was, sadly, absent. The announcement, like much these days, was reported on Twitter and there were lots of comments asking, “Where’s the union jack?”. I fear I know the answer to that but, even if the UK felt that in the current circumstances it was not able to be highly visible, I would like to think that we are engaged in this process. After all, if that well-known maritime nation Luxembourg thought that it was worth while attending and co-operating, it would seem very odd for the UK not to be there. The benefits of co-operating and the savings that come from it are enormous, so it really makes sense to do so.
Energy is crucial for all of us and the objective of secure, affordable and low-carbon energy can be aided by co-operation across borders. The EU has a really important role to play in bringing member states together, whether in a legislative framework or in a spirit of voluntary co-operation. The UK Government need to do more to demonstrate that they are serious about leading in this endeavour, whatever the outcome of 23 June.
Lord Selkirk of Douglas (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Baroness and to say how much those of us on her sub-committee appreciated her splendid leadership and commitment to producing this and other extremely good reports. The contribution that she made as chair and the work of all the members and the clerk helped to produce a really good report, whose conclusions and recommendations will stand the test of time. I wish her successor, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, every good fortune. I served under him on another sub-committee dealing with foreign affairs and defence, and he, too, in my humble opinion, produced extremely good reports. They were very well thought out and, similarly, have stood the test of time.
I am glad to have the opportunity to say a few words this evening. Perhaps I should mention a past interest: I was a Minister for the Environment in Scotland for five years. I recall that speaking on the subject of how to protect the environment and sustainable development felt a little bit like preaching against sin: some people listened and some did not. Today’s debate is very different because an abundant and affordable supply of energy can be a life-saving measure in circumstances of extreme cold. Whatever the outcome of the referendum, it is extremely likely that continuity of gas supply for heating purposes will be enormously important for the health of our nation, as well as for the health of other European Union nations.
Inevitably, it makes sense to be prepared for unforeseen developments either through emergencies caused, for example, by floods or by nations cutting off the energy they supply or charging enormous fees for it. So it seems to me that developing EU energy governance is necessary to safeguard continuity of supply. In some ways, it is rather like taking out an insurance policy in respect of possible events that may never take place.
I ask the Minister to confirm that the Government will give full support to Recommendations 19 and 20. Recommendation 19 states:
“The Commission should ensure that proposals for a future energy governance framework include legal clarity, a respect for Member State sovereignty, a focus on security of supply, commitment to the consumer, real ambition for decarbonisation and increased regional co-operation”.
Fulfilling those aspirations is likely to be a substantial challenge. For that reason, it is appropriate that the final recommendation—Recommendation 20—takes into account the different timescales that may be applied by different countries. It is therefore right that Recommendation 18 states:
“Regional co-operation”—
the noble Baroness referred to very recent happenings—
“should be far more prominent in governance discussions”.
Similarly, it is right that Recommendation 20 lays down:
“The Commission and Member States should work together on a governance framework that recognises the different timescales that are involved and ensures policy coherence between short and long term targets and objectives”.
Perhaps the Minister will also confirm that on this one aspect of providing sufficient warmth to many millions of people, the Government should be, and should remain, sensitive to the needs of consumers throughout Europe.
It was Napoleon Bonaparte who is believed to have called our countrymen and countrywomen a nation of shopkeepers. According to Napoleon’s surgeon, the defeated emperor later explained his remarks in the following terms:
“You”—
by which he meant all of us—
“were greatly offended with me for having called you ‘a nation of shopkeepers’. Had I meant by this that you were a nation of cowards, you would have had reason to be displeased, even though it were ridiculous and contrary to historical facts; but no such thing was ever intended. I meant that you were a nation of merchants, and that all your great riches and your grand resources arose from commerce, which is true”.
He went on to say that no man of sense should be ashamed to be called a shopkeeper. Nowadays, of course, we would add, “and no woman”. Today, trade and commerce and the selling of goods and services in our country remain every bit as important as they were in Napoleon’s day.
This report is a good one. It has been well received by the European Commission, which, in its positive response, stated that national policies should contribute to member states working better together to meet the challenges of ensuring,
“secure, competitive, safe, affordable and sustainable energy to all consumers”.
I therefore commend this report as being worthy of the Government’s serious and sympathetic consideration and support.
Viscount Hanworth (Lab)
My Lords, several reports of the European Union sub-committees of the House of Lords have been scheduled for debate prior to the crucial date of 23 June, when the referendum will be held to determine whether Britain has a future as a member of the European Union. It might seem that such reports would become irrelevant if our membership of the Union were to cease. Indeed, the very existence of the European Union Committee would be in doubt. However, it is a misapprehension to imagine that, in that event, the committee’s reports would become irrelevant. In any circumstances, we shall be tied to Europe, and the needs and problems to which the reports draw attention will be only exacerbated if we leave the European Union.
The need to which the report on energy governance draws attention is for an orderly and integrated system of energy supply throughout the European Union that transcends national boundaries. The three aims are to achieve carbon reduction in line with agreed commitments, to ensure security of supplies, and to achieve efficiency and affordability. The European Union imports 53% of its energy supplies. For their imports of gas, the member states depend heavily on a single supplier, which is Russia.
There are mounting anxieties over the security of supplies. There is a growing dependency on renewable resources for generating electricity, and these can be intermittent and unreliable. These problems can be addressed and partly overcome by enhancing the interconnectedness of the network of supply. The intermittency of the electricity generated by wind and solar power can be mitigated if the network of interconnections is wide enough to comprise regions of greatly differing climatic and meteorological conditions.
Britain faces the same problems as many of the other nations of the Union. After spending most of the previous 25 years as a net exporter of energy, the UK became a net importer in 2004. The gap between imports and exports has increased since then, and it looks set to continue to increase in future. Our imports of energy now amount to 40% of our consumption. The narrowing margin in our capacity to meet the demand for electricity is compelling us to seek external supplies via enhanced connections with neighbouring countries.
The need for concerted action across the European Union to deal with the problems of energy supply is increasing at a time when its ability to act in concert is in doubt. Thus, whereas the European Commission is keen to declare common objectives, it is hesitating to define the means by which they can be achieved.
The tendency is well illustrated by the programme for carbon reduction. In 2007, the leaders of the European Union agreed climate and energy targets for the year 2020. These included a 20% cut in greenhouse gas emissions relative to 1990 levels. The Commission mandated a 20% provision of energy from renewable sources and a 20% improvement in energy efficiency. Targets were declared for individual member states. In 2014, the European Commission adopted targets for 2030 that included a 40% reduction in greenhouse emissions relative to 1990 levels, a 27% target for renewable energy and an energy efficiency target of 27%. However, no targets were declared for individual member states, for fear of their being resisted.
Such apparent weakness of purpose has led, in some quarters, to the disparagement of the European Union. However, in an alternative perception, it highlights the need for concerted action. The need to act in concert is evident in view of the threat to supplies of gas. Russia, which is the principal supplier of gas to the European Union, is inclined to use its position as a means of achieving its political aims. The Russian intentions have become clear recently in connection to the Nord Stream 2 project, which proposes to link Germany directly to Russia via a gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea. This would bypass Ukraine, thereby denying it the tariffs for transporting the gas, as well as threatening its own gas supplies.
It is rumoured that the five western companies co-investing in Nord Stream 2 have been told by Gazprom, the Russian state energy company, that, as a condition for participating in the project, they must cease to receive gas supplies via Ukraine. The project has been heavily criticised by central and eastern European nations that are dependent on Russian supplies that come via Ukraine and that are fearful of Russian aggression. The European Commission had reacted by proposing that mutually supportive groups of member nations should be established with the aim of pooling and protecting their supplies of gas.
It is notable that the former Soviet Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are pressing for the creation of a single gas market with no internal borders. They have grave anxieties concerning Russian intentions. However, Latvia, the gas supplies of which remain in the hands of Gazprom, has rejected the opportunity to import gas from Lithuania, and Estonia is pursuing its own projects, including co-operation with Finland. This makes regional co-operation difficult, and it is incumbent upon the European Union to try to amend this situation.
The project for unifying the European energy market is beset by political, technical and economic difficulties. The economic difficulties concern the design of an integrated market and the raising of the necessary funds for establishing or enhancing the interconnections, and for enhancing other aspects of supply.
The Union has adopted many of the nostrums of the neoclassical economists who inspired the Conservative Governments of Margaret Thatcher, and which also prevail among the Conservatives at present. The document declaring the framework strategy of the European Commission for a resilient energy union makes it clear that the Commission expects the necessary investment funds to be provided by private enterprise. It declares that a centralised, supply-side approach is an outdated business model, and it evinces the belief that private firms in competition can be relied upon to cope with the complexities of an integrated market.
To some degree, interconnectedness can be seen as a public good; the public in question being the people within the realms of the interconnected nations that form the European Union. Since public benefits would not be included in their cost-benefit analysis, there is a risk that private investors will underinvest relative to the size of the investment that would maximise the public good. In view of the differing interests of groups in different member states, there is a need for an overarching policy negotiated at European Union level.
The belief of the economics pundits, who tend to be neoclassical economists and free marketeers, is that the appropriate outcomes can be engineered by establishing incentives for private investors. I have a different opinion. To expect to achieve the optimal outcome in a hands-off manner strikes me as foolishly optimistic. Not only must one identify the appropriate outcome but, in order to fashion the incentives, one must make an accurate assessment of the likely responses of private investors. There is a strong possibility that the incentives will be misjudged.
We had a recent experience of this in connection with the energy market reforms of the present UK Government, which are intended to be mediated by so-called contracts for difference. A similar “cap and floor” regime has been proposed by Ofgem for mediating the returns to private investment projects, aimed at enhancing the UK’s connections to the electricity supplies of Norway, Denmark, France, Belgium and Ireland. The regime sets a maximum and a minimum amount of revenue to be derived by the interconnector, and it proposes to add to or subtract from their actual revenues according to their shortfall or their excess.
