National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall
Mr Rees-Mogg
May I tell my hon. Friend that Scottish National party Members are very willing to give advice on how their constituencies are pronounced and that the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) spent some time helping me to get it right?
Mr Nuttall
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention and I think that I need to go for those lessons, too, because I always dread having to follow the hon. Gentleman in case I am asked to pronounce his constituency. I think that I need to sign up for that course.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke) on presenting this Bill this morning and on coming third in the ballot for private Members’ Bills. As he made clear when he introduced the Bill, and to be fair to him, he has spent years campaigning on this issue; I think that is fair to say. That in itself demonstrates his determination on this issue and I know that he is introducing the Bill with the very best of intentions. He listed this cause as one of the six points in the plan that he put before his own electorate, so I do not criticise him in any way for introducing the Bill.
To be honest, I agree with my hon. Friend on the other five points that he put forward: focusing on jobs, action on dementia, supporting schools, calling for affordable family homes and tackling crime. Unfortunately, I have to say very gently to him that I do not support the Bill, and I will set out why. I hope that he will accept that I do so in a spirit of helpfulness.
National Minimum Wage (Workplace Internships) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s report of that. I have been completely consistent in my approach to the proposed legislation. I voted against the previous Bill when it was put to a Division a couple of years ago, so he and I have both been consistent.
As it happens, I was an employer when the national minimum wage legislation was introduced. At the time, I suspect I was employing about 30 or 40 people, so I know from first-hand experience about the impact that it had, not just on me but on many of my clients, which were small businesses. It undoubtedly took up some staff time; it was new legislation and we had to look at how to comply with it. To be fair, although rogue employers will do all they can to break the rules—that will always be the case—the truth is that most businesses and most small employers bend over backwards to try to comply with laws that emanate from this place. Although some extra administration was involved, I do not want to over-egg the pudding; it did not take up a huge amount of time or dominate our practice, but we did have to deal with it.
The biggest problem was not so much the administration but the economic costs of the minimum wage. I refer not so much to those who were not covered by the legislation—in our small practice, perhaps only one or two employees felt any benefit initially from the imposition of the minimum wage—but to the knock-on effect that it had on wage differentials. That was the economic problem for small businesses. If, for example, the salary of the lowest-paid worker—say, the office junior—is increased to the same level as, say, the junior typists, they can legitimately and understandably claim that in order to restore the pay differential, they should have a pay increase. That has a knock-on effect on the next grade up, and so on. The ripple effect of increasing the wages at one level can soon be felt much higher up the pay grade.
Turning to the engagement of additional staff, the fact is that if an employer has work that needs doing, they will engage a new member of staff. That may be part-time, of course—there might not be enough work to fill a full-time role, but the employer will engage either a part-time or full-time staff member. I accept that there might be unscrupulous employers who, seeing a short-term amount of work that needs doing, might seek to engage an unpaid intern to do that work. As I demonstrated earlier, however, my view—which, to be fair, is backed up by cases—is that that situation would already be covered if the person involved could demonstrate that they were carrying out work and were entitled to be paid the national minimum wage. So who would be covered by my hon. Friend’s Bill? People who are doing work are already covered, so the only other people who could be covered are those who are not working: the ones who are watching. Is my hon. Friend really suggesting that the national minimum wage should be paid to people who are simply watching someone else work?
I shall let hon. Members into a little secret. What goes on in this Chamber might be considered a spectator sport, and quite rightly, but I take the view that running a small business is not. When I was running a small business, I could not afford to pay people to come and watch me work. I did not mind paying them if they were carrying out work, but I could not afford to pay them simply to come and watch. I did not mind them coming to do work experience, and I got lots of requests—I still do, as a Member of Parliament—from people asking to come and spend time with me. I said, “Of course, there’s no problem. I will chat to you and I will give you advice.” But I could not pay them to do that. The reality is that an employer, and particularly a small business, cannot afford to pay people who want to sit and watch and then simply walk away having added no value whatever to the business.
Let us ask ourselves what determines a wage on the open market. It is an essential truth that work should be compensated according to productivity. A wage is the price at which a worker is prepared to sell his or her labour; the wage is the balance between what the employer is prepared to pay and at what level the labourer is prepared to sell. The employer will of course take into account the productivity of the labourer, and the labourer will consider how much they value themselves working for that employer. They will also take into account the experience of working there and the working environment. Someone who is prepared to spend time going on work experience—or an unpaid internship, if that is what we want to call it—is demonstrating that they value the experience of just being there and the contacts that they will make while they are there. In their eyes, those considerations cancel out the need for any monetary compensation. I believe that it is absolutely right that an individual should be free to decide for themselves the value of their own labour.
So what would happen if that basic arrangement were interfered with? What would happen if the law said—as I believe would be the case if the Bill became law—that an employer would have to pay to be watched? The obvious conclusion is that a black market would develop, as happens in any market where the price of a product or commodity is set at an artificially high level, higher than the genuine market level. If someone wants to do a few weeks’ work experience—whether it is called an internship or not—without being paid, the law should not prevent that from happening.
Let me deal briefly with the claim that unscrupulous employers are somehow exploiting a loophole. It seems to me that there is much more likelihood of an unscrupulous employer exploiting an individual who is being paid, because they will then expect a return on their payment. If someone is not being paid at all, it is surely far more difficult to exploit them and far more likely that that intern doing work experience would simply walk away.
I want to look in detail at the problems in the Bill. The first problem revolves around the definition in clause 1, which states:
“For the purposes of this Act, a workplace internship is an employment practice in which a person (“the intern”)—
undertakes regular work or provides regular services in the United Kingdom for—
(i) another person;
(ii) a company;
(iii) a limited liability partnership; or
(iv) a public authority; and”.
At the moment, the word “intern” has no legal definition. The official Government website, gov.uk, states:
“Internships are sometimes understood to be positions requiring a higher level of qualification than other forms of work experience, and are associated with gaining experience for a professional career.”
The key term in clause 1 is “employment practice”. Those two words are central to what I would call the obfuscation at the heart of the Bill. What is an employment practice? I venture to suggest that it is actually an employment contract. In other words, this clause is attempting to cover every employment contract in just about every conceivable working environment. Perhaps my hon. Friend would agree, and say that that is exactly what he is trying to do. Perhaps he is trying to make this so watertight and all-encompassing that absolutely no one could escape from it, but let us consider for a moment the problems that could arise from that.
Let us take the example of someone who is setting up a gardening business and regularly volunteering their time to maintain the garden of, say, an elderly neighbour. For the gardener, who wants to work, this is an opportunity not only to help the neighbour but to demonstrate to the neighbourhood that they are capable of the job, which could lead to paid work. Clause 1(b) states:
“(b) the purpose of the employment practice is—
(i) that the intern meets learning objectives or gains experience of working for the employer listed in section 1(a); and
(ii) to provide practical experience in an occupation or profession.”
We know from clause 1(a) that the intern could be working for a sole individual, which would cover the example of someone wanting to work for their neighbour. In that scenario, could the neighbour become liable to pay the national minimum wage? To me, that seems very likely. I submit that that would be an unintended consequence that could result in a financial cost when the person was simply trying to do someone a favour.
Nowhere in the Bill is there a definition of regular work or regular services, a point made earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley. While we are fortunate that the Bill comes with some explanatory notes, they do not give any further clues as to what actually amounts to regular work or regular services. When something is not specifically defined, there is the potential, as pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) in an earlier intervention, not only for further references being necessary in order for an industrial tribunal to clarify the situation, but for terms to be widely construed. If someone is called in to do some filing in an office every Tuesday, is that regular? If a volunteer assists with a monthly live event, is that regular? It clearly means that something happens more than once, but there is no clear guidance.
I suspect that what would happen with the Bill is that the term “internship”, which has been adopted and is widely used and which this Bill seeks to outlaw, will be rapidly replaced by another term. People will try to get around the legislation by using another term—perhaps “work shadowing”. It may be that work shadowing is already covered by the Bill—we would have to see—but if someone has not been promised future work, that situation could be caught by the Bill. I would therefore submit that the Bill’s scope is too wide.
Clause 3 attempts to narrow that scope by setting out some exclusions. It excludes students who are required to do work experience as part of their course. In other words, the Bill recognises that work experience, when part of a wider course of study, does not have to be paid. To be fair, my hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell touched on that in his remarks, but I did not intervene because he made it clear that he was not going to take any more interventions. However, the Bill’s true effect will be to discriminate against precisely those who have been told this morning that it seeks to help. If someone is lucky enough to go to college or university, the Bill says that it is fine for them to go on a placement or have 12 months’ work experience. If someone is not that lucky and just wants the opportunity to see what workplace life is like, the Bill states that an employer must pay them. That cannot be right. I am unsure whether that has been thought through by the Bill’s promoter, but it seems that that is exactly what would happen if the Bill became law.
The Bill also excludes those “of compulsory school age”, who are excluded from the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 anyway; those who are doing apprenticeships; and those otherwise excluded under devolved powers. However, I now want to comment on clause 3(1)(d). Clause 3 states:
“For the purposes of this Act, section 2 shall not apply if the person is—
(a) a student at a higher or further education institution…
(b) of compulsory school age;
(c) undertaking an approved English apprenticeship…
(d) meets the terms of a definition set out in regulations made by the Secretary of State or, as the case may be, the relevant Scottish, Welsh or Northern Ireland Ministers.”
Taken together, those words state that
“section 2 shall not apply if the person is-
… meets the terms of a definition”.
I gently suggest to my hon. Friend that there must be some words missing from clause 3(1)(d)—probably “someone who”. I think it should say that section 2 “shall not apply if the person is—someone who meets the terms of a definition”. It does not make sense as it stands.
The clause also runs the risk of different regulations being made in different parts of this United Kingdom. I hope that my hon. Friend will say that I have missed something and that that is not the case, but the clause seems to suggest that if regulations are made by the Secretary of State in this place or by relevant Ministers in the devolved Administrations, different classes of people would be excluded in different parts of the United Kingdom. Is that the case? Perhaps my hon. Friend will reflect on that and comment on it when he winds up.
I am conscious of the fact that many other Members wish to speak , but I want to talk about the many other people who have looked into this problem. In 2011, the policy group Perspective produced a paper called “Arguing for the introduction of paid internships”, detailing international comparisons of the action taken on this issue. It referred to the 2010 report from the International Labour Office “Global Employment Trends for Youth”, which looked at international comparisons. I do not know whether my hon. Friend, in drawing up the Bill, has examined the situation in other countries and whether the problem he has identified has been solved anywhere else in the world—it may well have been. Some countries, such as Canada and South Korea, have committed to funding internships in key sectors, which may be one way of doing this; we could simply throw Government money at it and say, “We will pay for people who need work experience.” South Korea extended its state-supported youth internship programme and introduced wage subsidies for small and medium-sized enterprises that engaged interns on regular contracts at the conclusion of their internship. I would not want to go down that road, but it has happened in other countries.
More interestingly, the Institute of Economic Affairs, perhaps spurred into action by the publication of my hon. Friend’s Bill, published a discussion paper in August entitled “And how much do you earn?”. One of its conclusions was that the current minimum wage legislation “should be simplified”, and I strongly support that. If this Bill were to be amended in Committee and to go down that road, there would be a lot of merit in that approach. The authors of that paper, Ryan Bourne and J. R. Shackleton, acknowledged that the national minimum wage has “broad public support”, but they said that
“the introduction of the National Living Wage threatens to lead to a populist arms race in terms of statutory minimum pay rates.”
The paper made a number of suggestions, including reducing the number of bands to just two, one for people 18 and over and the other for people 25 and over. It also suggested that the Government should:
“re-emphasise the independence of the Low Pay Commission, allowing it to continue to recommend changes to both rates in the new system according to the best evidence available on the pay-employment trade-off. This is particularly important given the pressure there will be to continue increasing wage rates even in economic recessions.”
In conclusion, the website Simple Politics calls this Bill “The ‘pay interns’ Bill”. I would argue that on closer inspection it is not that, but “The making work experience unaffordable Bill”. Even worse, it could be called “The denying young people opportunities Bill”. The growth in the number of unpaid internships has arisen as a consequence of the minimum wage legislation. I said earlier that I had not previously come across the term “internship”; it has arisen only since the arrival on the scene of the minimum wage, and with it has come the problem of elevating people who are doing work experience to the status of workers.
It was never the intention—the Minister actually said this, in terms—that businesses would have to pay wages to people who were not actually working, but simply experiencing the workplace. The most likely result, if the Bill became law, would be a reduction in the number of opportunities available to young people. Why? Perhaps because the law recognises that work placements do not have the same status as actual work. If an intern is actually working, it is already illegal not to pay them the national minimum wage; that is in the national minimum wage legislation, which Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is enforcing. The Bill is simply unnecessary.
Mr Rees-Mogg
I am interested in what my hon. Friend says. Will he talk a bit about the status of voluntary work? Some people want to volunteer, and lots of charities have business arms; there are charity shops and so on, which have a mix of employee and volunteer help.