In the UK, the policy of placing investments in power generation entirely in the hands of willing commercial providers has been a disaster. The willing providers of the next generation of nuclear power stations have not been readily forthcoming. We will have to rely on French and Chinese nationalised corporations to undertake the task of building our nuclear power stations, at an exorbitant cost. At present, their commitment to this task is in doubt. I wish to argue in favour of initiatives for which the finance has been provided by central government, and in which the Government, supported by expert opinion, have the oversight of the associated technologies.
The incentive to rely on the private funding of infrastructure projects has been to remove the costs from the Government’s budget and to prevent them impacting on the levels of the Government’s deficit. A fallacy of this approach is to imagine that the discount rate by which the present value of future costs and benefits is calculated, and on which the rewards of the private investors are based, can or ought to be the rate that applies to commercial investment projects. That rate, according to the Government’s methodology of levelised costs, is at an exorbitant 10%, which is appropriate only to high commercial risks. Investment in national infrastructure is not associated with commercial risks, and the risks that there are should be borne by the Government.
This is recognised in the advice that is embedded in the so-called Treasury Green Book for the appraisal and evaluation of investment projects by central government. There, we find that the discount rate for social investment is deemed to be 3.5% per annum. This is a high figure when compared with the current prime lending rate of 1.5%, which is the average rate of interest charged on loans by major commercial banks to private individuals and companies. The consequence of funding energy infrastructure projects in the manner of the UK Government is that the deferred benefits of the projects will accrue largely to private enterprise, when they ought to accrue to the public good.
The European Commission has adopted similar nostrums to those of the present UK Government. However, whereas the Commission is in a position to promulgate an agreed agenda, it is not and never has been in a position to dictate how it might be fulfilled. The documents of the Commission openly concede this point. It behoves us at present to recognise this truth and to gainsay those critics who suggest that our membership of the European Union in some way diminishes our national sovereignty. We are free to make our own decisions on how to reach common objectives. Our membership of the Union can only empower us.
Viscount Ullswater (Con)
My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, for her chairmanship of the EU Energy and Environment Sub-Committee. Her knowledge of the workings of the Brussels machine is of immense practical use when considering matters of this nature. I thank her for her sure hand and guidance with this report, together with the help and assistance of the clerk to the committee, Patrick Milner.
I believe that the report is a fair reflection of the evidence we heard about the Commission’s intention to create an energy union and some form of underpinning governance framework. The Commission’s guidance on the preparation of member state national energy plans is a helpful nudge in the right direction and the concept of regional co-operation is sensible.
However, I wish to concentrate my few remarks on energy security and the duty of member states to provide that security with the technology that suits them best. I am pleased that the Commission’s response acknowledges the right of member states to determine their own energy mix. We have come a long way in recent years from relying on large, coal-fired generating stations sited conveniently beside deep mining pits to provide the bulk of our electricity supply. The North Sea gave us a plentiful supply of natural gas, which provided an alternative source of energy, and more recently we have developed renewable resources, whether it be wind or solar power.
This is a journey of technological advancement and it will not stop here. Civil nuclear power has been delivered by a whole range of reactors, which have provided the base load for the UK for decades. We are perhaps on the edge of the shale gas revolution at this very moment, and the development of small-scale nuclear reactors seems just round the corner. To quote from a recent policy digest weekly report sent to me by email on 3 June:
“The UK just experienced a historic milestone. For the first time since 1882 and on several occasions during last month, the UK power system was powered without coal. Earlier this year, solar also outstripped coal in electricity generation for a full day”.
Whether it is the stimulus provided by the acknowledgement of climate change and global warming, the drive for energy efficiency, or the goal of affordable energy prices, we must not neglect the importance of research and innovation.
Solar power is perhaps in its infancy in this country, but other techniques, such as systems involving the concentration of solar power by the use of parabolic mirrors, are being developed commercially in Spain. We are surrounded by the sea on all sides, yet have not been able to harness this resource in any meaningful way, although we have a mature hydroelectric industry, mostly located in the north. It is this variety that I believe is so important. Whereas I appreciate that perhaps Poland has an overreliance on coal and France on nuclear, I am not persuaded that Brussels should try to dictate which technologies should be developed and where.
The Commission’s desire to oversee the development plans of member states should be strictly limited, for, if geopolitical situations and the differing national energy mixes are ignored, the energy governance framework will never command support or function adequately. I am pleased that the Minister told us in her evidence:
“The core theme running through my evidence is that member states should be given every bit of leeway to determine their own energy mix and their own way of meeting their legally binding targets”.
I share the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s view when it said that,
“the Government does not currently foresee a need for the governance system to be enshrined in legislation”.
I hope the Minister can confirm that the Government will hold firm to that stance.
As I said at the outset, I see this initiative being useful for taking stock and sharing information around member states and perhaps for the greater development of interconnectors. But we live in very exciting times for the future generation of electricity, particularly in this country, and I would not wish to see any curtailment of the freedom to innovate.
Lord Teverson (LD)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Scott on her work on this committee. I have not been a member of it but I have heard many stories of its effectiveness under her chairmanship. My family comes from Suffolk, but I must admit I have never been to Needham Market. The great and the good there should offer my noble friend the freedom of the town in full recognition of her work over the last three years—something that would be very difficult for me to do equally well. Not having been a member of the committee during this inquiry, I will just make a few comments on the report itself, concerning governance.
Something most of us would agree on is that the twin areas of energy and, in particular, climate policy are absolutely the right things for the 28 sovereign member states of the European Union to start acting far better together on to ensure that we have energy security, in the context of the energy trilemma, and meet our climate goals, which we share with the European Union. In the plans for an energy union, we have not just the three points of the energy trilemma, but two additional points. One is making the single energy market work properly, which we all want in terms of efficiency, security and consumer power.
Another important area is research and innovation. As the noble Viscount, Lord Ullswater, has just said, we are not going to do what we need to do on energy and the climate with existing technologies alone: we need to move forward, work with new technologies and make sure that they are inventive and innovative, so that we can meet targets in the best way at the lowest cost. With its eighth framework programme, Horizon 2020, the European Union is one of the research powerhouses globally. Energy is one of the areas where member states and science communities work best together.
I welcome the national energy and climate plan concept, which I will talk more about later, but we must remember that the energy union debate is not just about electricity. All too often, we talk just about electricity generation, but that represents only about one-third of energy consumption and use. We also have heating, in which gas plays a major role both in this country and across Europe, and transport. Although that is not covered directly by this energy union, it is something we must not forget.
Lastly, as the chairman has said, investor confidence is key right across Europe. I was interested to read in the report that €200 billion needs to be invested over the next decade. Given that we have said many times in this House that the UK itself requires €100 billion, we have a large part to play in making sure that that happens.
On national plans, I completely agree with the noble Viscount, Lord Ullswater, about getting the right balance in energy policy between European intervention and management and national choice, which is absolutely critical in this area. We should have national plans and climate plans as recommended, but we need to make sure implementation is at national level. National choice should be there but must be compatible with overall European objectives and with those plans, as they work together. If Germany wants, as it did, to rid itself of nuclear power after Fukushima, it should have the ability to do so. It caused some chaos in various ways and did not help its decarbonisation targets, but that is its prerogative. What the UK does is up to us.
I find it difficult when we have an EU target and we do not translate it into a national target. I question whether it is worth having an EU renewables target of 27% if we do not have national targets to achieve that. That is a contradiction, and setting something up to fail.
The regional plans are a good way forward, but we should not think that they will change everything. Interconnected worlds and interconnected regions can also add instability. I think back to financial systems and the crisis of 2008, when everyone was having the same difficulties at the same time. If we all have the same problems with systems requiring energy, those regional interconnections can cause instability. I congratulate the Government on the work they are doing on interconnections, but we need to make sure they are stable. The report says that the Commission should be the body that manages the area of regional co-operation, which is absolutely right. The last thing Europe needs at the moment is another institution. That is a strong recommendation, which should be adopted.
I have some questions for the Minister on the capacity market and the UK. How successful has progress on demand-side management been so far? Where interconnection is continuing, how successful has that intervention been so far? Lastly, we should not forget the cold economy. I chaired a commission by the University of Birmingham that looked at keeping people not warm but cool, which already accounts for some 12% to 14% of energy consumption. We need increasingly to take that into consideration in a European energy strategy.
We should never forget that the answer to the trilemma—security, low cost to consumers and carbon reduction—is energy efficiency. It was a great disappointment that energy efficiency was the one 2020 target that was not legally binding. Energy efficiency across Europe needs to be the fundamental cornerstone of European energy policy.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, I declare my interests as in the register on energy connections and matters, and I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, on her very interesting report. I was not a member of the team, but I read it with the greatest of interest. I am sorry that she has been rotated off. I hope that she is rotated on to something else fairly soon by the mysterious forces that do the rotating. As my qualification, I spent the war years as a child in Suffolk. I seem to remember that we relied on old-fashioned windmills to survive at all in those days.
The report raises so many interesting questions and I have confined myself to two observations. First, this is one of the fascinating areas where we need a lot more Europe and a lot less Europe at the same time. That is a complicated thought and it does not fit in at all with the current Brexit debate, which reduces everything to polarised simplicities, but then hardly anything fits into the current Brexit debate that is of a serious and real kind. The “more”, as noble Lords have rightly perceived and as the report fully recognises, is in the area of physical interconnectors, gas and electricity and the appropriate grid systems, and the regulations, which are immensely complex, needed for the transmission of power or the travelling of gas across borders. We could then have a genuine competitive market in Europe, in which gas and electricity can be priced in a competitive way. We are very far from that. The funding and the organisation of that can only be a pan-continental system, including the UK. We do not have that yet and we have to move towards that to achieve all kinds of objectives in Europe, certainly that meet the trilemmas of reliability, affordability—which we do not have at present—and lower carbon.