Hospital Parking Charges (Exemption for Carers) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(8 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I am grateful for the work carers do in my own constituency, particularly at the carers centre I visited recently, which provides a wide range of activities and support for those who undertake the often unsung job of caring for a loved on. I also pay tribute to the work that Carers UK does, as the principal national charity for carers. Of course, it very much supports the Bill, in this its golden jubilee year.
The aim of the hon. Lady’s Park the Charge campaign, which has resulted in the Bill, is to improve the financial position of carers who have to use hospital car parks by exempting them from car parking charges. Without doubt, the Bill is well intentioned, and no one from across the House would disagree with the proposition that helping those who selflessly care for others is a worthy aim. The first difficulty, however, facing anyone determining the size and nature of a group is that of definition, and that applies to carers as much as to any other. Carers UK says there are 6.5 million carers in the UK, with 5.4 million of them living in England. As I tried to mention earlier, the Bill only applies to England so that is the relevant figure.
Carers UK goes on to state that these people are providing unpaid care for their loved ones, saving the economy an enormous £119 billion each year, yet its research found that 48% of carers were struggling to make ends meet, and 45% said that financial worries were affecting their own health. It is no surprise, therefore, that Carers UK and the Bill seek to alleviate one of the financial pressures on carers—hospital car parking charges. However, I have several concerns, ranging from the Bill’s drafting to its financial implications and potential impact on other groups.
It is not clear to me how we can objectively determine who should and should not be expected to pay for car parking, as we would be doing if we started centrally exempting one particular group as being more deserving than another group. It would seem preferable to allow individual NHS trusts to continue making such decisions locally. Otherwise, on the face of it, we seem to have here a fair and reasonable proposal. Indeed, my initial thought was that it sounded like a good thing to do, and I suspect that most people’s instinct would be to support the Bill simply because of the title.
I know that the hon. Lady has campaigned on this issue with the best intentions, but I want to deal precisely with the exemptions she seeks to introduce. The Bill would exempt two groups of carers. The first is defined in clauses 1 to 3. Clause 2 states that beneficiaries of an exemption would either be in receipt of carer’s allowance or have an underlying entitlement to it. Carer’s allowance is a taxable benefit currently set at £62.10 a week to help a carer look after someone with substantial caring needs, and it is paid to the carer, not the recipient of the care. To qualify, the applicant must be over 16, spend at least 35 hours a week caring for someone, have been in England, Scotland or Wales for at least two of the last three years and not be in full-time education or studying for 21 hours a week or more. The person in receipt of care must receive qualifying benefits, such as the daily living component of the personal independence payment, the middle or highest care rate of the disability living allowance, attendance allowance or the armed forces independence payment.
That is the first group to which we can start to put a number. According to Department for Work and Pensions figures, as of February, 721,000 people were receiving carer’s allowance, so these people would be the first group that would clearly qualify under the criteria. However, the Bill would go further, by also including within the first group all those who have what is referred to as an underlying entitlement to carer’s allowance. The term “underlying entitlement” refers to the fact that a claimant cannot usually receive two income-replacement benefits together—for example, carer’s allowance and the state pension. This is called the overlapping benefit rule. If a person is not entitled to be paid carer’s allowance because of this rule, they are said to have an underlying entitlement to carer’s allowance instead. This might mean they could get the carer’s premium in jobseeker’s allowance and income support, the extra amount for carers in pension credit or the carer’s allowance element of universal credit. The importance of including those people is that the Bill would otherwise exclude carers in receipt of other benefits, such as the state pension, bereavement allowance, contribution-based employment and support allowance, contribution-based jobseeker’s allowance, incapacity benefit, industrial death benefit, maternity allowance, severe disablement allowance, universal credit, war widow’s or widower’s pension or widow’s pension.
Not surprisingly, the inclusion of these people significantly increases the number of those eligible under the Bill. DWP figures, as of February, estimate this group to number 409,000. Taken together, therefore, clauses 1 to 3 could exempt approximately 1.13 million people. These people are either receiving carer’s allowance or have an underlying entitlement to it. As the hon. Lady will be aware, in the north-west, where both our constituencies are located, there are 163,000 such people. To give some idea of the massive increase in the number of carers in recent years, I should add that the figure of 1.13 million is up from 451,000 in February 2000.
If, however, the definition of entitlement is applied in strict accordance with clause 2, the Bill would exclude, a university student caring for a disabled parent, for example. I suspect that the second group of potential beneficiaries was defined for people in such a position. The Bill therefore draws a distinction between a “qualifying carer”—someone caught by clause 2—and an “eligible carer”, as defined in clauses 4 to 6. My hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) touched on this, and I pointed out in an intervention that the figure of 1.13 million—the figure quoted by Opposition Members as being the total number involved—seemed to ignore completely those included under clauses 4 to 6.
Clause 5(1)(a) defines the eligible carer as someone who
“has been assessed for free hospital parking”
by virtue of an amendment to the Care Act 2014, which this Bill would insert. The Bill proposes to amend section 10 of the 2014 Act, which deals with carer’s assessments. A carer’s assessment is made by a trained person either from the council or another organisation that the council works with. The Bill will make it a mandatory requirement for the assessor to assess
“whether the carer should be eligible for free hospital…parking”.
This is in addition to assessing, as outlined in the rest of section 10—
“(a) whether the carer is able, and is likely to continue to be able, to provide care for the adult needing care,
(b) whether the carer is willing, and is likely to continue to be willing, to do so,
(c) the impact of the carer’s needs for support on the matters specified in section 1(2),
(d) the outcomes that the carer wishes to achieve in day-to-day life, and
(e) whether, and if so to what extent, the provision of support could contribute to the achievement of those outcomes.”
It is not clear at all on what basis the assessor is expected to make this decision. If only eligibility or underlying eligibility to carer’s allowance is going to be checked, this provision is superfluous, as such people would be covered in the first group. If some other criteria are to be applied, there is nothing in the Bill or in any guidance notes—no such notes have been issued—to suggest what that might be.
Returning to my example of the student who is caring for a parent but cannot get carer’s allowance because of their studies, clause 5(1)(b) perhaps comes to the rescue. It says an “eligible carer” is a person who
“provides or intends to provide substantial care on a regular basis, other than by virtue of a contract or as voluntary work and has been certified as such by an appropriate clinician.”
I believe that the meaning is ambiguous. What does “intend to provide” mean? How far into the future is it expected that the care will be delivered—within the next week, the next month, the next year, or what? The Bill does not say. Or is a fixed timescale not required; is consideration of caring enough? What constitutes “substantial care” in this provision? Is it the 35 hours a week required to be eligible for the carer’s allowance, or is it fewer than 35 hours a week? We need to know, because the Bill is asking an assessor to be the ultimate arbiter of whether someone is entitled to free hospital parking charges.
Suddenly, the number of people who might benefit from free hospital parking becomes a lot less certain. The first group gave us 1.13 million people. How many more of the 5.4 million carers estimated by Carers UK to be living in England would be included in the second group? We simply do not know.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Does my hon. Friend agree with the further point that clause 5(1)(b) might provide an incentive to increase the total number of carers because people would have a strong need to say that they were carers or had the intention to be carers—even if the reality were completely different, which would mean falsely inflating the figures?
Mr Nuttall
There is always a danger with any scheme, as with the blue badge scheme, that some people will try to use it for their own ends. I hope it would be only a minority, but that danger exists. The assessors would need to be aware of that; they would need to be constantly on the lookout for people who were not genuine cases. That is what I think my hon. Friend is getting at—that some people might “try it on” to their own advantage.
Given that there are no explanatory notes and no impact assessment for the Bill, it is worth considering what has been done in the past. Fortunately, under the last Labour Government, an impact assessment was done—the NHS car parking impact assessment, which was published in December 2009. It estimated that there were 46 million in-patient visitors a day. We do not know how many of them are carers, but as we shall see, car parking charges vary significantly around the country. Regardless of the precise number, it is inevitable that one consequence of the Bill would be to divert part of the healthcare budget that could otherwise be used for front-line national health services—potentially life-saving services—to cover car parking maintenance and all the associated costs ranging from maintenance to administration and dispute management.
The Bill places Members here in the unenviable position of being asked to single out one particular group of people as being more deserving of financial assistance than any other. Without an exact number of those eligible for exemption, it is difficult to know how much money we are talking about in each area that the Bill would take out of the healthcare budget.
At the Bill’s heart is the principle of whether it is right to charge for parking at a hospital or other healthcare facility and, if so, which if any group should be exempt from those charges. I appreciate that some of the public—perhaps virtually all the public—take the view that charging to park a car at a hospital is simply an attempt to make a profit for greedy hospitals or, worse still, for nefarious parking companies. If that were the case, I suspect there would be universal condemnation of such a practice, but of course it is not the case.
Hospital car parking charges in our national health service are what are called “an income-generation scheme”. They are not just an extra-revenue scheme for hospital managers to provide comfier chairs or profit for private parking company executives to fund their jollies to the Seychelles. In 2006, the Department of Health issued guidance called “Income Generation: car parking charges —best practice for implementation”, which was subsequently revised in the same year. This guidance clearly states that to qualify as an income-generation scheme, the scheme
“must be profitable and provide a level of income that exceeds total costs. If the scheme ran at a loss it would mean that commercial activities were being subsidised from NHS funds, thereby diverting funds away from NHS patient care. However, each case will need to be assessed individually. For example, if a scheme is making a substantial loss then it should be stopped immediately.”
If a scheme such as car parking charges at an NHS hospital ran at a loss, it would not be acceptable. The Department of Health’s guidance goes on to state that
“the profit made from the scheme, which the NHS body would keep, must be used for improving the health services”.
The current guidance therefore prevents public money that should be used for patient care from being used to subsidise a loss-making scheme.
Clearly, if the Bill became law, it would inevitably affect the amount of income that a scheme would generate, meaning either that there would be knock-on effects for other users of the car park who are paying for it or that the health authority would be faced with the question of whether to start to subsidise it. It cannot do so because of the guidance, thus raising the question of whether the guidance would need to be revised in the regulations anticipated in the Bill. It is a principle that the Bill could reverse or it could open a door to making such a change.
Mr Nuttall
The problem with selecting a group to exempt from parking charges is the necessity of considering other groups, and deciding which groups it is fair to charge and which groups should be exempt. Is it fair to exempt a particular visitor, albeit a carer, but to charge a clinical support worker who parks at the hospital every day? It could be someone with children or other dependants, working and acting as a carer but not in receipt of carer’s allowance.
Fairfield general hospital in my constituency comes under the Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. According to figures from the northern commissioning region for the latest available year, I understand it is one of the trusts that charges on average 11p per hour for staff to park. I have to say that the trust sets out very clearly what its charges are for hospital car parking, and it provides a range of concessions. I take note of your stricture, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I will not read them out, but it is fair to say that it has obviously looked at this question and considered the various groups that should be entitled to a concession. For example, it has picked out blue badge holders, patients and visitors who need to attend on a frequent or regular basis and those who need to visit because they have suffered the bereavement of a loved one.
Such a scheme would be put in danger, and the trust would have to revisit it, which would undoubtedly have an effect on the viability of that scheme. Is it fair to charge a spouse or partner of a cancer patient who is still working and does not get carer’s allowance if they are too busy to get certified as eligible for hospital parking charge exemption, as required under clause 5 of this Bill? The Bill would require them to be approved in advance, and there will be many other deserving cases not covered by the Bill. The Bill does not seek to exempt people because of their low incomes, which is one a weakness. Some of the carers may well be in straitened circumstances, but there may be others who would be able to pay the charge, whereas some members of other groups would not be in that position.
The conclusion may well be that the fairest answer is not to exempt any groups but to make car parking free for everyone, as has happened in Scotland and Wales. Aligning us with those countries would be a popular idea with many people, but we must not forget that it would mean taking hundreds of millions of pounds out of the healthcare budget. The 2009 impact assessment suggested that the cost then would be between £140 million and £180 million. In six years’ time, it is reasonable to assume that cost would have increased enough to pay for 13,000 band 1 clinical support workers or 9,000 band 5 nurses. We have to ask what we think it is right to spend the healthcare budget on: patient care or free or reduced car parking.
Mr Rees-Mogg
Perhaps my hon. Friend intends to mention it, but he is ignoring the reduction in the availability of spaces that would come about without charges—people would be able to park all day, and there would be much less control. It is not going to make it easier for carers to park if all the spaces are taken and they are blocked.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is right. The fact is that in September 2014 the then Health Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Central Suffolk and North Ipswich (Dr Poulter), noted in a debate that 40% of hospitals now do not charge for hospital car parking. They are likely to be in rural areas where there is less demand for parking—where it is easier to provide parking and there is less pressure on it. I suspect the reality is that a hospital with a car park in a central location in a busy town or a major city centre has no choice but to have a car parking charge. That is the reality of life. If it were be free, there would just be chaos; essentially, it would mean that those who really needed to get close to the hospital would not be able to do so. There has to be some system in place to protect the spaces that are close to the hospital for those who need them. Whatever system we have, there is no simple answer to that.
What we do know is that the present system of having local decision making is working. Fairfield hospital allows 30 minutes of free parking for everyone; then it costs just £1 for up to one hour. In the constituency of the hon. Member for Burnley, by contrast, people would pay £1.90 for up to three hours’ parking. There is a huge disparity across the country. We heard earlier—in an intervention from the hon. Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), I think—about the costs in central London, which are understandably very much higher than in the provinces.
While the Bill does explain the generality of what is required, it does not explain how the system would work in practice. In the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Burnley, she mentioned that the system would work by way of having a badge in the car window. I am happy to be corrected if I misheard. That is the first time I had heard that. It would perhaps have helped all of us if that had been in an explanatory note saying this was how the scheme would work. She also mentioned that in some hospitals people have to pay on entry—I think the hon. Lady is nodding. That is all very well, but I am not quite sure how simply having a voucher in the car window would help in that scenario. It must be more complex than that, and some sort of token would be needed in order to get through the barrier.
Health Service Commissioner for England (Complaint Handling) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(9 years, 2 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I do not intend to detain the House for long on this group of amendments. Suffice it to say that I think there is merit in new clause 3, to the extent that it concentrates the mind of the ombudsman. At the moment, there is simply a requirement to report and that is the end of it. If nothing seems to be done, it just carries on. My concern is that the whole object of the Bill is to stop the situation that occurred in the case that led to its introduction, in which an investigation carried on for the best part of two and half years. As I read the Bill, it seems to me that there would be nothing to stop that happening again. A case could be reported as being outstanding in the annual report at the end of year one, and at the end of year two it could still be outstanding and nobody other than the complainant and the ombudsman’s staff would know anything about it.
Amendment 3 places a requirement on the commissioner to notify the complainant before the end of the period and again that seems to me to be eminently reasonable. Given that the purpose of the Bill is to try to get things dealt with within 12 months, it seems sensible that if it is apparent to the commissioner that that will not be the case, they should inform the complainant before the end of the period. Otherwise, quite legitimately, the complainant will expect the result at the end of those 12 months if they have not heard anything. It is pretty sensible to expect that. Whether that would happen anyway remains to be seen.
Amendment 4 would require the commissioner to provide at the same time an estimate of the target date for completing the investigation, which seems very sensible. The commissioner would say, “Look, we’ve not quite managed to do it in 12 months, but we certainly will in another three.” I see no reason why that should not be set out in the Bill.
I am pleased that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) decided not to proceed with amendment 1, which relates to keeping complainants informed, as we dealt with that in the previous group. Everyone agreed that that was not a matter for legislation but should happen anyway as a matter of good practice.
I am rather less happy that my right hon. Friend has decided not to proceed with amendment 2, which would insert after subsection (4A)(b) the words
“the reasons for each of those delays”.
The general report, as set out in subsection (4)(a), should include details of how long investigations concluded in the year to which the report relates took to be concluded and how many of them took more than 12 months. That means giving a stark figure, for example saying, “We had 30 investigations outstanding at the end of the year.” It seems sensible also to require the reasons to be included. That would allow us to drill down and find out exactly what is causing the delays.
That leads me neatly to amendment 5, which stands in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope). It would insert the following provision:
“If the reason for the delay specified in Section 2HA is lack of financial resources it shall be the duty of the Commissioner to set out the action which is being taken to remedy that lack of financial resource.”
I am reluctant to support that. In my humble opinion, it is almost certain that any public official will reach the conclusion that what they really need to make their job easier and speed up the service they provide to the public is more resources. Unless we expect them to start having jumble sales and raffles—we have all tried using our own resources in that way to raise more funds—really the only thing they can do is come to Parliament and—
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend makes an absolutely brilliant and incisive point, because has not the whole lesson of the past five years been that public services have been able to deliver more with less? That should also be true of ombudsmen, and therefore the amendment is otiose.
Mr Nuttall
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. That has indeed been the lesson of the past five years, and we have seen some sparkling examples of people in the public sector doing more with less—our police service, for example. The same is true of the ombudsman. They have said that they have lowered the threshold and changed the way they work in order to try to meet demand so that fewer inquiries from the public are turned away.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It occurs to me that that allows me to say that that is all thanks to our long-term economic plan—the first time I have managed to get those words into Hansard.
Local Government (Religious etc. Observances) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall
Mr Nuttall
I have a couple of points to make on this group of amendments.
Amendment 7 deals with a requirement on a local authority to determine this question by holding a local referendum. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) said that he would not press the amendment to a Division, because in view of the financial position of the country and of local authorities, it would make complete nonsense of the Bill. One of the great beauties of this Bill is that it does not impose any financial obligation on local authorities. The amendment would impose a completely unnecessary burden and make a mockery of all the other decisions that local authorities take.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Is my hon. Friend saying that if the amendment were passed, the Bill would require a money resolution and therefore fall at this stage?
Mr Nuttall
As I understand it, the Bill already has a money resolution, so I think we can be satisfied on that point. The amendment would certainly increase the amount from what was originally envisaged; it is for others to determine whether that requires a change to the money resolution.
In view of all the matters that local authorities decide for themselves without the necessity of a referendum, requiring a local authority to hold a referendum across the whole district merely to determine whether it holds prayers is bordering on the faintly ridiculous. I therefore oppose the amendment.
My second point is on amendment 12, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), which would replace the word “may” with the word “shall”. My clear view is that all council meetings should start with prayers and they should be of a Christian nature, but I am against making it mandatory. I think it should be for local authorities to determine for themselves whether to hold prayers.
Let me put to the Chamber a particular scenario. This might be unlikely, but it just might happen that, for whatever reason, all the elected councillors in a particular area have no religious belief whatsoever. They might all be atheists. It would be absurd, would it not, if they were required by the Bill to hold prayers before their meetings? That might not happen, but it should be for the councillors to decide for themselves.
International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is right. Indeed, more suspicious minds than mine may wonder why the Government are reluctant to include a provision to enable either the ICAI or my hon. Friend’s proposed body to carry out independent evaluation and oversee the Department’s work. There may be a good answer to that and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s explanation.
Mr Nuttall
Yes; I am pleased to see that my hon. Friend has arrived in the Chamber.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It is always one of life’s great pleasures to be in the Chamber, and it is always a sadness to be away from it.
My hon. Friend is making an interesting point, and I wonder whether it brings us to the underlying tokenism of the Bill: without any proper mechanism for checking whether the money is well spent, it is merely a grandiloquent expression of intent, rather than proper legislation.
Mr Nuttall
That is the core problem, which some of us have pointed out since the Bill’s inception: it is a Bill without teeth. One of the new clauses tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley shows how the Bill might be given more teeth, or enforcement powers.
The ICAI would be the perfect body to carry out the role of scrutiny and evaluation because it operates on the basis of the following core values. It is independent: it undertakes its work without fear or favour, and reports the facts as it finds them. It has professional rigour and uses the highest professional standards to gather and evaluate evidence. It is transparent in that it places on its website all its reports and, crucially, the supporting analysis, as well as its records of costs and activities. It is responsive in that it takes into account public and parliamentary opinion in selecting its work programme and undertaking its work. It is innovative in that it makes the most of its new status to experiment with new ways of working, reporting and interacting with its stakeholders. Its last core value is to operate with the greatest integrity by ensuring that its operations are characterised by value for money, high ethical standards, transparency, and accountability to Parliament and the public.
The ICAI is a fairly small body. It consists of just four commissioners, who are led by the chief commissioner and supported by a small secretariat. We are not talking about some large, burgeoning bureaucracy. I accept that it has not been going for many years, but it has been around for most of this Parliament. As I said, it has been well received. Its work has been praised by former Ministers of the Department and the International Development Committee.
The ICAI is the ideal body to take on this role. It will have to be undertaken by somebody, because clause 5 states that the Secretary of State “must”—it does not say “may”—
“make arrangements for the independent evaluation of the extent to which ODA provided by the United Kingdom represents value for money”.
If the ICAI is not going to carry out that work, who is? It is vital work on behalf of this House and, indeed, the country.
I will go through the other proposals in passing. New clause 5, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley, gives us a flavour of what I have loosely termed the definition amendments. It sets out that
“An amount equivalent to the following annual payments, or estimates thereof, shall be included in the calculation of annual UK ODA for the purposes of section 1—
(a) the amount payable by the United Kingdom to the European Union
(b) Welfare benefits paid to foreign nationals
(c) Welfare benefits paid to UK nationals living abroad
(d) The administrative costs of the Department for International Development and its agencies and associated public bodies.”
There was some discussion on the last point in Committee on whether the cost of running the Department should be included in, or excluded from, the target. It seems entirely sensible to include the cost in the target for the simple reason that it gives those involved in the work of international development programmes the desire to help themselves. The more they cut down on administration, the more they can put towards the cost of helping the people around the world we all want to see helped. I am sure my hon. Friend will have more to say about the quite astonishing figures relating to the amount of welfare benefits that go around the world. Without new clause 5, they will not be included in the definition of what constitutes overseas development assistance.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Before my hon. Friend moves on, he mentioned payments to the European Union being included. As most of those payments go to poorer countries in the EU, is it not perverse that they do not count as overseas aid?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend, as ever, is absolutely right. That is one reason why new clause 5 should be included in the Bill. As we all know, a substantial part, if not the largest part, of EU funds are disbursed in regional grants to the poorer parts of the EU.
Affordable Homes Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and allowing me to interrupt him at an early stage in his remarks. Does it occur to him, as it does to me, that those constituents who went through the consultation process and asked for a Bill on affordable housing would not have thought that a Bill on affordable housing would merely get them a review? That does not seem to be a very active Bill.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and I was just about to deal with that point.
Mr Nuttall
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for that contribution, which reflects the messages that I was getting in my constituency, in Bury, Ramsbottom and Tottington, before the most recent general election.
To go back to the consultation that the hon. Member for St Ives carried out, we know that 65,000 people did not bother to comment at all, or give an opinion either way. In my view, those who did indicate their support for this Affordable Homes Bill will be very disappointed, to say the least, with its content. The Bill appears to be a mere shadow of the one that the hon. Gentleman put forward for consultation to his constituents. That Bill contained an extension of the Government’s Help to Buy scheme, a proposal to create an affordable homes investment bank—there is no mention of such an institution in the Bill before us—and a proposal to create a new planning use class for non-permanent residential use, in other words, for second homes. That would have given local planning authorities power to control the number of second homes in their area. There is no mention of that in this Bill.
The Bill that the hon. Gentleman asked his constituents to comment on was also scheduled to give local authorities immense powers of compulsory purchase where developers held back land for development, or where they failed to develop sites for which planning permission had been granted but on which no development had yet begun. Well, surprise, surprise: there is no mention of that measure either.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Does my hon. Friend agree that it is a jolly good thing that that has been dropped from the Bill, as it would have been a fundamental attack on the rights of private property, which the House has always protected?
Mr Nuttall
I completely and 100% agree with my hon. Friend. I for one am extremely grateful that those measures are not in the Bill, but I am worried, as I shall explain in a moment, that the Bill may be just an opening salvo for the introduction of those measures at a later stage. Although what is left is a proposal to change the eligibility for housing benefit and a proposal to require the Secretary of State to carry out a review of the availability of affordable homes and intermediate housing, that is it; there is no mention of any affordable homes investment bank, no mention of any change to planning use classes and no mention of any enhanced powers for local councils. We must ask ourselves why that is so. On one level, I would like to think it is because the hon. Member for St Ives has seen the light and realised that his proposal for Government interference in the free market—as my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) identified it—would not have had the effect he hoped for. However, the truth is, I believe, rather more worrying.
As I mentioned in an intervention at the outset, the hon. Member for St Ives perhaps gave an explanation of why there is so little in the Bill on his website last week:
“If I succeed at Second Reading…I hope I can beef up the Bill with amendments at Committee Stage.”
There we have it: this skeleton of a Bill is actually a Trojan horse Bill. If it is granted a Second Reading today, the hon. Gentleman admits that he will use it to try to introduce those other measures later in its parliamentary proceedings.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful once again to my hon. Friend for giving way. I wonder whether anyone consulted the Clerks on whether amendments to widen the Bill by so much would be within its scope.
Mr Nuttall
I have not inquired of the Clerks whether that would be correct parliamentary procedure. It is certainly unusual for a Bill’s promoter to admit at the outset that the measure being proposed is not the measure they want agreed on Third Reading and that they intend to table amendments in Committee. It is usual for the rest of the House, not the promoter, to want to amend a Bill.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend might think that, but I think it is better for the discretionary housing payment to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, as at present.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Has not the Minister himself told us that these proposals will cost £1 billion? That is more than the cost of the discretionary powers, so this Bill has a clear financial effect.
Mr Nuttall
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for reminding the House that we now know from the Minister’s comments that we are talking about a figure of £1 billion a year, whichever way we look at it.
Mr Nuttall
I will be more selfish with the interventions I accept, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) was not one I have in my speech, so I am grateful to him for making it.