The “less” part is more controversial. It is that the EU’s detailed direction in the past—which was even more detailed than now—about how each country should decarbonise and resolve the dilemma has been far too extensive and intrusive and has had very perverse consequences. The report rightly recognises this, but one could be even more frank and point for instance to the German situation. It is the worst example of excessive attempts to meet low carbon leading to higher carbon, to lignite being burnt on massive scales and more coal stations being built, which is the very reverse of what was intended. It is a classic example of good intentions paving the way to we know where. Indeed, the latest figures for CO2 show that German CO2 is actually rising again after all its efforts. That is a special situation, I know, because Mrs Merkel decided to close down nuclear power, which would have been one of the contributions to a low-carbon future for Germany.
In this country we have done somewhat better, although at a much bigger cost than some of the optimists forecast when they said that energy transformation would be quite cheap. It will not be quite cheap: it is proving and will prove colossally expensive. It has also raised the shadow of power shortages and narrow safety margins, as is mentioned by almost every paper every day, including this morning. As to the CO2 side of things, on the production front we have done rather well and there has been a significant UK reduction of CO2, but that excludes all the leakage effect of the carbon that is included in our vast import and consumption-based emissions. That is one comment I wanted to make about the more and less.
The interconnectors themselves are very important not only to the whole of Europe and the competitive market but particularly to this island. I had the opportunity when I had responsibility as Energy Secretary 40 years ago to be in office when the French connector, which was operative from the 1970s, was enlarged and strengthened. I now read that we are to go for a second, which is extremely good news and very much part of our future capacity. It will indeed help to save us from very severe challenges to the reliability of our power supplies and the danger of the lights going out, as was mentioned insistently by Ministers in their evidence to the committee.
It is not the only one. The Danish connector Viking system is under way. The link with Belgium is under way. The possibilities are there for a much longer link with Norway, which will be particularly attractive because it would not be intermittent, spare electricity. As a result of Norway’s hydropower and storage capacities, it would be electricity on demand, as needed at any time. The Danish one would be very intermittent because the Danes have a huge surplus of wind power and are anxious to transmit it whenever it would otherwise upset their entire grid balance. Then there is Iceland, where we could draw on volcanic energy, which would be extremely green and attractive but would again require a considerably long connector system and complicated switching stations either end. But all in all, for Britain alone, we can draw on a minimum of 7 gigawatts extra of electricity, which will be a blessing when one thinks of the dangers of the narrowness of the margins in our own system in the near future, which I will comment on a little more in a moment.
My second observation is that the report talks about energy and climate national plans. The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has a mastery of these things and said that he welcomed them. My difficulty is that I cannot see that here in the UK we have an energy plan. We have an energy hope that we will muddle through to 2018-19, and that is largely thanks to the brilliance and ingenuity of National Grid, which has set out the ways in which somehow, by hook or by crook, it will manage supply by particular arrangements and incentives, all of which I should say are extremely costly, and by manipulating demand through entering into contracts where demand can be interrupted. In these ways it hopes to get through the next three years without a power crisis. That is the plan. But of course beyond 2019-20 we simply have to build new gas turbines for the simple reason that we have seen 11 major closures of coal-fired stations in line with the policy of both the previous and the present Government. If we are to cover supplies through the early 2020s and have an adequate margin instead of the very narrow one that we are heading for now, and until nuclear kicks in—we hope—in the late 2020s or early 2030s, we need enormous skill on the part of National Grid and we will need more gas turbines.
The hope, not the plan, is that this will be done by greatly increased energy efficiency—the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, rightly says that that is absolutely the key—by reduced energy intensity which is necessary to help with the low-carbon aims, and by much more local generation and a whole range of new technologies, some of which we cannot even foresee at the moment, although we will need them within the next five or six years. It is also going to be done through better capacity arrangements that we have now because so far they have not produced any of the new-build combined-cycle gas turbines we need. I hope—again it is only a hope; talking to the would-be investors it is very much a hope—that the new arrangements will encourage them to come forward and invest.
The reality is different. So far the gas turbines have not been built and instead old plants have been subsided and even diesel has been boosted. Moreover, as the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, rightly reminded us, the nuclear future lying at the end of the 2020s is looking extremely wobbly. I have hopes that it will survive and that we shall get through the period, but the very name Hinkley Point C produces frowns on many faces. It is hard to see how all that work is going to be completed in line with the wishes of the French and British Governments unless they take the obvious route of halving the size of it and building a single reactor as at Flamanville, and thus halve the enormous capital costs. I suspect, although it is only a guess, that that is where they will come to in the end.
What the EU should be doing in terms of governance is rather different from what it is doing now. The energy union is mentioned in the report. It was a document of immense length and I know that there were good intentions behind it. It sought partly to increase the security of the Gazprom-threatened eastern and central Europeans, which in the case of two or three countries has been very serious because they were 90% to 100% reliant on Gazprom. It was a progress policy, and in part it was to continue the anti fossil fuel policy by encouraging the move away from dependence on fossil fuels generally in Europe. Of course, as is often the case with these sorts of attempts, it did not please either side. It took up a great deal of print and to this day people are still arguing about what it really means and where it is going to lead. But that is not where the real need lies. It lies in giving maximum encouragement to new technologies and reduced renewable costs; that is, new technologies in all fields, including the cleaner burning of existing fossil fuels and of course going for physical connectors, as I have said.
European Union governance should also be giving maximum encouragement to the storage technologies already mentioned by noble Lords. There may be a breakthrough quite soon, which will be very exciting and will transform many prospects. There is the issue of CCS which we have talked about again and again: how do we get the costs down? The present situation has left one feeling that the whole technology is still too expensive to be brought into the commercial range. I urge those in charge of EU governance to do something that may surprise your Lordships, and that is to look at what the Indians are doing. They are building hundreds of new coal-fired stations, but they are not unaware of their responsibilities—the Paris commitments and what the world requires of them. They cannot afford CCS and must have cheap power for the hundreds of millions of Indians with neither electricity nor water, so it is desperately needed for development. They say that if they can work with off-the-shelf technology for ultra-supercritical boilers, they can achieve a 45% efficiency increase in their coal-burning capacity; that is, they can get 45% more electricity out of the system for every tonne of coal burned. That would have a distinct impact, perhaps not a welcome one to purists, in lowering carbon emissions.
The third area, aside from CCS, that needs much more attention is at the refinery end. We have too many refineries that are higher carbon than necessary, and of course we are importing a lot of fuel into Europe from areas where the refineries operate with substantial carbon emissions—far higher than some European refineries, which find themselves in great economic difficulty. It is a completely messed-up situation and it needs to be reorganised.
We all know in the end that Asia is the epicentre of climate disasters and that, if we are serious about combating climate change, the answer really lies in diverting India and China from cheap coal. There is a long way to go. We are making some progress and last year world carbon intensity actually fell by 2.8%, which is extremely good news. But the fact is that it needs to fall by 5.5% every year for the next 20 years to get anywhere near the Paris goals. Our contribution here in Europe is bound to be mainly by example and by what we can do by putting our shoulder to our resources and all our firepower into new technology. On those we are not doing well enough. EU governance should be supporting us with new priorities instead of pursuing overly prescriptive energy policies. That needs a new mindset in Brussels—a move into the digital age of less centralisation and standardisation to more individualisation, if you like. It is about the progressive nationalisation of energy policies which the digital age allows for but was not conceived of at the beginning of the European Coal and Steel Community, EURATOM or the foundations of the modern European Community. We need the kind of fundamental EU reform that many of us hope for and for which the United Kingdom should be pushing. We are left with the thought that we can do that, unless of course by some awful error we are not there, in which case we will not be able to do anything at all.
Lord Suri (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for bringing forward this debate. The report is timely given that we have only a little more than a week to go until the most critical poll that probably any of us will know in our lifetime. I hope that the British people, with their infinite sensibility, will opt for the safer choice rather than retreating from the world and the globalisation that has made us all richer, safer and more harmonious.
The report touches on one of the most pressing and serious issues that we face, not just us as Britons but as humanity. Climate change mitigation cannot be settled at national level. Greenhouse gases and rising sea levels do not respect national borders, and we and our European allies sensibly use the EU as a forum to decide what action to take.
As it happens, I support the EU proposal that greenhouse gas emissions should be reduced by at least 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and by 80% to 95% by 2050. We have the Climate Change Act to compel the Secretary of State to work towards this target, too, but it is useful to have similar controls in the 2009 renewable energy directive. I am glad to see that the authors of this report endorse that responsibility.
It is important, however, to take account of the geopolitical nature of energy policy. As the report says, one can draw a perhaps depressing comparison between Germany and Poland. While Germany has the luxury of not being overly dependent on coal or Russian fuels, Poland is heavily dependent on both. It would be unfair to Poland and other Visegrád countries to expect full implementation of all the relevant directives and regulations. Indeed, it would be a good idea to attempt to reform this peculiarity in the next reform agenda. Preferably, this would happen during the upcoming UK presidency of the Council.
Another salient point raised pertains to the integration of the market with regard to capacity market designs. Much like climate mitigation, EU member states are deeply interdependent when it comes to interconnectors. With a wide range of capacity market designs, the relevant authorities, on both the national and European level, run into difficulties. Power systems can become overloaded if supply is insufficient to meet demand in particular localities. Given that the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has warned about the danger of concurrent overloads, action is required on the European level to remedy this. There are other benefits beyond just keeping the lights on, as investment markets can be calmed by increased security, thereby ensuring price stability. In the light of this, I look forward to seeing the Commission bring forward proposals in the area of market design and regulation in 2016.
To touch on a final topic, I feel that one of the problems the British public have with the EU and the institutions is that they feel overly bureaucratic and inefficient. Earlier, I mentioned the importance of oversight in the legal requirements for member states. There will of course need to be some authority tasked with this. I recommend that a new institution is not necessary. The Eurosceptics in European Union countries would have a clear case to make about the wasting of public money. The European Environment Agency could easily deal with a broadened oversight remit or the Commission could deal with it itself. But setting up a new institution, with a new building, more civil servants and its own acronym, would just hand more ammunition to those who are chipping away at European solidarity and co-operation.
Lord Grantchester (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a very interesting report, reflecting the challenges of integrating a wider EU approach to energy policy, taking into account energy security and decarbonisation plans in response to climate change goals. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, for her committee’s concise report and for her introduction.