The Government trebled support for discretionary housing payments so that funding for this year is £165 million. In 2013-14, £21 million of central Government funding was unspent by the end of the year. Almost two thirds—63%—of local authorities paid out less than their total discretionary housing payment allocation, and fewer than a quarter applied for a share of the £20 million that the Department for Work and Pensions held back in reserve. Discretionary housing payments exist to provide a safety net for vulnerable tenants, and they offer the best mechanism for local authorities to provide additional support as welfare payments are reformed, enabling them to respond on a case-by-case basis to those who need more assistance.
I appreciate that the hon. Member for St Ives ideally wants the spare room subsidy to be removed. He would like a return to the time before the measure was introduced, when taxpayers in my constituency had to contribute towards those living on benefits and enjoying accommodation that they themselves could only dream about. Clause 1 is seen by those who want to return to those days as a mere stepping stone towards the day when tenants can once more have the benefit of spare rooms at the expense of other hard-working taxpayers. We must strike a balance between the interests of taxpayers and the legitimate needs of welfare claimants, and I do not see the need to introduce the measures in clause 1 to achieve that balance.
Let me turn to clause 3, which has not received the attention it needs so far. Subsection (1) requires the Secretary of State to
“carry out a review of the availability of affordable homes and intermediate housing and produce and lay before Parliament a report which must set out the conclusions of the review.”
within 12 months of the Bill being enacted. We know from clause 7(2) that the Act would come into force
“at the end of the period of 3 months beginning with the day on which it is passed.”
Anyone reading clause 3 would assume that there must be an urgent need for a review, and that for some reason no information is available about the housing stock in this country, and certainly nothing on affordable housing. However, even the most cursory investigation of the subject reveals that our library shelves are simply groaning under the weight of reports and statistics on this matter. In fact, there are so many that—you will be pleased to know this, Madam Deputy Speaker—I will not even begin to list them, never mind quote from them all.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Although one of life’s great pleasures is to ensure that Madam Deputy Speaker is happy, the rest of the House will be desperately disappointed if my hon. Friend does not elaborate on all those points.
Section 5 of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years ago)
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Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
It is a pleasure, as always, to follow my near neighbour from Greater Manchester, the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton (Graham Stringer). As he and the House are aware, I agree with him on the issue of our membership of the European Union.
I want to bring the debate back to the motion, which states specifically:
“That this House approves, for the purposes of Section 5 of the European Communities (Amendment) Act 1993, the Government’s assessment”—
and so on. I will not read out the whole motion. It is purely for the purposes of complying with section 5 that we are being asked to approve the motion today—purely to comply with our obligations under European Union rules and regulations. I oppose the motion for that reason, as I have in previous years. I oppose it, but not because I oppose the Government’s financial policies—indeed, barely a week goes by without further evidence to prove that the policies are working. We could debate, as we have earlier this afternoon, whether things are going fast enough, and whether they are going as quickly as someone previously predicted, but I think all that is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that the economy, by any stretch of the imagination, is growing. Things are going in the right direction.
I welcome the fact that we have the opportunity to say that, but I regret the fact that we are having to do it in the context of submitting documents to the European Union. As has been said, this is the very last day for submission of the documents. I am not sure what would happen if—as I very much doubt would be the case—the House refused to support the Government’s motion. I will be voting against it and I would be interested to know what would happen. In last year’s debate, my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) mentioned that if the EU does not agree that we are carrying out the policies to its satisfaction, it can send a surveillance mission to the country, or even an enhanced surveillance mission. If so, I am sure that we would have great delight in meeting them, because they have a lot to learn from what this country is doing.
I do not agree that we, as a sovereign nation, should have to submit our economic policies to the bureaucrats in Brussels like some naughty schoolboy having to report to the headmaster with school work. There is no reason why we should have to go through this annual charade. It is an annual occasion when we have to approve, purely for the purposes of section 5, these documents. I see no reason why we cannot tag the motion on to the end of the Budget motions, for example, if we want to comply with this ridiculous law.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
For once, I disagree with my hon. Friend. I think it is of immeasurable importance that this debate remain a specific debate on the Floor of the House, because there may come a time when the House wants to refuse to report to Brussels and we need to preserve that right.
Mr Nuttall
I entirely agree on that point with my hon. Friend. If I had my way, we would disagree with Europe quite a bit more often than we do. I oppose the motion for that reason and no other, because I do not think we should send these documents to Europe. As I have said in previous years, and will probably repeat later in my speech, if the European officials are so interested in our documents, they are all available online. There is no reason why we need to produce this document.
For all that has been said about the fact that we have not spent any time on this subject, we do have before us a new document entitled “2013-14 Convergence Programme for the United Kingdom.” It is 247 pages long—slightly larger than last year’s document. It has been produced by Her Majesty’s Treasury specifically for this purpose and no other. So somewhere along the line the requirement to produce the document is costing the British taxpayer money.
We must be clear that the sole reason why the UK is making this submission—I quote from the treaty on the functioning of the European Union—is:
“In order to ensure closer coordination of economic policies and sustained convergence of the economic performances of the Member States”.
Why does the treaty require that? Simply because it is all part of their grand plan to forge together a single country called the European Union. That is what they want to see. That is why they want to have these documents sent in to them.
We are fortunate in this country that the UK electorate—the British people—had the good sense at the last general election to elect a Conservative-led Government with a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was prepared to take the difficult decisions necessary to put our country back on the path of economic recovery, which means living within our means.
It is instructive to compare the progress that we have made, and continue to make, with that of the European Union. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset mentioned, the European Union’s own official statistics body—interestingly named EUROSTAT— reported that the United Kingdom economy grew by 1.7% last year, compared with a minuscule 0.1% in the rest of the European Union. Even worse, there was a 0.4% contraction in the economies of the countries within the eurozone. And even that performance figure is flattered by the fact that it includes the figures for Germany and France, whose economies, EUROSTAT reported, grew by 0.4% and 0.1% respectively.
The situation is the same for the respective unemployment rates. EUROSTAT reports that the unemployment rate for the European Union as a whole was 10.8% last year, and the latest figures show that unemployment in the UK for the three months to February was 6.9%. That is reflected in my constituency. The latest figures show that in Bury, Ramsbottom and Tottington there are 451 fewer unemployed people than there were a year ago, which means 451 more families have the security of a regular wage coming in each week. More new businesses are being started, business confidence is growing and all the signs indicate that the plan is working and we are on the road to recovery.
The rest of Europe ought to be looking at what the UK is doing and working out how they can adopt our Government’s policies and increase their growth rates. As the hon. Member for Blackley and Broughton said, we want our European neighbours’ economies to grow, because they are important trading nations, as I never fail to accept. The fact that I want us to leave the European Union does not mean that I do not want us to trade with it; I just do not think that we should have to pay a net contribution of £9 billion to have the privilege of doing so. It is simply unnecessary, because we trade with many other countries around the world without having to pay a membership fee to enable us to do so. Therefore, I do not believe that submitting a 247-page convergence programme document is necessary.
In conclusion, let me put two simple questions to my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), whom I warmly welcome to her new role as Financial Secretary to the Treasury. First, what response has the Government received from the European Union on last year’s submission? Did we receive any acknowledgement from the bureaucrats in Brussels? Did they tell us that we were doing a good job and that they would use our document as a model for economic success? Did they say that they would encourage our partners to accept some of the policies set out in our convergence programme document?
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly—in view of the Prime Minister’s declared aim of putting an end to the commitment, which we are presently signed up to, to ever-closer union with the rest of Europe—will my hon. Friend confirm that, as part of any renegotiation of the United Kingdom’s obligations to the rest of Europe, the obligation to submit this annual convergence programme document will be removed? Does she agree that not removing that obligation will be seen as clear proof that those renegotiations have failed?
House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The return of the hereditary peerage is the sort of reform that would improve the quality of the House considerably. I do think that there are opportunities for reform but, as I said on Second Reading—I had better not go through this all again, Mr Speaker—I have concerns about this process for reforming the second Chamber. I think that reform ought to have been proposed in a Government Bill and considered in a Committee of the whole House.
Although the Bill is simple, it would fundamentally change the nature of the House of Lords. Removing the absolute certainty that a peerage is for life would allow people appointed to the House to remain there for a term. That change in structure would allow Governments that are not necessarily as benign as this one—I will talk about this further in relation to some of my other amendments—to ensure that peers are in the House for only a certain period, and possibly to get them post-dated cheques for when they might resign. I think that that reform should have been handled differently, but there are certainly reforms that could be made to the House of Lords.
Amendment 2 ties in with amendment 3. The point of amendment 3 is to insert a minimum age for retirement, whereby no peer under 65 could retire. Being a peer—a legislator in the upper House—should not be a marker in somebody’s career. It should not be a point on their CV so that when they apply for jobs in merchant banks, or wherever, they can say “I was a peer for 10 years.” People who take it on should commit to do so for an extended period, so that if a peer is raised to that rank, style and dignity at the age of 40, there will be an expectation that the major part of their future life and career will be a commitment to serve the House—this country—in the second Chamber.
These two amendments, in essence, offer the House the choice of saying that there ought to be a minimum period and that it ought to be longer than a single Parliament. Ten years obviously equates to two Parliaments under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. That gets away from the risk that people might use the House of Lords as a means of advancing their political career in relation to the Commons, a point to which we will return in a subsequent group of amendments. The amendments are about expecting people to follow through on the commitment they have given, so that when their letters patent are issued they will be doing this for life.
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
What is my hon. Friend’s preference between amendments 2 and 3?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. My preference is for amendment 3, as it would ensure that people retired from Parliament when they were coming to the end of their working career. It is wrong for people to use membership of the House of Lords as a point on their CV. It is not an internship that people do for a little while to get a bit of work experience before taking on another job. It is such an exciting and great honour to have—why would these people wish to give it up? I recall that when Disraeli went to the House of Lords, he said that he was not dead
“but in the Elysian fields.”
Who, having entered the Elysian fields, wants to come back down to earth? It seems extraordinary in the first place that anyone would want to leave those glorious red Benches and the gilt around the throne—the magnificence that the House of Lords shows to the world—and trot out into the humdrum life in front of them. [Interruption.] My hon. Friend the Member for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) asks whether this is a job application. I am by no means grand enough to enter their lordships’ House. I like representing the British people—vox populi, vox Dei—through this illustrious Chamber rather than in their lordships’ noble House. Given the question of why anybody would want to leave, they ought to live up to the commitment they have made. Ten years seems reasonable; I would have been happy with 15 or 20 years.
Moreover, crucially, when Ministers go into the House of Lords they may want to be there only while they are in ministerial office. That is not a proper way of treating the constitution. Ministers who go into the House of Lords ought to stay there for an extended period to show a commitment to the legislature, not just to being appointees of the Executive who are here today, gone tomorrow. These amendments are important and would improve the Bill. Had we been debating them in a Committee of the whole House, it is likely that some of these changes would have been made.
Amendment 4 is about the witnessing of the peer’s statement that he wishes to retire or resign. The statement may be witnessed by anybody, but I think that it should be witnessed by two people, both of whom must be peers of the same degree. Is that because I think that lots of fraudulent certificates will be issued by random people wandering around signing things and pretending to be witnesses to statements that peers have not made? No, I do not think that, but these resignations are essentially proceedings in Parliament, and they should be a formal parliamentary proceeding registered by people who are also Members of Parliament. This would be a safeguard to ensure that somebody did not resign in a light moment and then regret it, or have the statement signed in their office and send it in having been pushed into doing it by offers of who knows what—perhaps an offer of becoming a European commissioner or something grand and fancy such as that, although I know that there is a special way for such people to stay in the House of Lords with a formal leave of absence. We should ensure that the grave and important decision to leave the upper Chamber is made properly and thoughtfully and that there is a formal process by which to register that decision.
That ties in with amendment 6, which says:
“after the date specified in 2(a) above”.
The problem with reading out amendments without reading out the relevant part of the Bill is that they sound rather obscure, so it may be sensible to explain. The Bill says that if somebody signs a form resigning from the House of Lords, that notice is irrevocable from the point at which it has been signed, even if it is a long-post-dated cheque. So if a peer entered the House of Lords and said that he intended to resign in eight years’ time, the document would be irrevocable, even though all sorts of things may change. That person would then be ineligible to be a peer again in future. I think that that is a mistake. There should be an ability to withdraw the notice prior to its becoming effective; otherwise, appointments to the House of Lords are opened up to abuse.
I have heard former Leaders of the House of Lords—noble Lords themselves—talk about what happens when people ask for peerages. It may shock you, Mr Speaker, that people ask for peerages. I would have thought it was an enormous impertinence for anybody to say to the Prime Minister or to the Leader of the House of Lords that they would like a peerage, but people do. Apparently, they knock on their doors to ask to be given a peerage; they queue up outside their offices as though they were waiting for an omnibus. When they do so—I really have heard Leaders of the House of Lords make speeches along these lines—they say anything that the people dishing the peerage out may wish to hear. They say, “I’ll always vote with the Government line, I’ll never disobey, I’ll do what I’m told”, and so on and so forth.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I wonder whether my hon. Friend recalls the Agatha Christie book “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?”, in which the heart of the matter is who the witness was.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Without being able to find the witness and ascertain who they are, the existence of their signature is not much help to a court.