The committee’s recommendations were very much accepted and taken on board in the Government’s response. The policy direction towards greater co-ordination and harmonisation of EU capacity markets, open to cross-border mechanisms such as interconnectors and greater regional integration, underlines the clear conclusion that the UK would certainly benefit from continued membership in the EU following next week’s referendum. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, that energy policy is a clear candidate to be developed in a European context.
As the noble Lord, Lord Suri, said, working with Europe enables us to raise ambitions on climate change, not just in the UK and Europe, but throughout the world through our participation in the Paris agreement last year. This is an agreement signed up to by not just the western powers, but all the peoples of the world. From within the European Union we can influence events and set the pace towards a collective goal of building a carbon-neutral global economy in a generation, with all countries agreeing to raise their ambition on clean energy every five years. While the binding commitments made are not yet sufficient to limit temperature rises well below the 2-degree limit, this agreement should take us much closer to climate safety.
It is interesting to reflect that this report, published in December last year, provides an interesting critique of policy actions by the Government since. Several debates on the Energy Bill and renewable energy last Session highlighted the need for the Government to be aware of the effects of their lack of a clear and consistent plan. The recommendation at paragraph 62 reads:
“Rapid and unexpected changes in policies … create policy uncertainty and may undermine investor confidence”.
Paragraph 63 states:
“The UK Government should be clear about its own renewable energy strategy and target for 2030 as part of its decarbonisation and energy security objectives”.
The report continues with a call for the Government and member states,
“to meet the Commission’s deadline for the preparation of the first National Energy and Climate Plans by 2018”.
In their response, the Government give their commitment to meeting the Commission’s deadline and state that work is already under way. This is excellent. On this side, we consider this crucial to mitigate the damage done recently to investor confidence. Will the Minister give the House any further details on workstreams and reports for consideration coming over this winter?
The Paris agreement was secured through close working over several years, identifying that using cleaner and more efficient technologies can bring benefits when co-ordinated across Europe. In the referendum debate we would like to see the Minister and his colleagues in the department clearly promote these benefits. Recommendation 12 at paragraph 63 argues that the Government,
“should be clear about its own renewable energy strategy and target for 2030 as part of its decarbonisation and energy security objectives”.
Does the Minister agree with paragraph 69, which says:
“The UK Government should go to greater lengths to explain to consumers the financial and security benefits of a more integrated EU energy market”?
I am sure that he will endorse the fact that the UK has played a leading role in shaping an energy strategy for the EU and must continue to do so by voting to remain in the referendum.
We support the EU 2030 energy and climate change package, which includes the headline commitment of a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases against 1990 levels. On the EU-wide commitment to 27% of energy coming from renewables by 2030, we agree that there should be clarity to ensure how this is to be achieved. We agree with and welcome the flexibility offered to member states to develop their own plans to meet energy and climate objectives in ways most appropriate to their natural contexts. Consumer interests should not be segregated in energy policy. As the report states,
“the interests of industrial, business and domestic consumers should be considered in energy governance framework discussions”.
Will the Minister outline the Government’s plans to consult consumers and stakeholders during the development of the UK’s national energy and climate plan?
It should be noted that the UK does not have a clear plan ahead to meet the 2020 target, let alone the 2030 target. The UK should meet certain reduction commitments through a balanced mix of low-carbon options, including nuclear, CCS, renewables, storage and greater levels of interconnection and demand management, together with the very important aspect of increased investment in energy efficiency.
The UK could face a 25% shortfall in meeting the 2020 clean energy target. After setting the fifth carbon budget, to be published by the end of 2016—this year—the Government have to present an emissions reductions plan to cover our targets up to 2032. As yet it is unclear how transparent and inclusive this process of developing the plan will be. Following the Paris agreement, what consideration will the Government give in their energy and climate plan to meet the ambition and the timetable set out that member states raise their climate target every five years? What further implications to policies do this Government foresee? In the light of the report does the Minister have plans to integrate proposals in conjunction with other member states?
There are already clear economic benefits of interconnections to EU energy markets, one of the other main recommendations of the report, referred to by my noble friend Lord Hanworth and the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The E3G study concluded that greater interconnection to EU energy markets allows the UK to bring cheaper energy from the continent and balance variable renewable generation across a wider area, which could save the UK £500 million a year by 2020. A 2014 National Grid report estimates that doubling interconnection capacity would bring benefits to every consumer, amounting to £1 billion a year—a saving of £13 a year off household bills.
This report has brought general agreement about the pathway the EU should be taking. The Government have responded positively. All speakers have highlighted important aspects of the report and the noble Viscount, Lord Ullswater, made an interesting contribution with his thoughts on the technology mix of energy sources. This excellent report underlines to the House that there is much work for the Government to do to live up to its expectations and to the hopes of the noble Lord, Lord Howell. We will certainly work with the Government to bring coherence to their plans.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change and Wales Office (Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth) (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful for contributions to what has been an extremely wide-ranging debate, far beyond the issue of energy governance, as many noble Lords would acknowledge. It covered just about every aspect of energy policy, possibly apart from smart meters, so I will try to give those a mention as well as I go through. I will try to pick up all points brought up by noble Lords. I will ensure that officials and myself read a report of the debate, pick up every aspect of the debate and write to all noble Lords who have participated in what was, as I have said, a very wide-ranging debate.
First, I join with the thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, who has done an outstanding job over three years as chairman of this committee, and to committee staff and officials. The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, as she said, now rotates off and I welcome to the rotisserie the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, who follows her; she is obviously a very difficult act to follow. There must be something in the water in Needham Market, I think. I thank her very much for the work she has done and for this report.
I say at the outset, pursuant to what was said by the noble Viscount, Lord Hanworth, the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, and my noble friend Lord Suri, that the position of the Government on the European Union is very clear: we believe that it is in the best interests of the United Kingdom that we remain members. That is certainly my view too and it colours some of what I will be saying as I go through the various points that have been made. On an international level, international points were made as well, highlighting the importance of the European Union, the relatively recent success in Paris and the role that the United Kingdom and the European Union made in that—we were part of the European Union negotiation team. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State, Amber Rudd, played a leading role in that. The leading official for the European Union was Pete Betts from our own DECC and we were very proud of the role that he played too. That is a clear example of the importance of the European Union in relation to climate change.
Energy and climate policy is an area where there is significant added value for the United Kingdom in working with our European partners, whether to shape the single market or to drive ambitious action on climate change in Europe and more widely. The Government support the energy union because it should help ensure that the Commission and all EU member states take a more holistic, long-term and strategic approach to energy and climate policy. I should say something at this stage about the Energy Council in Luxembourg a week ago today, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, referred. The only reason we did not sign the agreement, the North Seas countries declaration, was simply purdah, as I made clear at the time and have since. I am absolutely clear that we will sign it, but we were not in a position to do so last week or this week. As soon as we are able to do so, we will.
The holistic approach I have referred to should cover all five pillars of the energy union. These are energy security, the internal market, energy efficiency, decarbonisation, and research and innovation. They are all central parts of UK government policy as well as energy union policy. At the heart of it, the energy union should support the delivery of a competitive, interconnected and fully functioning single energy market. The single energy market is the cornerstone of our ability to provide secure, affordable and sustainable energy supplies. That is the approach of the Government and I am very pleased to hear the support that the noble Lord, Lord Grantchester, offers to that approach.
The United Kingdom has long been a strong advocate of making the single energy market a reality, because it helps keep bills down and improves the energy security of all. Inside the EU it is cheaper and easier to buy and sell energy across borders. By 2030, a fully integrated EU energy market could save EU consumers £50 billion a year in energy costs. Therefore, we fully support the further development of the single energy market and are working with the Commission on its electricity market design proposals, a point raised by my noble friend Lord Suri. We understand your Lordships’ interest in common EU standards for capacity markets. However, until there is a fully functioning internal market, we do not think that such common standards are practically possible or, indeed, politically desirable. The development of capacity markets is a political decision which needs to take into account the circumstances of individual member states. It is not appropriate or desirable to be harmonised at European level, in our view.
It is, however, important that the effect of capacity markets on the working of the single energy market is kept to a minimum. That is why the United Kingdom, the first member state to receive clearance for our capacity market, supports agreed general principles for capacity markets and encourages member states to share best practice and to develop our common understanding of how capacity markets in different countries interact. Of course, we are happy and indeed keen to share our practice and our own experience in relation to that. Capacity markets are a very important part of dealing with the capacity that we have and the importance of security of supply, a point raised by my noble friend Lord Howell. I was at the National Grid this morning, discussing this. We actually have a slightly better margin than we have had for the past winter, but it is obviously something where capacity markets, demand-side reduction and interconnectors are all helping us to address the challenges: there are challenges, of course.
I move on to regional co-operation, a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, and my noble friends Lord Selkirk and Lord Howell. The sharing of information, plans and best practice can also improve energy security for the United Kingdom and our partners across Europe. My noble friend Lord Selkirk of Douglas raised recommendations 19 and 20, which we unequivocally support, about balancing the need for EU frameworks with member states’ right to choose the best and most cost-effective way to meet their emissions reductions targets. We strongly support that and would strongly oppose any attempt to use the governance framework to impose de facto binding national or regional renewable targets.
As I think I have made clear, we also support increased interconnection. The United Kingdom plans to more than double the amount of electricity we can import over the next five years, saving consumers nearly £12 billion in energy costs over the next two decades, involving interconnectors with France, Belgium and Norway and so on. Combined with recent measures to facilitate cross-border energy flows, interconnection should improve energy security and give the United Kingdom access to continental electricity when it is cheaper.
We strongly believe in an energy union and that it is important to strike the balance between national interests and the way the energy union will operate in the interests of the whole community. That is what we seek to do. Indeed, based on the experience of last Monday, I think that is what other member states seek to do. I forget which noble Lord made the point about differing national interests and differing national energy mixes—I think it was my noble friend Lord Selkirk although it may have been my noble friend Lord Howell or somebody else—with Germany ruling out nuclear, France being strongly nuclear and the United Kingdom being somewhere in between. The nuclear issue arose at the recent Energy Council and was dealt with. It seems that most states in the energy union take a different view from that of Luxembourg, Austria and Germany, which are fairly strongly anti-nuclear. Member states have different national interests and should have the right to determine the way in which they reach decarbonisation targets.
If the single market works well, the overall effect will be to reduce prices. The energy union should also give investors the greater policy certainty—many noble Lords mentioned this—that they need to make the long-term investments in energy infrastructure projects required to continue to deliver secure, affordable and clean energy in the future. Investor certainty is certainly important. A very clear signal was given in Paris. We should keep at the very forefront of our minds the importance of that clear message. I say “should” in relation to the energy union giving investors that greater policy certainty because we are at a very early stage in the development of thinking about the energy union, what it means and how it can best be implemented. This was discussed last Monday and clearly things will move on. This is why the report and indeed this debate are so timely.
Discussions are beginning in capitals and in Brussels to determine what an energy union governance framework should look like and how to develop an approach that works for countries not used to taking a holistic approach to energy and climate policy, and for countries such as the United Kingdom which have done so for many years. Given what is at stake, it will be vital to develop the right framework for the governance of the energy union, one that seizes the opportunity to enable all member states to have a clear and credible road map for decarbonisation of their economies over the long term. That point was made by many noble Lords, including my noble friends Lord Howell and Lord Ullswater and the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. The framework should support those member states that will be producing national energy and climate plans for the first time. We shall proceed on the basis of the carbon plans that we are already producing, so this will form the basis of our own national energy and climate plans. However, it must respect those member states such as the United Kingdom which have produced such plans for many years. We believe that the United Kingdom can play a strong leadership role here, continuing to share with other member states the experience we have gained from the complex cross-government work required to both produce and implement our carbon plans.
We have set out our position on ending energy from coal. We are unique in the European Union and in developed countries in that regard. That highlights the differences that often exist in this field. My noble friend Lord Howell referred to the importance of the marine possibilities that we have such as hydro, which is important at the moment. Tidal lagoons are being looked at and we need to move that forward. We believe that with our experience we can help others develop long-term, robust, credible national plans and so ensure a level playing field across the EU.
However, the arrangements for energy union governance need to be flexible. Member states must be responsible for developing and delivering their own national plans. Crucially, member states’ right to determine their own energy mix must be respected. With this in mind, we do not believe that national renewables targets in particular should be part of the 2030 framework. This should not surprise noble Lords as this has been a very clear stance of the Government for a considerable period.
The United Kingdom is a world leader in offshore wind deployment and we recognise the role played by the 2020 framework to kick-start renewables deployment and drive down costs in the United Kingdom, across Europe and globally. But for the period after 2020, it is right that member states have the flexibility to decarbonise in the most cost-effective way. Energy union governance should not create unnecessary burdens or constraints, nor restrict member states’ policy choices on those issues best addressed at national level. I briefly mention nuclear, which has come up. I do not want to get bogged down in a discussion about Hinkley. That is perhaps for another time. I am happy to pick that up in correspondence but will say that the increased cost of Hinkley is an increased cost for EDF and the Chinese Government. That is not reflected in the strike price. In decarbonising, the contribution of nuclear is important not just from Hinkley and developments at Wylfa, Moorside and so on but also from small modular reactors.
In policy terms this means balancing the need for EU frameworks on issues such as market integration and emissions reduction with preserving national flexibility to choose the best and most cost-effective way to meet national greenhouse gas targets. It also means balancing the need for certainty and predictability with the need to adapt as the market changes and technologies develop. It has also been mentioned in the debate that there will be developments that we may not even anticipate at the moment—known unknowns. With an eye to the better regulation agenda, the energy union should not create additional burdens for countries such as the United Kingdom which are ahead of the pack. We will be arguing strongly for a flexible template for member states to use in completing those national plans.
As regards DECC’s goals, clearly there is the trilemma. Our first priority is energy security—as I think noble Lords know—affordability and, of course, the importance of clean energy and decarbonisation. We are strongly committed to those goals. Nobody can doubt that, having seen what we did in Paris with the commitment to decarbonisation.
I apologise for picking up other points made by noble Lords in a somewhat random way but they were not perhaps central to the report. The challenge of security of gas supplies in Europe is certainly a central one and—to be fair—comes up in relation to the energy union. That obviously is linked with not just the energy union but also the energy community in south-east Europe and, indeed, the energy charter which governs the former Soviet Union, the European Union and a few others in terms of ensuring that we have security there. That clearly is important. I have mentioned some of the other issues relating to nuclear. I think I have covered the importance of interconnectors. Energy efficiency is certainly important. We hope that that can contribute to demand-side reduction. It is already bringing down demand, as has been acknowledged today in relation to the national grid. Demand is an important point in ensuring that we have that security of supply. We are now getting the demand-side reduction on the industrial business side. We can expect to see that delivered through smart meters and smart grids on the domestic side as they roll out to 2020 and, indeed, beyond.
CCS is vital. We discussed that very recently in New York when signing the international treaty and when discussing bilateral arrangements with other states on the importance of coming together to see whether we can pool resources in terms of research and data on CCS. That work will be ongoing. Therefore, an awful lot is happening. I restate my thanks and those of the Government for the report, which is timely and well thought through. We largely accept it and welcome it, as noble Lords are aware. I am very grateful for it. I thank the noble Baroness once more for all that she and the committee have done and wish them all the best in the future.
Baroness Scott of Needham Market
My Lords, I am very grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate this evening and particularly to those who said nice things about me. I have reached that age where my gratitude is much greater than my modesty, so I thank them for their comments.
I also tried very hard in my introduction not to mention the R word but of course the referendum is the backdrop against which all these debates take place. I thought it was interesting that there was consensus, certainly among this evening’s speakers, on the challenges we face in producing a supply of energy that is environmentally sustainable, secure and affordable for everyone—and consensus that these objectives can be met only by co-operation of a number of kinds between countries. The challenge is about how we create a governance framework that delivers the strategic objectives while allowing it to reflect member states’ very different traditions and preferences for an energy mix. If the European Union can get this one right, it will also be a very useful template for other areas of endeavour where there are advantages in working together but we still want to maintain some freedoms and flexibilities.
I was particularly struck by the point on innovation and making sure that such a framework does not stifle innovation, because I think we are on the cusp of an energy revolution. We are not very far away from that and would not want to stifle that sort of innovation and change. With that, I again thank all noble Lords, particularly the Minister, and I beg to move.
Statutory Auditors and Third Country Auditors Regulations 2016
The Earl of Courtown
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 23 May be approved.
The Earl of Courtown (Con)
My Lords, effective financial reporting underpins the success of every business. It helps inform decision-making, improve performance and promote confidence in a company’s future. For many businesses, audit is essential to provide assurances that financial reporting to shareholders is honest and accurate. Government activity in this area should improve trust and transparency, but without placing excessive or undue burdens on business. The proposed regulations implement the 2014 EU audit directive, which amends a directive adopted in 2006, and the EU audit regulation. They apply to a wide range of businesses that require audit services. However, the most significant changes to the status quo will apply to public interest entities or PIEs, as I will refer to them in this debate. For the purposes of these EU reforms, PIEs are banks, building societies, insurers and other companies listed on a regulated market.
The audit directive and regulation came about due to recognition that action was needed to improve confidence in audit quality and assure auditor independence. The final legislation, which was passed with UK agreement, represents a workable and positive outcome for UK negotiation. The directive and regulation take further steps to harmonise audit regulation across the EU but also allow member states sufficient flexibility to regulate audit services in ways that reflect the national systems that they have built up over time.
The key priorities for the United Kingdom, in the negotiation of this legislation and its implementation, have been to help secure high-quality audits and independence in auditor judgments across the EU, and to help avoid excessive concentration of large firms in the audit market. The profile and importance of auditing in UK business means that we have consulted extensively on the implementation of the EU audit directive and regulation. BIS published a discussion document in 2014 to get views on our approach to implementation. Responses to that document informed a technical consultation in 2015. Both consultations showed general support for our approach to ensure maximum flexibility for auditors and their clients. The majority of the stakeholders who responded had practical experience of preparing or auditing accounts. The responses have been published online.
The regulations before us will amend the Companies Act 2006 and other related legislation on the current audit framework. I am aware that they may appear complex but the effects should easily be understood with the help of guidance. We have tried to keep additional costs as low as possible. Our impact assessment is publicly available but I acknowledge that the majority of the costs will impact on PIEs. These are the most important businesses and effective financial reporting in this area is crucial. The regulations implement the requirement to identify a single competent authority for the regulation of statutory audits. The Financial Reporting Council will fulfil this role. This is consistent with the Written Statement to the House last July. The FRC will delegate tasks to the existing recognised supervisory bodies, for example the ICAEW or the ACCA. These delegations will include approval of individuals and firms as eligible for appointment as auditors, inspections, investigations and enforcement. The FRC will retain the task of inspections and investigations of PIE audits.
As I have mentioned, the regulations introduce provisions to secure auditor independence. Most significantly, this includes a framework for the mandatory rotation and retendering of audit engagements for PIEs. This will require all PIEs to put their audit out to tender at least every 10 years and change their auditor at least every 20 years. This will apply in respect of financial years beginning on or after 17 June 2016. Currently, there is no maximum duration for an audit engagement and annual reappointments of the same auditor can continue indefinitely. So we have spent considerable time analysing how to make maximum use of the flexibilities provided in the regulation to reduce disruption to the market.
The requirement on retendering and rotation will be introduced on a phased basis. Some engagements will be given a further four or seven financial years after the regulations come into force, depending on how long they have already been in place. That engagement must then be brought to an end.
This wider requirement is intended to be as consistent as possible with the requirement introduced by the CMA. As a result, and so that the initial implementation of the framework is simple to follow, we have not taken up the member state option to incentivise “joint audit”. The practice of appointing more than one audit firm is not followed in the UK, and the CMA did not consider it would improve competition in the audit market. We will of course keep this decision under review.