Presumption of Innocence and EU Law
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
Let me start, Mr Speaker, by apologising for missing the Minister’s opening comments.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) and the members of his Committee for bringing this matter to the attention of the House. It is yet another example of the fine work that they do in scrutinising and painstakingly going through the masses—hundreds and hundreds—of EU regulations and directives that emanate from Brussels to identify those that are worthy of consideration in debate on the Floor of the House.
This is such a measure and, frankly, it goes to the very heart of the British legal system—the presumption of innocence. Quite frankly, it is staggering that the EU should try to lecture this country. That is what it boils down to: the EU is trying to tell this country how to run its justice system, and trying to interfere with what we determine about the innocence of a subject until they are proven guilty in a court of law. This is just a further building block that the EU Commission sees as a stepping stone on its way to building an EU-wide common system of criminal justice, but it is one that we ought strenuously to oppose.
I am quite happy that we are being asked to approve the Government’s proposal to send a reasoned opinion back to Europe about why the measure fails the test of subsidiarity. In my mind, it certainly does fail that test, but like other hon. Members, I am extremely concerned that it appears that we will once again stand alone in our opposition to it. My understanding—I look forward to hearing from the Minister whether it is correct—is that the deadline for objections from member states is 12 February. If that is the case, there is very little time for this Parliament or any others to lodge objections. It therefore seems likely, although I wish it were not the case, that the measure will pass.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Does my hon. Friend take the comfort that I do from the Government’s firm stance, in that even if no other Parliament sends in a reasoned opinion against the proposal, it would be eccentric of the Government, because it is subject to our title 5 opt-out, to opt in to one that is thought not to meet the test of subsidiarity?
Mr Nuttall
Absolutely. I for one certainly hope that the Government will not feel that it is necessary to bow to the will of Brussels on this measure. Although I am at one and in accord with the Government on their proposal this evening, I would have to depart from that course if they tried in future to suggest that we should adopt it given that the European Commission seems likely to pursue it. Bearing in mind this country’s proud history of establishing our own system of common law and the rights of an individual to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, I see no reason why we need lecturing from the EU on this matter.
Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
On the points made by the Opposition Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed), I cannot help but think that no similar points were made against the International Development (Gender Equality) Bill. When we considered that Bill earlier, it was suggested that its provision could easily be dealt with by Ministers without the need for legislation, but the Minister of State, Department for International Development, gave all manner of reasons why they should be enshrined in legislation. Let me put on the record that I support the Illegal Immigrants (Criminal Sanctions) Bill, and I am pleased to be one of its sponsors.
May I deal briefly with the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) about the human rights aspect? I want to refer to the case of Haroon Aswat, a suspected terrorist, whom the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights has prevented this country from returning to the United States of America. It comes to something when we cannot even return suspected terrorists to the US on the grounds that it is not a fit and proper country to which to return people. That really calls the whole system into question. It is the most developed nation on earth, so if the European Court of Human Rights says that it is not a safe nation—
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Did I hear my hon. Friend correctly? He said that the United States is the most developed nation on earth, but surely it is only the sixth, after all those of which the Queen is sovereign.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is, as ever, quite right. It is perhaps more accurate to say that the US is one of the most developed nations.
Mr Nuttall
That is the solution, and we now have agreement on that issue.
My hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) has referred to the poll carried out by Lord Ashcroft on 28 and 30 June that asked 2,013 people about the merits or otherwise of various Bills. I obviously do not know why each of those individuals decided their views about each Bill, but on this one to introduce criminal sanctions against those in this country illegally, 86% of people said that it was a good idea, while only 9% said that they were not bothered either way. Therefore, only one in 20 people did not think that this was a sensible measure.
I am not surprised by that, because I see no reason why the Bill should not be on the statute book. It makes perfect sense that if somebody has entered this country illegally, through whatever means, it should be possible to find them guilty of having committed a criminal offence. For that reason, I fully support the Bill.
House of Lords Reform (No. 2) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
Mr Nuttall
I was coming on to that point, but it does not explain whether attending the proceedings of the House covers, for example, somebody who wishes to attend and listen to the debate, but then decides that they do not want to take part in the vote.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend will be aware that, because of the very large numbers in the House of Lords, the seating at the Bar of the House that is not technically within the Lords is now being used by peers. If a peer were to sit behind the Bar, hoping to attend but not actually be in the body of the House, would that count as attendance?
Mr Nuttall
As always, my hon. Friend makes a valuable and pertinent point. Have those peers attended the proceedings or not? What if they were to attend but had to witness the proceedings from the Gallery because of the lack of seats?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I can help my hon. Friend on that point. Certainly in this House, the Gallery counts as the House and, if the Chamber is full, it is possible to speak from the Gallery, which I hope at some point to do—although not today. [Laughter.]
Mr Nuttall
No, not today. Whether one is on the Floor of the House in the other place or in the Gallery, does merely attending and watching count as attendance, or would one be expected to vote? Many of the Cross Benchers, because of the nature of their appointment to the other place, often do not wish to vote on certain issues, so we need to be careful with that provision.
Clause 2 amounts to the compulsory exclusion of a peer from the other place, and in many ways it is therefore much more controversial than clause 1. Clause 1 has its problems, but we can deal with it. Clause 2 is more controversial, because someone would risk being excluded from the other place against their will. They might not be happy about being excluded and we should be careful in our consideration of the provision. It has been suggested that we should go even further and put in a minimum attendance level and link it to the number of votes a peer takes part in. For example, as a minimum, a peer should take part in at least 10% of votes to maintain their membership of the other place.
Mr Nuttall
I agree with my hon. Friend that it would be a dangerous precedent to adopt. We heard from the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Mr Blunkett), who suggested that voting should be used as a method of determining whether peers are non-attenders. In a written submission to the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, he stated that peers who have not voted in more than 10% of Divisions for three Sessions out of the last five should be removed from having “a formal role”:
“They would of course remain Peers and could be allowed access to the restaurants and bars (but not offices, research and other working facilities). This would be commercially prudent.”
That may be prudent from a commercial point of view, but it would be the worst of all worlds. We would have Members of the other place effectively treating it is a social club: not taking part in proceedings, just having a drink in the bar. If anything were to bring the other place into disrepute, it would be such a mechanism.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Would it not also undermine the benefit of having a House of Lords of specialists? We want peers to intervene on subjects they know about, not to turn up for any old thing on which they have no expertise.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point that links in with my earlier point about Cross Benchers, who often feel that they only want to take part in debates on issues on which they have specialist knowledge. It may be that in one Session their area of expertise is not brought before the House, but that in the next Session it is and their expertise is desperately needed.
Deep Sea Mining Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing up the matter of the European Union. I was wondering whether we might be able to touch on that. She is absolutely right to suggest that the EU plays an important role in this matter. I understand that it has taken it upon itself to become a signatory to the convention, which demonstrates just how it can behave as though it were a single European state. It is clearly positioning itself so that, one day, it will be able to take over the organisation of and responsibility for passing legislation such as this. She might think that that is of little consequence, but she has highlighted a real fear. There is a danger that, if the European Union continues on the path that it appears to be taking, this will be yet another area over which this House will have no competence whatever.
As I was saying, the Government of the day considered the 1981 Bill necessary, because of all the uncertainty, in order to allow British companies to proceed with some certainty, notwithstanding the involvement of the European Community at that time.
I should point out that the 1981 Bill was by no means uncontroversial. Indeed, it divided the House on Second Reading and Third Reading. One concern that was raised at the time was that people wondered why it was necessary to introduce legislation at all, given the progress that was being made on securing an international agreement. Concern was expressed that, if the United Kingdom passed unilateral legislation, it could jeopardise the wider international treaty negotiations.
The answer was that that Government were keen to pass an interim measure because the text of the draft convention available at the time contained a provision for the convention not to become effective until 60 states had ratified it. That was the threshold set in the draft agreement. It was therefore clear that, even if agreement were reached fairly soon after the Bill had reached the statute book, it was likely that several years would pass before 60 states had ratified the treaty.
The Government of the day were absolutely right to predict that it would take several years to bring together that number of signatories. Indeed, although international agreement was reached the year after the Bill became law and the convention was signed on 10 December 1982 at Montego Bay in Jamaica, it was not until some 12 years later on 16 November 1994—one year after Guyana had become the 60th nation to ratify the convention—that it actually came into force. Members might wonder why it was signed at Montego Bay. The answer is that that is where the headquarters of what is now the International Seabed Authority are situated.
Another concern expressed at the time was that the delays and uncertainties in the international arrangements left the developing deep-sea mining industry in a difficult and uncertain position. The industry was in its infancy and had to carry out costly development work before being ready to embark on commercial operations. Understandably, mining companies were not prepared to invest the huge sums required to undertake this development work without a reasonably stable legal framework in which to operate. If the 1981 Act had never been passed, the Government feared that mining companies would allow their development programmes to run down, and if they did run down, there was no guarantee that they would ever be built up again.
A further reason why legislation was required was that the companies that had pioneered the development of sea-bed mining had already expended considerable efforts on prospecting large areas of the ocean floor. They wanted to secure their claims to potential areas of exploration and exploitation—the areas that they had identified as worthy of further investigation, particularly when other countries were already pressing ahead with their own national legislation.
The key concern was, of course, ensuring that the exploitation of the valuable mineral resources did not result in damage being caused to the marine environment. As already mentioned this morning, section 5 of the 1981 Act provided for protection of the marine environment, which was a central part of the legislation at that time, and it is the one section, incidentally, of the Act that is hardly altered at all by my hon. Friend’s Bill.
Of course, the whole purpose of the present Bill is to amend the 1981 Act. Although on the face of it, this Bill is very short, I venture to suggest that it is deceptively short. There are only two clauses, but the real meat lies in the schedule, which extends to no fewer than 12 paragraphs containing 11 separate sets of amendments over six pages.
The first of the amendments to the 1981 Act is designed to substitute proposed new subsections (1) and (2) in section 1 of the 1981 Act. That Act presently prohibits anyone covered by the section from undertaking mining activities in the deep sea without a licence. There are essentially two types of licence: exploration licences and exploitation licences. The provisions apply to UK nationals, Scottish firms or anybody incorporated under UK law and resident in any part of the UK. That is the 1981 definition, and I shall deal later with how the Bill proposes to extend it.
The crucial change is made to the description of what might be mined. The 1981 Act referred to “hard mineral resources”, but it is now proposed to change that to “mineral resource”, which is defined in amended subsection (6) as
“a solid, liquid or gaseous…resource”.
That definition is obviously much wider than the previous one, which was very specifically defined as meaning
“deposits of nodules containing…quantities”
of
“at least one of the following elements…manganese, nickel, cobalt, copper, phosphorous and molybdenum”
in “quantities greater than trace”. The new definition will allow several different explorers to start prospecting for different minerals at the same time in the same area.
In view of the much wider definition, I wonder what will be the likely increase in the number of explorers who will now need to seek a licence. I am sure that, when we hear from him, the Minister will want to reassure us that the Government have in place sufficient resources to enable them to deal with what I hope will be sudden rush of applicants wanting to take advantage of the opportunities provided once the Bill has passed through here and the other place.
The crucial definitions in amended section 2 introduce references to the International Seabed Authority and to what the provisions refer to as a “corresponding contract”, defined as
“a contract…granted by the Authority to the licensee”
either to explore or exploit mineral resources in a given licensed area. As has been said, this is very much a twin-track approach. It is no good a company only obtaining a licence from the UK, as it must at the same time ensure that it has a contract from the International Seabed Authority.
There is also a requirement to pay a fee to the Government, so we need not think that there will necessarily be a cost to the UK Government, although I express the hope that any fee does not put off potential applicants. As I said earlier, there is a real danger that if we do not establish a friendly regime for exploration companies, they will simply go elsewhere. Nevertheless, the requirement to pay a fee is retained. Proposed new subsection (3) of section 2 makes it clear to applicants that double authorisation is required by specifying that a licence granted by the Secretary of State under the UK legislation shall
“not come into force before the date on which a corresponding contract comes into force.”
It will thus not be sufficient for any individual or company to obtain just a licence.
Proposed new subsection (3A) sets out a minimum list of terms and conditions that a licence may include. I add, although the hon. Member for Brent North is no longer in his place, that this subsection could provide the means and the mechanism by which any further environmental protection that the Government felt necessary in any particular case could be dealt with—without any necessity to amend the Bill in Committee or on Report.
Proposed new subsection (5) provides that where a person has been
“granted an exploration licence, the Secretary of State may not grant an exploitation licence which relates to any part of the licensed area”
or to
“any of the mineral resources to which that licence relates”
to anyone other than
“the holder of the exploration licence”
without their “written consent”.