Another change made by the regulations will benefit the full range of businesses that use statutory audit services, including limited liability partnerships. Businesses will no longer be able to sign effective agreements that restrict their choice of auditor. The regulations also contain changes that are likely to have a deregulatory effect. These include changes to make cross-border provision of audit services more straightforward in the EEA. As well as having the potential to increase competition in the UK, this mandatory EU requirement will be reflected in similar provisions in other member states and should open up opportunities to UK firms.
This Government believe that a non-statutory approach to implementation of EU legislation should be adopted wherever possible. The implementation of ethical and technical requirements in the directive for auditors will be covered by revised FRC standards. This approach reflects that taken to implementing the 2006 audit directive, where the requirements in the directive were implemented in UK law as requirements on the content of FRC standards.
Many of the requirements of the EU regulations will also apply as part of the standards. This includes a black list of services that auditors will not be able to provide alongside the audit to avoid overfamiliarity between the management and auditors of PIEs. It also includes additional requirements on the content of the audit report for PIEs, which supplement further harmonisation in the directive. This is not expected to significantly increase the length of audit reports but is likely to increase their value to users.
In conclusion, the regulations will strengthen standards for the audit of PIEs and make audit reporting more informative. They should also improve confidence in the independence of auditors and avoid excessive concentration in the audit market. They open up opportunities for smaller audit firms that are not as well established as their larger competitors. I beg to move.
Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)
My Lords, “Statutory Auditors and Third Country Auditors Regulations” is not an exciting title—it will certainly not have them dancing in the saloon bar of the Dog and Duck—but this is important to the country, to the companies in this country and indeed to our capital markets. I want this evening to question the extent to which these regulations will achieve the very wide-ranging and important objectives the Government expect from them and whether there may not be perverse and unintended consequences, possibly just maintaining the status quo and the risk of a further increase in the regulatory burden, which my noble friend referred to in his opening remarks.
I hope that the House will forgive me if I take a minute just to lay out my case. I make these remarks drawing on my experience as a non-executive director of a public company from 2002 to 2014. I ceased to be a director two years ago, so I do not have a direct interest to declare, but I should draw the House’s attention to my past record. The company was what they call a FTSE 250 company—that is to say not in the top 100 but in the next 250, so one of the 350 largest companies in the country.
What are the Government seeking to achieve? I draw the House’s attention to page 1 of the impact assessment, where it says:
“What is the problem under consideration? Why is government intervention necessary?”.
It goes on to say:
“The financial crash in 2008, led to calls for greater scrutiny of the audit profession. The belief was that the accounts of several financial institutions had been given unjustified ‘clean’ audit reports and so potentially misled investors and regulators, undermining confidence in the financial system as a whole and affecting the efficient allocation of financial capital”.
In reading that, one could only conclude that the fundamental purpose behind these regulations is to address issues of systemic risk. If this were not the case, why would the impact assessment focus so heavily on undermining confidence in the financial system as a whole?
If we are addressing systemic risk, there are relatively few companies that are large enough to pose a systemic risk in this country: the banks, certainly, along with other financial institutions, and some of the biggest industrial and commercial companies. How many? Possibly 50, but probably no more than that. However, the regulations, as my noble friend has told us, apply to every company called a public interest entity—a PIE. When I read the policy background on page 2 of the Explanatory Memorandum, it was clear that it applies to all listed companies of whatever size, from the biggest to the smallest. Just for the record, it would be helpful if my noble friend could give an assurance that the regulations do not apply to companies listed on the AIM. If he cannot give that assurance, I will be seriously upset.
What additional reporting requirements will be imposed on PIEs? According to paragraph 7.6 on page 3 of the Explanatory Memorandum,
“The Regulations make changes to audit reporting requirements, including the reporting of irregularities; auditors of PIEs will be required to submit an additional report to the audit committee of the audited entity”.
In order to try and tackle the challenges—or possibly the failures—of auditing the 50 or so companies which pose a systemic risk to the British economy, we are proposing to require all listed companies to prepare further reports, for which of course they will have to pay, directly or indirectly.
I have heard many politicians on both sides of the House deplore the emergence of private equity at the expense of the public stock market. Such people seem to worry about what may be happening behind the green baize door of a private company, away from the public gaze. As it happens, I do not share that view—I think there are good and bad everywhere—but I share it in one respect, which is that the man in the street cannot and probably should not invest in private equity in the way he can and should in shares traded on public markets such as the London Stock Exchange. In order to encourage general faith and confidence in the fairness of our liberal capitalist economy, we need a healthy, growing public market in which all our fellow citizens can participate. Every time the Government come up with another set of regulations to be complied with by public companies, they give another boost to the growth of alternative funding mechanisms and therefore accentuate the different investment opportunities available to different parts of our society. If the Government said: “These regulations apply only to companies which pose a systemic risk to the UK economy”, I would be entirely supportive, but I fear that is not the case.
How do the Government think that this can be remedied? My noble friend referred in his opening remarks to excessive concentration. I return to the impact assessment:
“The market failures are due to misaligned incentives, conflict of interests and lack of competition. Companies infrequently tendering audit appointments or changing auditors cause there to be little opportunity for new entrants to compete for contracts, leading to a lack of competition in the market for the provision of audit services”.
Lack of competition? There are only four major firms in the PIE space—all other auditing practices are at present effectively also-rans—so there are only four entrants to the race, one of which must be ruled out because it will be the current auditor and another may be ruled out because it is providing corporate finance or other services. We have a race of only two horses. This is what we call competition. There is bound to be the effect of taking in each other’s dirty washing or passing the buck around when you have that limited a number of participants.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, following that speech, I think that the Minister will be delighted to know that we welcome these regulations, and particularly what they seek to achieve. I am a little surprised that, today being 13 June, they come into operation on 17 June—so we are cutting it fine. Nevertheless, the content is important to improving audit, and is another welcome initiative by the EU, further proof of how our membership of the EU enables us to develop rules across the whole of the EU, which will ensure that the public can be assured that company accounts really mean what they say. We particularly welcome the increased oversight of the auditing of quoted companies, credit and insurance firms, all of which are vital to the health of UK plc. I think even the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, would agree with that. We especially welcome strengthening the independence of auditors from their clients, including independent members having to form a majority of an audit committee. We strongly welcome the audit firm rotation, with at least 10-yearly public tendering, and an upper limit of 20 years for appointments, and we welcome the restrictions on the supply of non-audit services, including at certain points tax, legal, and internal audit functions.
The questions that I shall pose to the Minister are about the governance of the competent authority—the FRC; the delegation to, and recall back from, an RSB; and the potential exclusion from membership of an accountant from a professional body. First, I recognise the detailed work that the FRC has undertaken in preparing for these regulations, and in preparing itself for 17 June. However, could the Minister confirm that involved in that planning were not only the regulated community but representatives of the wider community, which particularly depends on high-quality auditing—consumers, investors and employees?
That brings me to the second question about the FRC—its future accountability and governance. I note that in its response to our Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, BIS said that the Government and the FRC are likely to review the current accountability framework. Will the Minister confirm that in any such discussions and review the Secretary of State will take seriously the need to include these wider interests of consumer, investor and employee representatives in the governance of the FRC? I should perhaps say that, although it is quite out of date, I used to chair the FRC’s actuarial stakeholder group. This wider input to professional, ethical and enforcement standards remains important, and I would like to build it into any such review of governance.
When we look at BHS or many other examples, we are often left wondering what on earth the auditors did not see or did not choose to report. A proper audit might have led to different outcomes. It is essential that in fulfilling its bigger and, indeed, powerful role, the FRC will work not simply with its regulated community—that is, the audit firms and the RSBs—but with these wider interests who are dependent on high-class auditing for the future of their jobs or their investment or, indeed, for the purchase of goods and services in their role as consumers. Will the Secretary of State consider their interests in looking at future governance?
Secondly, in relation to the delegation from the competent authority to an RSB and the recall of those delegated powers, the regulations define what cannot be delegated from the competent authority—the FRC—but allow the retention of some tasks. They also allow for some tasks to be reclaimed. Will the Minister confirm that, so that the FRC can concentrate on the systemic risks in the audit market, it will leave the other bits of the regulation of audit to the existing regulatory supervisory bodies? I assume that he agrees that the FRC should really concentrate on the bits that only it can do and leave the RSBs to use their experiences and skills where that is appropriate.
That brings me to the part in the draft regulations that state that something can be reclaimed if the FRC considers that the RSB is unable to carry out the task. However, we know nothing about how that would be defined and what the barrier is. Will the Minister outline the governance mechanism and the criteria behind a judgment that an RSB was not able to carry out a task? Will there be transparent criteria for that decision on its competence? Will there be any appeal mechanism against such a judgment?
Thirdly, if I and others have read this correctly, an important area is the potential expulsion by the competent authority—the FRC—of an accountant from his or her professional body. I think the Minister knows that RSBs are concerned about the FRC taking power to exclude members from their professional body. The ICAEW asked whether it really was the intention to allow the FRC to exclude an ICAEW member from membership of the ICAEW or whether it was really simply for the FRC to be able to exclude a member from holding an audit licence issued by their professional body. That is quite a big difference. Our legal friends who are in the House tonight will know the difference between being and not being a member of their professional body. It would be unusual for an outside body to take away their membership of the Law Society or the Bar Council.
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, I thank my noble friend and the noble Baroness for their contributions to this short debate. I know both of them feel that effective financial management underpins the success of every business, and the quality and reliability of financial reporting in the UK is well regarded. Consequently, it will also be a priority of this Government to maintain the rigour and integrity of the UK’s audit regime. Although the regulations are largely regulatory they should place very low additional costs on business. Furthermore, compulsory retendering of audits should increase competition—notwithstanding what my noble friend said—and choice in the marketplace.
Although the application of the requirements to auditors of LLPs goes beyond the minimum requirements of the audit directive and regulation, it will implement the recommendations of the Competition and Markets Authority and meet the understandable desire of users and preparers of accounts for consistency in financial frameworks.
My noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, asked a number of questions. I will deal first with the questions asked by the noble Baroness. In her first question she asked whether the regulated community was involved in planning but also representatives of the wider community—consumers, investors and employers. As I said in my earlier speech, the Government have conducted two full public—I emphasise “public”—consultations on implementation. Respondents included representatives of companies and investors who are also effectively the consumers of audit services in this context. I am not aware at this stage of interest from any employee representatives but the ability for representations to be made in both consultations was there at that point.
The noble Baroness also asked about the need to include wider interests such as consumer, investor and employer representatives in the governance structure of the FRC. As part of current discussions relating to the status of the FRC as a public body the Government and FRC are likely to review the current accountability framework and to consider whether changes are needed following the implementation of the directive and regulation. I am sure that interest from these groups will be considered where it is expressed. It is fair to say that the interests of investors in particular are of great concern to the FRC and all its work.
The noble Baroness also mentioned leaving the regulation of audit to the existing regulatory supervisory bodies. The experience and skills of the professional bodies are vital to the quality of audit and accounting in the United Kingdom, which is why the United Kingdom successfully made the case in Brussels for their continued involvement in audit regulation. However, we also support independent oversight of the profession as envisaged by the directive and regulation. The FRC therefore has had to have power and discretion to reclaim tasks from the RSBs where necessary.
The line in the EU reforms is between PIE audits, where inspections, most investigations and enforcements cannot be delegated, and other audits, where these tasks can be delegated. The regulations place the FRC as a competent authority in charge of delegation decisions. We do not want to tie its hands unduly. The FRC works closely with other regulatory authorities such as the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England to identify areas of risk. We would expect any such areas of concern to be identified through consultation. This would all be subject to a direction from the Secretary of State which will oblige the FRC to work on the basis that it will delegate all tasks wherever possible.
The noble Baroness also asked whether I could outline the governance mechanism and criteria behind such a judgment and whether there would be any transparent criteria upon which any RSB competency would be judged. The FRC will delegate tasks on the basis that it can update from time to time the conditions which it will set when making the delegation. We will expect any conclusion that an RSB is unable to carry out tasks for a particular type of audit to be based on whether these conditions are met. The conditions will be set out in written delegation arrangements, which the FRC is currently discussing with the RSBs.
The noble Baroness also asked about an appeal mechanism for an RSB against such a judgment. There is no prescribed appeal system, but if the RSB considered that the FRC had acted unreasonably, it would have recourse to judicial review.
The noble Baroness also asked whether there would be some form of continual review of this matter. There will be continuing discussions on these regulations between the FRC and the Government.
My noble friend Lord Hodgson, with all his experience—
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
If the Minister is moving on from the points that I made, the one that he has not addressed is about the power which appears to be given to the FRC to expel a member from their professional body. If he does not have that information in front of him, maybe it will be possible to at least give an undertaking that discussions on that will take place, because clearly it is a key concern for the professional bodies.
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, but I thought that I had covered that issue. Rather than repeat what I said, I will write to her and put a copy of my response in the Library.
As I was saying, my noble friend, with all his experience in business, made some important points. Perhaps the most important question that he asked, right at the beginning, related to the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange and public interest entities, and I hope that my answer will satisfy him. The definition of a public interest entity does not include companies unless they are banks or insurers that have securities listed only on the Alternative Investment Market of the London Stock Exchange. These companies will not be required to retender or rotate auditor appointments, or to be subject to any of the statutory provisions on audits of PIEs introduced by the regulations or to the provision of the EU regulation. Nor will they be subject to the FCA’s or PRA’s rules on audit committees.
My noble friend asked why these regulations do not apply to the small number of companies that pose a systemic risk. This was a source of concern in the negotiations in Brussels, where the list of criteria for a company to qualify as a PIE was reduced considerably. The definition of a PIE focuses on an EU-regulated market, not the AIM, and that may illustrate the concern in Brussels to apply some harmonisation across this area.
My noble friend also mentioned enabling more entry to the PIE audit market for mid-sized firms. The prohibition of restrictive clauses in, for example, loan agreements will help to achieve this, as it will not be possible for third parties to require other audit firms to be excluded from tenders.
I think my noble friend made a number of other points and if I have missed any, I will of course respond to them in writing, ensuring that the noble Baroness has a copy and that a copy is placed in the Library.
Finally, the Financial Conduct Authority has amended its rules to reflect changes to the framework in the directive on audit committees. The directive also requires rules on audit committees to be applied, for the first time, to unlisted banks, building societies and unlisted insurers—something the Prudential Regulation Authority has already done in respect of its rules. As noble Lords will note, overall this represents an extensive package of changes, of which these regulations are an important part. I commend them to the House.
Access to Justice Act 1999 (Destination of Appeals) (Family Proceedings) (Amendment) Order 2016
(7 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Faulks
That the draft Order laid before the House on 14 April be approved.
The Minister of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Faulks) (Con)
My Lords, I beg to move that the Committee has considered the draft Access to Justice Act 1999 (Destination of Appeals) Order 2016, which I will refer to as “the civil order”, and the draft Access to Justice Act 1999 (Destination of Appeals) (Family Proceedings) (Amendment) Order 2016, which I will refer to as “the family order”.
The orders are intended to address the workload of the Court of Appeal and are made under Section 56 of the Access to Justice Act 1999. They have been consulted upon with members of the senior judiciary, as is required by Section 56. As their titles suggest, the orders make provision in respect of the routes of appeal from judicial decisions in civil and family proceedings. I will start with the civil order.
The civil order replaces the Access to Justice Act 1999 (Destination of Appeals) Order 2000. If made, the order will remove the current distinction made for certain proceedings between interim and final decisions, so that appeals from all decisions of a particular level of judge will follow the same route and, as far as possible, lie to the next level of judge. This is the key amendment made by the order. The civil order also reflects amendments made by the Crime and Courts Act 2013 to Section 5 of the County Courts Act 1984, which widened the definition of “judge of the county court”.
The 2000 order currently makes provision for routes of appeal where a route is not already provided in other legislation. In particular, the order makes provision for an exception with regard to appeals against final decisions in claims which are allocated to the multi-track and appeals from decisions in specialist courts; for example, proceedings under the Companies Acts. At present, these appeals lie directly to the Court of Appeal, in some cases circumventing both the county court judge and the High Court, irrespective of the level of judge who made the decision to be appealed. This exception might well have been thought appropriate at the time that the 2000 order was debated, but there is no doubt that both the county court and the High Court have the requisite level of expertise to determine such appeals irrespective of whether the decisions appealed are interim or final. In the meantime, valuable judicial and administrative resources in the Court of Appeal are being lost to matters that can quite properly be determined in the lower courts.
Turning to the detail of the civil order, the Ministry of Justice has worked with the senior judiciary to ensure that these amendments will work, and we are grateful to them for their assistance. Although the civil order may appear quite detailed, its effect is to simplify the routes of appeal so that appeals from decisions of district judges sitting in the county court will lie to a circuit judge, except in respect of appeals in proceedings under the Companies Acts, which will now be determined by the High Court; appeals from decisions of circuit judges will lie to the High Court; appeals from decisions of masters and district judges sitting in the High Court will lie to a High Court judge, except in proceedings which have been allocated to the small claims track of the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court, where an appeal will lie from a decision of a district judge to an enterprise judge; and appeals from decisions of High Court judges will continue to lie to the Court of Appeal. The result will be that cases will be considered at the most appropriate level of court, which, in turn, will result in a more efficient use of available judicial resources.
Recent amendments to Section 5 of the County Courts Act 1984 significantly increased the number of judges who might sit in the county court, and list no fewer than 25 judicial officeholders, including certain tribunal judiciary, who may do so. In reflecting this reform, and to ensure that the correct route of appeal is applied in each case, the civil order also recognises that when sitting as a judge of the county court, some of that number will be accorded a level of seniority commensurate with that of a circuit judge, while others will be accorded that of a district judge.
I should add that the amended order will not undermine the judicial power to order that an appeal be transferred to a higher appellate authority should the circumstances of the case merit it. Also, as is apparent on the face of the civil order, the new arrangements are not intended to affect the rules relating to second appeals, which will continue to lie to the Court of Appeal.
The aim of this new civil order is to clarify and simplify the appeals process to ensure that the route of appeal in civil proceedings lies to the next level of judge. This should reduce the number of appeals that are lodged in the Court of Appeal and reduce pressure at that court by making best use of judicial time, ensuring that cases are heard in the most appropriate level of court.
I now move on to the family order. This order amends the Access to Justice Act 1999 (Destination of Appeals) (Family Proceedings) Order 2014, which I will refer to as the 2014 order, to route certain family court appeals away from the Court of Appeal to the High Court. The order also includes consequential amendments to the Family Procedure Rules 2010. Those rules set out the practice and procedure that is to be followed in family proceedings in the family court and the High Court.
Family proceedings in England and Wales are dealt with primarily in the family court, with the High Court also having jurisdiction to hear such cases. The default route of appeal from a decision of a judge of the family court would be to the Court of Appeal. However, the 2014 order already makes provision for appeals from decisions of certain judges in the family court to be routed to a different, higher, level of judge in the family court. For example, an appeal from a decision of a district judge in the family court already lies to a circuit judge in the family court.
The family order will amend the 2014 order so that appeals from certain decisions of circuit judges and recorders in the family court will lie to the High Court rather than to the Court of Appeal. It has been laid in response to concerns about the quantity of appeals currently being made to the Court of Appeal. Ministry of Justice statistics published in June 2015 show that family-related appeals to the Court of Appeal increased by over 200% between 2008 and 2014. Appeals must be dealt with in ways proportionate to the grounds of complaint and the subject of the dispute, while ensuring effective access to justice.
The changes proposed under the order mean that, rather than an appeal hearing taking place before a court of up to three Court of Appeal judges, appeals routed to the Family Division of the High Court will be heard by a single, specialist and experienced High Court judge. It is clear that this change will reduce the senior judicial resources required for these types of appeal and, by moving some work to the High Court, the Court of Appeal will be better able to manage cases of appropriate weight for that court.