Of course, that immediately poses the question why, when an exploitation licence can be granted only to someone who has an exploration licence, anyone would want to go prospecting on the patch of someone else. I thought that that could happen only if they had in mind a joint venture agreement with the holder of the exploration licence and cut a deal with them.
The amended section 8 adds two new subsections to reflect the fact that under the terms of the 1994 agreement, there is a requirement for judicial and arbitration decisions to be recognised. This area was not covered at all in the 1981 Act. Sections 9 and 10 of the 1981 Act are then removed. Perhaps worthy of note is just how much debate and discussion took place around the two clauses when the Bill was debated back in 1981. Hours and hours were spent considering them, and we now discover, 32 years later, that neither the deep-sea mining levy nor the deep-sea mining fund have, in fact, ever operated at all.
The schedule then makes provision for the list of definitions to be extended to take into account the new structures and terms introduced by the 1994 agreement. Finally, it removes the reference to the 1981 Act as a temporary measure and it removes the provisions that allowed the Secretary of State to repeal it. I assume that it is the intention of my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall for this legislation to become permanent.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Does my hon. Friend share my view that it is a pity so to tidy up the statute book as to remove the word “temporary”, which always serves as a useful reminder? Even income tax was introduced on a temporary basis. We are very bad at ensuring that the word “temporary” means what it says.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and this is a case in point. The House was given all sorts of assurances in 1981, when the original Bill was debated, that it would be a temporary measure, extending even—as I said earlier—to the inclusion of the word in its title. Section 18 of the Act sets out the mechanism enabling the Secretary of State to repeal it, but of course that never came to pass, although, as we have heard this morning, the expected flurry of applications did not materialise. It was expected that once an agreement had been reached there would be no need for national legislation, but, notwithstanding that, the Act remains on the statute book to this day.
I want to make two brief points about clause 2. First, I am pleased that it retains the provision in the Act for the legislation to be extended to the British overseas territories by Order of Her Majesty in Council. Secondly, I note that, unlike the Act, the Bill does not extend to Scotland. I can only assume that deep-sea mining is a reserved matter for the Scottish Parliament, and that the House of Commons no longer has power to legislate in that area. If there is no corresponding legislation in Scotland, I wonder what would be the position of a company that chose to incorporate north of the border. Would it be able to bypass this legislation?
I believe that the Bill presents the United Kingdom with an enormous opportunity to become a world leader in this emerging industry. I believe that, if we adopt a sympathetic and light-touch approach, we shall be able to attract exploration companies from all over the world which will choose to set themselves up in the UK to take advantage of both the licensing regime established by the Bill and the fact that, thanks to the actions of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, they will benefit from one of the most competitive corporation tax regimes and lowest corporation tax rates anywhere in the G20. Conversely, I believe that, if we make our regime too onerous, it will not encourage applications, and other countries throughout the world will profit from this new area of human activity.
I do not wish to be in any way critical of the Bill, but I wonder whether it would not have been simpler to repeal the 1981 Act and introduce a new Bill, which might have made it easier for people to understand what the legislation was all about. Notwithstanding that small point, however, I wish the Bill well. I trust that it will receive an unopposed Second Reading today—time will tell—but, regardless of whether it is opposed or not, I hope that it will be given a Second Reading, that it will then enjoy a smooth and speedy passage through both Houses, and that, in the fullness of time, this country will be able to benefit from the enormous opportunities that it affords and we shall be world leaders in an emerging industrial activity.
United Kingdom Corporate and Individual Tax and Financial Transparency Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(10 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Once again, I do not agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s assertion. Placing an extra tax burden on the private sector during the lowest point in a downturn will make that downturn even worse. The cash that has been built up by the private sector is waiting to encourage the recovery as it begins and as the private sector begins to recover. At that point, people become more confident because they have kept their own money, rather than it having being taken by the Government.
Mr Nuttall
Does my hon. Friend agree that, contrary to what has been said, it is the private sector that is leading the way in this recovery? The fact is that the private sector has created 1.3 million new jobs since the last election.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am very glad that my hon. Friend has put it in that way. Sometimes, the Government claim that they have created 1.3 million private sector jobs, and that is a turn of phrase that I particularly dislike. It is not the Government who have done it; it is the private sector.
I am particularly enjoying discussing the right hon. Gentleman’s Bill. It is sometimes alleged that politics has all become too similar and that all the parties agree. That might be true of those on our Front Benches, but there are still some of us on the Back Benches who are willing to put forward in a more forthright way the views that we hold according to our respective political traditions. That certainly makes the debate in the Chamber more interesting.
Having set out my broad-brush objection in principle to what the right hon. Gentleman has proposed, I want to move on to the details of the Bill. And here it gets worse. The Bill is an astonishing, fundamental attack on some of the basic principles that we ought to enjoy. As a taxpayer—I am sad to say that I am not in the top 250, although I would not mind if I were—I have a right to privacy. The Government do not have a right to publish my financial information; that is my private, confidential affair. I am not advocating tax evasion, which is a criminal activity. It is quite right that it should be criminal, and the Government should enforce those laws. However, the prevention of that crime does not require the Government to deny people their fundamental right to privacy.
People’s most personal and intimate financial details, as set out in their tax return, should not be made available to all and sundry, and it is quite right that the tax authorities should maintain vigorous rules of confidentiality, even when appearing before Select Committees of the House of Commons. It is a right that we all enjoy as British subjects that our financial affairs are a private matter. Yes, we have to pay a degree of taxation and, yes, we have to make declarations to the Revenue, but we do so on the understanding that they will be kept confidential. Once this begins with the top 250, the next stage will be the top 1,000 and it will develop further so that nobody has the right to maintain privacy of their own financial affairs. I thus oppose this provision very strongly.
I oppose less strongly the requirements for disclosure by public companies because they have exchanged a right to privacy in return for limited liability, so they are expected to make disclosure and are obliged to do so to their shareholders. Clause 1 deals with “Disclosure of financial information by large companies” and from the perspective of a shareholder as an investor, I believe that I am entitled to such information anyway; and with large public companies, the shareholder list is so extensive that, once that information is given to shareholders, it is effectively in the public domain.
I add at this point that my background and career have been in investment management, so I know that the more information we get from listed companies, the easier it is to do the job of an investment manager and the better the investments it is possible to make. Perhaps inadvertently, then, the right hon. Gentleman will help the investment community in that, if clause 1 were introduced, financial analysts in the City of London would practically be dancing with joy at their ability to find out every single financial statement of large private companies. It might be quite helpful in stopping them from hiding unwelcome, loss-making subsidiaries somewhere at the bottom of the balance sheet, tucking them away under a contingent liability. Because this is essentially dealing with already public companies, I would make no objection to the clause, but I would maintain the privacy of individuals—and of trusts.
I do not think that trusts should be attacked in this way. Trusts are, in fact, one of the glories of the British legal system. They are much less understood on the continent, but they allow many protections to be built into ownership. Trusts allow the protection of minors in how they are structured and they allow continuity in the holding of assets, including allowing some of this country’s great historic treasures to be kept within the country through the trust structure of ownership. Putting unduly onerous charges on them and requirements to report would, I think, be unreasonable.
Looking at the detail, the idea is that, if trusts do not meet the requirements, their income should go to the Crown. That is what happened in the Court of Wards in the 17th century. It was one of the things that caused such trouble between Parliament and the King because the Crown was able to take the estates of minors and effectively ruin them during the minority of the beneficiary. We moved away from that type of arbitrary rule of giving power to the Crown—in this context, it is not a personal Crown; the Crown is the Executive—to do things such as take funds from private property, not in the form of tax, but in a regulatory way, squeezing income for a certain period until onerous requirements are met.
I think that would be an extraordinarily unsatisfactory way of proceeding. It would undermine the right of property—again a fundamental right that we ought to enjoy. Going back to the Magna Carta, the Crown cannot take property away from people unless there is a judgment—a judgment in a court—against them; it cannot be done on the basis of some failure to meet some bureaucratic standard. This seems to me to illustrate where the Conservative, a believer in the rights of property and a believer in the individual, stands up against the socialist, a believer in the collective and the rights of the collective to override the rights of property. I stand four-square in favour of the rights of property and four-square, too, in favour of the rights of the Crown dependencies, by and large, to regulate their own affairs.
The Bill is again onerous in what it requires to be done, by Order in Council, for territories that, by and large, are no longer treated as mere colonies. The Crown dependencies are allowed to develop and run their own affairs and have their own elective councils to take charge of those affairs. The Bill is a throwback to how this country behaved in the 19th century when we felt we had a greater right to order about the non-dominions—with dominions starting, first with Canada, in the latter part of the 19th century. We seem to be taking the Crown dependencies back to a period before dominion status started to be granted. I consider that to be undemocratic, and unfair on them. It attacks their fundamental livelihoods, namely, their ability to provide financial services and a degree of confidentiality at the same time.
There is a fundamental disagreement—and I am not entirely of the Government’s view either—about the attempt to elide tax avoidance and tax evasion. It is very important to be clear about the difference between the two. Tax evasion is criminal, illegal deliberate breaking of the tax law; tax avoidance is following the law as it is written. It seems to me that, when people are being accused of avoiding tax, it is the job of Parliament to pass good laws that make that avoidance difficult, and to make the tax collectible by Act of Parliament, rather than turning the position the other way round and saying “We are not very good at writing tax law, and therefore we will make you disclose absolutely everything so that, ex post facto, we can determine how much tax we think you ought to have paid.” That strikes me as fundamentally unjust.
It has been a solid principle of British law for decades formally, but for centuries effectively, that the individual taxpayer does not have to arrange his affairs so as to increase the amount of tax that the Revenue is entitled to take. It is an important part of justice that the law should be clear, and should be enforced fairly.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My understanding of aggressive tax avoidance is that it is, in fact, tax evasion when the Revenue has not yet got around to taking action. One of the schemes reported in the newspapers involved some comedian whose name escapes me: he is modern, and apparently very funny if you like that sort of thing. What he was doing struck me as evasion, not avoidance, although that was not directly his fault. It seemed to me that the scheme was so far removed from any sensible understanding of the tax law that “aggressive tax avoidance” was essentially a euphemism for “We will try to scrape things back rather than charging people.” I should prefer to see Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs using the law as it is, and testing the law in the courts to establish whether such activity really is evasion. If it proves to be evasion, people should be punished accordingly, and if it proves to be avoidance, it should be considered legitimate.
I do not think it is possible to say that there is the law, there is the non-law, and somewhere in between there is something that the Government would quite like us to do. There are an awful lot of things that the Government would quite like us to do. At one point, they wanted us all to eat five vegetables a day. Indeed, they probably still want us to eat five vegetables a day, but that cannot be law. It is wrong to try to say that good behaviour, generosity and charity should be a matter of law. That is a different concept. The law, with all the might and power and sanction behind it, is a more absolute thing than that.
Mr Nuttall
Does my hon. Friend accept that there might be such a person as a diligent tax avoider—someone who reads the legislation, spots a loophole, and decides to take advantage of it?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Sometimes the Government want people to avoid tax. Sometimes they allow people to do that because, although they do not much like it, they cannot stop it. Let us take, for example, people who bring cigarettes into this country from abroad. There is an agreement with the European Union that, if people have bought cigarettes in another member state, they are entitled to bring them in. In that way they collectively avoid, probably, billions of pounds’ worth of tax. Duty free is tax avoidance, a form of tax avoidance that some of us rather enjoy when we have been a bit further afield than the European Union. Pension funds are tax avoidance. Individual savings accounts are tax avoidance. All those elements of tax avoidance are elements of which the Government approve. It is, I think, unreasonable to say that people should arrange their affairs so as not to take advantage of legitimate tax avoidance that is in the legislation—and who is then to decide whether the tax avoidance provided by pension contributions is legitimate or the tax avoidance provided by some business start-up scheme has suddenly become illegitimate? It is the law that should be deciding these things, and the best way to solve the problem is not by denying people the right to privacy, not by confiscating their property, not by excessive and onerous burdens on the taxpayer, but by having a much simpler and clearer tax system without the Government giving all sorts of incentives to do one thing rather than the other.
We need a more Ronald Reagan-style approach to taxation where deductions are removed and rates come down. That leads, by and large, to more people paying their tax. If we go down the other route and have an incredibly onerous reporting system and put ever more burdens on individuals and on trusts, all that will happen is that those on The Sunday Times rich list—a vast number of whom are foreign nationals who have come to live in this country, and who are very mobile and who bring wealth, prosperity and employment into this country—will take up their wealth and leave.
What sort of a nation do we want to be? Do we want to be a nation that encourages enterprise, that believes in freedom, that respects the right of property and, crucially, the rule of law, or do we want to be a nation of arbitrary Government? The choice is very clear, and I am very grateful to the right hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton for bringing before this House the question of whether we want the fundamental arbitrariness of socialism: the belief that the state—the collective—comes first, and individual rights and privacy are trampled upon to ensure that the state can get what it feels like. That is not the nation I want to see us become. I want one, as we have historically been, based on strong and enterprising individuals who obey the law because they feel that the law is part of them and part of the nation they belong to. Therefore, I hope this Bill will be utterly rejected.