Routing certain appeals to the High Court instead of the Court of Appeal should also lead to a reduction in the time it takes for these appeals to be heard and, by reducing the number of appeals going to the Court of Appeal, I hope this change should also benefit the flow of cases in that court. This will allow for more effective and expeditious determinations in other appeals, for example public law appeals relating to children.
The senior judiciary was consulted on these proposals in November 2015. It was supportive of these proposals and its views were key in determining the content of the order. We also consulted 10 key stakeholders, including the Law Society, Bar Council and the Council of Her Majesty’s Circuit Judges, who were broadly supportive of our proposals and whose responses helped us to finalise the policy position. Further details in relation to the points raised in the consultation responses are summarised in the Explanatory Memorandum to the family order.
The amendments to the 2014 order made by the new family order will apply to appeals from decisions of the family court made by circuit judges and recorders in all proceedings, including appeals from decisions made relating to contempt of court, with some exceptions. Those exceptions are: appeals from decisions made on appeal in the family court, so as not to create an extra level of appeal; appeals from decisions made in proceedings under Part 4 or 5 of the Children Act 1989, for example appeals against orders placing a child in the care of a local authority; appeals from decisions under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, including adoption and placement order appeals; and appeals from decisions relating to contempt of court linked to the above proceedings.
In the case of appeals relating to proceedings under Parts 4 and 5 of the Children Act 1989 and those under the Adoption and Children Act 2002, the consequences of the state intervening in a family’s life, the fact that the relationship between a parent and their child may be completely severed and the child’s status changed by adoption, and the complexities arising in these proceedings are considered so serious as to merit these types of appeal continuing to be heard by the Court of Appeal.
To summarise, appeals must be dealt with in ways that are proportionate to the grounds of complaint and the subject of the dispute, while ensuring effective access to justice. The amendments made by the family order will allow that to happen. By moving some work to the High Court, the Court of Appeal will be better able to manage cases of appropriate weight for that court.
I should add that, as well as these measures to improve the flow of work through the Court of Appeal, the Civil Procedure Rule Committee has recently launched a further and separate consultation outlining proposals to raise the threshold for permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal and remove the automatic right of oral renewal for permission to appeal where permission has been refused on the basis of the documents in the case. The consultation closes on 24 June.
If the proposals under consultation, which I have described to the House, are accepted then they will apply to appeals to the Court of Appeal in both civil and family cases. This consultation, along with these two orders, form a suite of reforms to improve efficiency in the civil courts. We are grateful for the ongoing work of the judiciary in our efforts to achieve this. Noble Lords will be aware that judicial recruitment is the responsibility of the Lord Chancellor. That of course means ensuring that he meets his statutory obligation in respect of appointments, but also keeping workload under review—as he does—to ensure that enough judges are available to hear appeals within a reasonable timeframe.
Noble Lords will wish to know that the Lord Chancellor’s decisions are informed by a so-called complement group made up of senior judiciary and HMCTS officials who examine the business need at all levels of the judiciary and advise the Lord Chancellor on the optimum complement. Both orders respond to concerns about the volume of appeals directed to the Court of Appeal and they will ensure that cases and appeals are being heard in ways that are proportionate to the grounds of the complaint and the subject of the dispute. I beg to move.
Lord Beecham (Lab)
My Lords, when these orders were debated at the Third Delegated Legislation Committee, for all of 13 minutes, with an opening in the Commons by the Minister responsible there of two minutes, my honourable friend Christina Rees expressed support for the changes, which had the backing of the senior judiciary, as we have head, recognising the need to reduce the workload on the Court of Appeal. It took a freedom of information request from the Law Society, apparently, to reveal that almost half of the 646 trials adjourned in that court were adjourned because of a lack of judicial resources.
Can the Minister explain why the Government allowed the number of cases to increase by 59% in the last five years without increasing resources or taking action of the kind embodied in this order? Is there a particular category of case which is responsible for this increase? To what extent, if any, has the reduced availability of legal aid in both family and other proceedings had a bearing on the matter, particularly given the number of unrepresented parties? Can he answer the question asked by my honourable friend and not answered by the Minister in the other place, as to the evidence base for the assertion that:
“The High Court has the capacity to absorb the extra appeals, thus lowering waiting times”.?
She also asked to what extent these changes meet the four requirements made by Lord Justice Briggs for easing the load on the Court of Appeal, namely increasing the court’s resources, reducing its workload, improving its efficiency and—I hope this would not be the case—deliberately reducing the quantity and quality of the service.
Somewhat disconcertingly, the Minister in the Commons admitted that, on their own, the changes,
“will not necessarily address any backlog of work held by the Court of Appeal, but they will ensure that the backlog does not continue to increase and that cases are dealt with at an appropriate level and as swiftly as possible”.—[Official Report, Commons, Third Delegated Legislation Committee, 8/6/16; col. 6.]
What does that mean in terms of the number of cases that will go to the Court of Appeal, as compared with the present situation, and as to the waiting time for hearings in that court? Needless to say, the so-called impact assessment, as is all too often the case, fails to supply the relevant information.
The Explanatory Memorandum to the family proceedings order refers to the consultation carried out by the Ministry of Justice and referred to by the Minister with a range of 10 stakeholders, albeit none from court users, as opposed to the judiciary and legal professionals. The consultation responses “broadly supported” the rerouting of appeals from circuit judges and recorders in family proceedings to a High Court judge rather than the Court of Appeal. But what does “broadly” mean? Did any of the consultees raise questions about resources or target times for hearings?
Finally, to what extent will the Ministry of Justice monitor progress under this new regime, both in terms of the cases to be heard in the High Court as now prescribed, and in relation to the effect of the reduced workload in the Court of Appeal? I trust that we will not be waiting for three or more years before the position is reassessed, particularly given that the changes are principally directed at a significantly sensitive area of law—the family area. I should declare a paternal interest inasmuch as my daughter sits as a part-time deputy district judge.
Lord Faulks
I am grateful for the questions posed by the noble Lord and I congratulate his daughter on the contribution that she is making to the administration of justice. I am sure that she, like all judges, will be feeling the pressure that heavy workloads can create. The noble Lord asked if any consideration had been given to whether the lower courts could cope with additional work. The answer is that HMCTS, as is its responsibility, is fully aware of and supportive of the changes, and the Ministry of Justice has been working with the senior judiciary, who are supportive of the measures and keen for the order to come into force.
The noble Lord suggested that there has been a somewhat tardy response to what was clearly something of a crisis in the build-up of cases and the capacity of the Court of Appeal to deal with them. I am sure he will understand that any Government will have to be careful before depriving any litigant of their rights of appeal, which are well established, and will have to satisfy themselves, after the appropriate level of consultation, that restricting or changing the routes of appeal is in fact in the interests of justice and will not prejudice the interests of a particular appellant, while of course bearing in mind the fact that justice must be administered in an efficient way. The noble Lord will see that there has been a nuanced response in terms of the appeal process, so some of the appeals that I outlined in my opening remarks will still go straight to the Court of Appeal, where it is considered that that is appropriate. So this has not been an across-the-board response.
As to the consultation, there was a requirement for the Ministry of Justice to consult with the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls, the President of the Queen’s Bench Division, the President of the Family Division and the Chancellor of the High Court before making the order. All specifically indicated that they were content with the provisions, and their views were key in determining the content. But in addition to the consultation with the senior judiciary required by statute, the Ministry of Justice held a wider consultation on these proposals with 10 key stakeholders: the Council of Her Majesty’s Circuit Judges, the Association of District Judges, the Magistrates Association, the Chief Magistrate, the Bar Council, the Association of Lawyers for Children—very much, I respectfully suggest, representing the consumer—the Justices’ Clerks’ Society, the Family Law Bar Association, the Law Society and Resolution. That was a pretty broad series of bodies to consult before deciding on the appropriate changes to the arrangements.
Lord Beecham
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for supplying that information, but perhaps he could advise the department that in future when it sets out a position on these matters, it should give a rather fuller account of the consultations it has carried out—because it does not appear in the documentation that has been put before us.
Lord Faulks
I am tempted to say better late than never—but, in any event, the information is available, and I hope that it has satisfied the understandable curiosity that the noble Lord had about the extent of the consultation.
On the management of resources—clearly something that is a responsibility of the Government—this is an estimation. Of course one can never be precisely sure about how many people will be appealing. I do not have any figures on whether the increase in appeals is related to any of the matters that the noble Lord suggested. On the face of it, it seems somewhat unlikely that the reduction in legal aid in certain areas would result in there being more appeals. It could result in more or fewer appeals—but none the less, there has been an increase. As I also indicated, there is a consultation shortly to close as to whether there ought to be a change in the threshold for allowing an appeal to be launched in the first place. The Government are waiting for the response to that before deciding the next step.
On the question of backlog, the answer is simply this: we do not want to deprive anybody retrospectively, as it were, of a right to appeal that they had, so it will take a little time for the changes, which we think will improve matters, to take effect. Nothing very dramatic will happen until this order takes effect and we can reroute the appeals in the way we suggested.
On the question of monitoring progress, we will do so. If necessary, we will make appropriate changes to ensure, in so far as possible, that the administration of justice is efficiently carried out. We will continue, as we have done, to consult the judiciary—not only the heads of division, but various other bodies—to ensure we do this in the best way we can.
These are important changes. The appeal process is fundamental to civil and family jurisdictions. We feel we have the balance right. This should help to deal with the volume of appeals currently being made to the Court of Appeal and will make a significant difference to the progress of appeals prospectively after the order comes into effect. We also take the view that the order will clarify and simplify the process to ensure that the route of appeal is to the next level of judge. The family order will mean that certain family appeal hearings take place before a single, specialist and experienced High Court judge.
I hope that I have answered the questions the noble Lord asked. I beg to move.
Access to Justice Act 1999 (Destination of Appeals) Order 2016
(7 years, 10 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Faulks
That the draft Order laid before the House on 3 May be approved.