Antarctic Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(11 years, 3 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Nuttall
That is a very good point. It would be up to the Secretary of State at the Foreign Office to consider what would be the best way. My view is that we would have to consult the scientists who are there now, at the Antarctic bases, and ask the travel companies that want to carry out tourism in the area. We would also need a wider consultation, because others may be put off from carrying out scientific experiments or visiting as a result of the Bill. We are therefore talking not just about those who are doing good, but about those who might be put off, and whom we will have to contact in other ways. In effect, there might have to be a call for evidence towards the end of the three-year period, so that we can assess whether people have been put off—although I will mention that later.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I am very interested in what my hon. Friend is saying, but I am slightly concerned that the cost-benefit analysis will be so complex that it will itself have a considerable cost. Then we will need a cost-benefit analysis of the cost-benefit analysis. I hope that that will not be the case.
Mr Nuttall
I am grateful for that intervention. Let me immediately put my hon. Friend’s fears to bed. I do not envisage the report being a weighty tome, involving dozens of civil servants conducting a detailed analysis. Clearly there will be a cost involved—that is patently obvious—but in the long run it is better to have the wider benefits of a cost-benefit analysis than not to conduct one, because the important thing is that the Bill is effective in its purpose. As I said in response to an earlier intervention, we cannot really put a price on that. If the Bill turns out not to be effective, we need to know about it as legislators.
European Union (Croatian Accession and Irish Protocol) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(11 years, 5 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg
I hoped that the hon. Gentleman was going to find some link between the de Montforts and Somerset, which would have been more helpful. I am not opposed to people coming over from Europe, although I do not have any Norman blood, as far as I am aware. However, we are wandering slightly from the point.
Amendments 1 and 2 would simply ensure that the affirmative procedure was followed and would marginally improve parliamentary scrutiny—they would not change the world, but they would add a little to parliamentary scrutiny. I meant the compliments I paid to the Minister and his commitment to parliamentary scrutiny, which has been exemplary. The European Union Act 2011, which we passed to ensure the rights of Parliament, was an important advance in protecting this country from European activities passing through without anybody really knowing about them. When the rules are changed, they should be changed in the same way as they are first introduced, because sometimes a change can be more important than the initial introduction. For example, a new Government might want to adjust things or not continue with them for as long, and could do so via a statutory instrument, with a limited form of negative control.
I hope that the Government will support my amendment 5. I hope that the Opposition will, too, because we may not lose the next election, in which case things might be changed by a similar Government, and my amendments would give them a way to hold Her Majesty’s Government to better account. I am proposing modest, easy, humble, simplifying, gentle, but marginally improving amendments, which I hope in their wisdom the Minister and Her Majesty’s Government will accept.
Mr Nuttall
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Crausby.
My amendment 5 is also a minor and modest amendment. For the avoidance of doubt, it is perfectly compatible with amendments 1 and 2, standing in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg). There is absolutely no reason why the Government should not accept his amendments and my minor amendment. My amendment would open the way for the draft regulations laid by the Government—pursuant to what will in due course become section 4 of the Act—to be amended by this House. As anyone who has looked at the Bill will be aware, clause 4 is by some way the longest clause—indeed, it is longer than the rest of the Bill put together. The regulations that are brought forward might all be perfectly in order, and it might be that they cannot be improved on in any way, shape or form. Knowing the Minister’s skill and intelligence in such matters, I have absolutely no doubt that that will be the case. However, we are all human, and it is just possible that a tiny little matter somewhere in those regulations—which will undoubtedly be fairly lengthy and detailed—might need amending. My amendment 5 would give this House the flexibility to amend the draft regulations, rather than simply having the option of accepting or rejecting them in their entirety. It is a minor, modest and humble amendment, and I hope that the Government and the Opposition will support it.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I have listened to the Minister with great care. The problem with comparing anybody to the great figures of history is that so many of them came to a sticky end. That does not, however, undermine the valour of their actions before they met their sticky end. It is the way of politics nowadays that people are reshuffled, whereas in olden times they were rather more finally dealt with. This is perhaps one respect in which I am a moderniser, in that I am glad and reassured that political careers now end more gently than they did in times gone by. I was comparing my right hon. Friend the Minister to Simon de Montfort at the height of his powers when he was successfully commanding the country and advancing democracy.
The mood of the Committee today suggests that it would probably not vote in support of my amendment, and I shall therefore seek leave to withdraw it. However, I would just add that, to use an old cliché, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. It would be an advantage to place in the legislation a requirement for the affirmative resolution procedure, because we cannot guarantee what future Governments will do or, more particularly, what the European Court of Justice will do. The Minister referred to that possibility. There is a risk that the Court could make a highly political judgment that would change the regulations or cause them to be changed by the Government. That could allow the Government to use the negative resolution procedure, because the decision had come from the ECJ, without giving the House the opportunity to debate a genuinely important political matter. I regret that Her Majesty’s Government are not going to accept my proposal, but I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 5 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 6
Extent, commencement and short title
Mr Nuttall
I beg to move amendment 4, page 4, line 15, leave out subsection (2) and insert—
‘(2) This Act comes into force in accordance with the following provisions—
(a) Section 1 comes into force on the day after the following conditions are fulfilled—
(i) in each House of Parliament a Minister of the Crown moves a motion that the House approves the coming into force of section 1, and
(ii) each House agrees to the motion without amendment,
(b) the other provisions of this Act come into force on the day on which this Act is passed.’.
Prisons (Property) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) on doing so well in the lottery to get a private Member’s Bill so high up the list; perhaps he should participate in other lotteries and then have millions to spend on good causes.
I also want to congratulate the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), on his promotion. It is a pleasure to speak in a debate to which I know he will reply. I am grateful to him for asking me to speak on Disraeli earlier this year. It was a great pleasure, but I shall not talk about the late Earl of Beaconsfield today.
With this Bill, I want to go back to first principles. As a House, we should always be careful when we do anything that undermines the rights of property. The foundation of our state is the right of property—the right of people to enjoy the property they legitimately own. We can go back to the Magna Carta of 1215 when it comes to the right of people not to have their property taken away without proper process.
It is very easy, in looking at prisoners, to say that they have given up all their rights, so they do not have this right either. It is a very tempting argument and in some respects it is true. It is justly part of the punishment that some of prisoners’ rights are taken away. In my view, it is right for them to lose the ability to vote in general elections. It is a right that they have lost, by the will of Parliament, and it should remain lost to them. It gets more complicated, however, when it comes to things that they are sometimes allowed to have and sometimes not allowed to have. What we do not want is a prison regime that is fundamentally arbitrary, in which a prison governor can decide that he will allow a prisoner to have a mobile telephone at one moment, but then change his mind the next moment because the right circumstances have not been met. It is, I believe, the case that many people in prison are not as educationally advanced as many people in the House of Commons, so they might not fully understand the regulations that apply to them or be able to cope with the differentiations that might apply.
As a starting-point—here I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh)—I believe that we should always be enormously careful about extending the powers of the state to do something, and we should be particularly careful where there is cross-party support. In that case, there is often a popular view that it is right to do something and people find it very hard to object to it, but that is because they have forgotten the first principle that they should have borne in mind at the beginning of the process. My starting point, then, is general suspicion of extending the powers of the state and general suspicion of undermining the rights of property.
There is, of course, an exception. Going right back to the Magna Carta again, people’s property can be taken away if a proper process is involved, if the system allows it to be taken away and if the approach is fundamentally just and proportionate. To quote the Magna Carta, it says that “no free man” shall have certain penalties applied—and, of course, by their very definition, prisoners are not free men; that is the whole point of them being in prison. The definition of a free man in the Magna Carta is, of course, completely separate from our modern understanding, but I think a brief foray into the feudal system would be unhelpful on this occasion. Here, it is perhaps more interesting to look at the language literally rather than to apply a mediaeval interpretation of “a free man”. The limitation on the protection of property is that it is the protection of the property of a free man, and for many centuries the state has taken upon itself the right—to some extent, the obligation—to take away property from people as a form of penalty for their misbehaviour.
We then come to the question of whether the penalty is appropriate and suitable or unduly harsh in relation to what the prisoner has done. There are some categories where it will be incredibly easy to determine that. As we have already established, something that is a criminal item of itself can be taken by the police—although that is a different procedure—and destroyed by them. Fortunately, it will not be the case that a prisoner who is found with a stash of heroin on him will get it back at the end of his sentence, only to be arrested by the police and have it taken off him again. That would create a bureaucratic muddle. Of course, it would not necessarily be heroin—it could be any number of other illegal substances—but because some Members probably know more about illegal substances than I do, I shall stick to heroin for the time being.
Then there is the question of armaments. Some of us remember the break-out from Brixton prison when Lord Baker, I believe, was Home Secretary. Some IRA prisoners smuggled in a gun in the false bottom of a shoe. Had it been found, as it should have been, it would have been confiscated and undoubtedly not returned. However, there are grey areas. What if a prisoner has a replica gun? Replicas may be legal in the outside world, but they are obviously not encouraged in prison because they cause a certain amount of confusion, especially if they are good replicas. Prison officers would fear that a good replica might be a real gun. You would have to be a brave soul—and I know that you are a brave soul, Mr Deputy Speaker—to be certain that a replica gun was genuinely a replica, and would not actually fire. Although replica guns can currently be confiscated, it seems to me quite sensible to destroy them as well.
Mr Nuttall
I am not sure that it is right for them to be destroyed. There are many reasons for which guns can be legally held in this country. Surely if a gun were capable of being used, it could be sold and the money sent to the victims of crime.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I thought that a replica gun might not be of enormous value, and that it might therefore be easier to destroy it. Let us, however, take the example of a set of 18th-century duelling pistols. I do not know whether those crop up frequently in prisons, but they might. They are not very effective, the gunpowder that is required for them has got a bit damp and the flint does not work perfectly, so they are not necessarily enormously dangerous items, and they are legal to hold in the outside world. My hon. Friend is right, however: if these were found—
Social Care (Local Sufficiency) and Identification of Carers Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(11 years, 8 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I warmly congratulate the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) on her success in coming third in the ballot for private Members’ Bills and on securing the slot this morning. As always, it is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), who speaks with such authority on these issues. The hon. Lady’s interest in the matter is well known, and she should be congratulated on her determination in pursuing what is undoubtedly an extremely important issue.
Many private Members’ Bills cover only a narrow area or a specific point of law and are often technical in nature. Some of them are just one-clause Bills. This Bill is quite the opposite. No one could accuse the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South of lacking ambition, given the scope and depth of her wide-ranging Bill, which would affect millions of our fellow citizens.
An increasing number of families are involved in the care of another family member—often, but not exclusively, an older relative. In many cases, this can involve a younger person with a disability who requires care on either a temporary or a permanent basis. We are fortunate that the hon. Lady has succeeded in introducing her Bill, as it enables us to spend time today considering the plight of carers and highlighting the problems they face. We are also able to publicise some of the excellent help that is already available to carers. The debate also gives us an opportunity to highlight what the Government have done and are continuing to do for carers.
The Queen’s Speech at the beginning of this Session included a commitment to publish a draft care and support Bill. Some people might have been surprised, in the light of that announcement, that the hon. Lady’s Bill was introduced at all. It first saw the light of day on 20 June this year, when it received its First Reading. It was published the following month, on 10 July. Unfortunately for its promoter, the following day saw the publication of the Government’s own draft Care and Support Bill, which had been announced in the Queen’s Speech. I submit that this issue is so important, and has such huge ramifications for the public purse, that it should be the subject of a Government Bill. One of the problems with this private Member’s Bill is the lack of information on the likely cost of the measures it contains.
As I said earlier, caring for another person can take many forms. When I was a child, my family cared for my grandmother. Looking back, I do not recall the terms “carer” or “caring” being used that often. We simply said that grandma—or nana, if I am to be strictly accurate about the name we used—lived with us. I cannot remember how young I was when my mother’s mother came to live with us, but I cannot recall a time in my childhood when grandma was not around. Unfortunately, as she progressed through her 70s and 80s, she became increasingly afflicted by ill health, and undoubtedly needed caring for.
The catalyst for my grandmother leaving her own home and coming to live with us was her arthritis, especially in her knees. She found it difficult to walk and, particularly, to climb stairs. That disability meant that grandma had to sleep on a bed settee in the lounge. If truth be told, she would have had to sleep downstairs anyway, as we had only two real bedrooms—one for mum and dad, and one for my brother and me. Unfortunately, in addition to her arthritis, grandma also suffered from Parkinson’s disease and, in her final years, from Alzheimer’s. By that stage of her life, she was therefore heavily dependent on the rest of us to look after her. We might not have used the term, but we were her carers.
Other than having what in those days was an orange badge for the car—which enabled my dad to park near to where we were going so that grandma did not have far to walk—and attendance allowance or some other benefit to which we were entitled, I do not recall any other specific assistance or any group being around to help. It is a testament to how far we have developed as a society that there is now far more help available for those who need and want it.
There are many reasons that the provision of care has risen up the political agenda in recent years. There have been enormous advances in medicine and in man’s ability to conquer disease. New treatments and technological developments have united to increase life expectancy. Sadly, however, increased life expectancy does not always bring with it the ability to continue to live as we did when we were younger. It comes with a price.
Living to an advanced age after enjoying good health for many years does not guarantee that that good health will continue. Indeed, the opposite is often the case. Later-life conditions, as the human body effectively wears out, inevitably mean that many people become increasingly reliant on others to look after them. Changes in working practices mean that fewer families are able to take in an elderly relative as we did when I was a child. There are now many more women in the workplace, and far fewer families in which the wife stays at home. That means that, in many cases, care still takes place but at some distance, with a son or daughter travelling great distances each day to look after their elderly relative so that they can continue to live in their own home. We must never underestimate the enormous value of that care.
Statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions’ family resources survey for the United Kingdom for 2010-11 give us an idea of the scope and scale of the problem, and of the number of disabled people and carers in this country. The survey found that 4.8 million people were carers, which equates to about 8% of the total UK population. Of that number, 3.5 million were adults of working age, and 1.3 million were adults over the state pension age. There were also about 100,000 children acting as young carers. The distribution of carers, broken down by age group, has remained broadly stable over the past 10 years.
The survey also found that the prevalence of disability in the United Kingdom involved 19% of the population. That means that about one in five people in this country was classed as having some form of disability. Not surprisingly, the prevalence varied considerably between age groups, ranging from 6% among children through 15% among working-age adults to 45% among adults over the state pension age.
According to that same survey, some 27% of adults of working age worked full time, equating to about 1.5 million people, with another 10% working part time. It is interesting to note that the comparative figures for all adults of working age were 68% and 20%.
I note that in clause 8, to which we have not yet referred this morning, subsection (1) deals with interpretation and it helpfully defines some of the key terms in the Bill. The biggest key term of all, of course, is what constitutes “a carer”. For the purposes of the Bill, a carer is defined as having
“the same meaning as in section 1 of the Carers (Recognition and Services) Act 1995”,
so it may be useful at this juncture to remind hon. Members of precisely what that statutory definition of a carer is. Section 1 of the 1995 Act defines a carer as an individual who
“provides or intends to provide a substantial amount of care on a regular basis”—
not for just anyone, but for someone who is classed as “a relevant person”, and a relevant person is someone who has had their needs assessed by a local authority under section 47(1)(a) of the National Health Service and Community Care Act 1990.
It should be noted that this statutory definition is not the same definition as that used by many charities. For example, the Carers Trust defines a carer as
“someone of any age who provides unpaid support to family or friends who could not manage without this help.”
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Will my hon. Friend clarify whether the survey he mentioned used the legal definition or a broader definition of carers when it came up with the 8% figure?
Mr Nuttall
My belief is—I stand to be corrected on it—that the survey used a wider definition rather than the strict statutory definition contained in section 1 of the 1995 Act.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
That is a helpful answer. Does my hon. Friend suggest, then, that this Bill will apply to a much smaller number of people than it would if it used the survey definition rather than the definition in the previous Act?
Mr Nuttall
That would appear to be the case. If the survey used the wider definition, which I believe it might have, it would indeed indicate that the number of people affected by the Bill would be fewer as a result of its using the statutory definition.
After the Carers Trust’s definition of a carer as
“someone of any age who provides unpaid support to family or friends who could not manage without this help”,
it goes on to state:
“This could be caring for a relative, partner or friend”—
we should note that this definition includes friends as well—
“who is ill, frail, disabled or has mental health or substance misuse problems.”
At this point, we come to what I submit are some of the problems with the interpretation of the Bill. What exactly constitutes a “substantial” amount of care? Who is to be the judge of whether care is substantial or not? One man’s definition of what is “substantial” may not be the same as another’s. Therein lies the first of a number of uncertainties in the Bill.
Mr Nuttall
Absolutely. I completely agree. We want to hear from as many Members as possible, including the hon. Lady.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
If my hon. Friend managed to go on for a further two hours and 25 minutes, his speech would be of such an heroic nature that he would deserve an award rather than criticism. However, I do not think that even he will manage that, so there is clearly enough time for others to speak.
Mr Nuttall
I am trying to be as generous as possible in taking interventions, many of which, I would point out very gently, have come from the other side of the Chamber. I shall move on and try to deal with matters as quickly as possible, but they are genuine matters of concern which I think need to be heard. After that, we can hear from other Members.
As I was saying before the various interventions, the Bill has two general aims. The first is to place a duty on local authorities to ensure that there are sufficient social care services to support carers and those who are disabled, and in particular to aid them to enter or remain in the labour market or undertake work-related education or training. The Bill also seeks to secure the early identification of carers by health bodies such as clinical commissioning groups and foundation trusts, schools, and further and higher education establishments.
As we have heard, clause 1 imposes a general duty on
“every local authority to take steps to ensure that, as far as reasonably practicable, a range and level of social care services are provided to meet the reasonable requirements of disabled people and carers who are ordinarily resident in their area.”
I was grateful to the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South for indicating that the definition of “reasonably practicable” was designed to be set down in future legislation, through delegated legislation. I am prepared to accept that assurance, but it does mean that we are effectively being asked to sign a blank piece of paper.
Clause 2 provides that in order to demonstrate that a local authority has discharged its general duty under clause 1,
“every local authority shall be under a specific duty to secure, so far as reasonably practicable, the provision of social care services sufficient to meet the reasonable requirements of all people aged 18 or over with a disability and carers who require such support to enable them to—
(a) take up, or remain in, work, or
(b) undertake education or training which could reasonably be expected to assist them to obtain work.”
In just those first two clauses, we see that the test of “reasonableness” is key; the idea crops up time and again. Perhaps it would have been helpful if we could have known at this juncture how that will be defined.
What we do have, however, is information from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the university of Essex. Last year, it published a paper entitled “Trends in the Employment of Disabled People in Britain”, which was a detailed analysis of the series of general household surveys published between 1974 and 2005, and covered adults between the ages of 20 and 59. The report found that the prevalence of disability has gradually increased, stating that the proportion of working age adults who report a limiting long-standing illness
“rose from 14% in 1975 to 18% in 1996, before falling back again to 16% in 2004.”
It went on to state that
“disabled people are less likely to have a job than other people, even after taking account of other characteristics such as their age and educational background.”
The paper presented an important concept—the idea of the disability employment penalty—and undertook an analysis for the period between 1995 and 2005 of its impact. It stated that
“the ‘disability employment penalty’ has been calculated as the difference between the actual proportion of disabled people in work, and what the proportion would have been if those same people were not disabled, but all their other characteristics (gender, education and so on) remained the same. So the actual outcome for disabled people is compared with the hypothetical situation in which their disadvantage was switched off. For the straightforward model covering the last ten years of the period under analysis:
80% of non-disabled people in the age range covered were in work, averaged over the ten year period 1996-2005.
76% of disabled people would have been in work if their disability had no effect
48% of disabled people were actually in work.
So
4% (80-76) is a measure of how much disabled people were disadvantaged by their other observed characteristics (such as age and education).”
However, on the basis of this research,
“28% (76-48) is the true disability penalty.”
The author actually cautioned that that penalty figure might be an underestimate because the “limiting long-standing illness” definition
“is probably too broad (including many adults with only slight impairments), this is probably a smaller penalty than would be observed if a tight definition of disability were used, restricted to people with more serious impairments. Note too that the estimate of 28% is the average effect of a range of conditions, impairments and severities, all bundled into a single category labelled ‘limiting long-standing illness’. Previous analysis of a much more detailed disability survey has shown that the penalties affecting different types of disabled people range from 0 to 100%, and helps to show that they are not all facing the same experience.”
The paper also considered how the penalty had changed over time, finding that it had risen
“from 17 percentage points to about 28 percentage points”
between 2000 and 2004. It also found
“that people with severely disadvantaging sets of health conditions have been more, not less, affected by the trends.”
Under this Bill, local authorities would need to ask why disabled people are less likely to be in employment. The Office for National Statistics published the results of the first wave of its life opportunities survey in December 2011, using evidence gathered during the period from June 2009 to March 2011. It described the LOS as a major new national survey of disability in Britain that
“aims to measure people’s use of local facilities, including public transport and health services, and their participation in leisure activities and employment opportunities.
It also aims to find out why people don’t take part in work or leisure activities that they would like to, or why they may experience difficulties in using public services.”
The survey investigated the barriers and what it called the enablers to employment for three groups of adults aged 16 and over: the employed, who were in employment but were limited in the type or amount of paid work that they did by their impairment status; the unemployed, who were unemployed and seeking employment but were limited in the type or amount of paid work that they could do by their impairment status; and the economically inactive, who were neither in employment nor actively seeking work. The top barrier to employment opportunities for adults with an impairment in each group was their health condition, illness or impairment. The second top barrier for the employed was family responsibility, whereas for the unemployed it was the lack of job opportunities and for the economically inactive it was disability-related.
As for what the researchers called the “enablers”, most respondents did not indicate the most important factor at all. In so far as they did, the most often stated enabler was modified hours or days or reduced work hours. We know from the DWP family resources survey, to which I referred earlier, that the majority of carers balance their caring responsibilities with paid work. Those in full-time employment made up the largest group of carers in the United Kingdom, at 35%, and the next largest, at 24%, were those in retirement, followed by the economically inactive, at 21%, and those in part-time employment, at just 17%. Among the working-age population, 60% of carers worked full time whereas 27% worked part time, compared with 68% and 20% among all working-age adults.
A survey by the NHS information centre, published in December 2010 and entitled “Survey of Carers in Households 2009/10”, provides an insight into how caring responsibilities affect the employment and education of carers. That survey found that caring duties did not adversely impact on the employment of most people, although they did for a sizeable minority. All carers who were under 70, regardless of their personal status, were asked whether their ability to take up or stay in employment had been affected by the assistance they gave the main cared-for person. Although just over a quarter of that group, 26%, felt that their caring responsibilities had affected them in such a way, nearly three quarters, or 74%, did not feel that that was the case.
The survey also gave some further detail of the backgrounds of those whose employment was so affected. The groups who were most likely to say that their employment prospects had been affected by the care they provided were: those aged 35 to 44, who represented 34% of carers, and those aged 45 to 54, who represented 30%; those looking after the home or a family, who represented 46%, and those working part time, who represented just 35%; those who were caring for someone in the same household, who represented 38%; those providing care for 20 hours or more per week, who represented 40%; and those in bad or fair health, who represented 34% and 32% respectively.
As for the specific impacts, just over a third, or 35%, of working-age carers who were looking after the home or family had to leave employment altogether, compared with 10% on average, whereas 23% of carers who were working part time, or almost one in four, had reduced their employment hours compared with an average of 8%.
It is of course important to understand why carers are less likely to be in employment. The “Survey of Carers in Households 2009/10” stated that
“the intensity of care provision has an impact upon interest in taking up paid employment.”
Of those who were caring for less than 20 hours a week, 24% were interested in taking up paid employment in the near future, compared with only 11% of the high-intensity group of carers. Of those interested in returning to work, 51% indicated that they would like to work part time, while 38% wanted full-time work and 11% did not know. On the possible barriers to employment, saying, “I cannot work because of my caring responsibilities,” was the third most popular explanation for not working, with 37% of people choosing that response.
Mr Nuttall
There is indeed such an irony. Legislation of all kinds should receive proper scrutiny.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It is worth noting that if Labour Members were so committed to the Bill, they would have been able to get 100 Members here to support a closure motion. Alternatively, they could move a motion that would force an hon. Member to bring their speech to an end, but they have not asked to use either of those mechanisms.
Mr Nuttall
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have indeed been helped by the Library’s document, which is extremely useful in analysing the Bill.
I will move on, if I may. As I understand it, there is nothing to prevent local authorities from carrying out the various actions proposed by the Bill, so it might be worth asking why they are not already going down that route.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Is my hon. Friend referring to the general power that the Government’s Localism Act 2011 gave to local authorities, allowing them to carry out a much wider range of activities than was the case under the previous limitation whereby everything had to be identified by statute? Are parts of this Bill therefore unnecessary because of the abilities that local authorities already have?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is right that, under the Localism Act, local authorities now have a general freedom to do what they want without being given specific powers by central Government.
I pay tribute to the important and valuable work of various charities in this sector, for which they should be warmly commended. The Carers Trust charity’s website is a good source, packed with useful information. A particularly useful function enables anyone who is seeking help to find the location of their nearest centre simply by typing in their postcode. It covers the Princess Royal Trust for Carers network and the Crossroads care schemes.
Data Protection in the Areas of Police and Criminal Justice (EU Directive)
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(12 years ago)
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Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I will be conscious of your remarks, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is, as always, a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey). If this motion is passed tonight, it will result in yet another slice of the sovereignty of this House passing to Brussels and to the European Union. We have no obligation to do it. This country has every right to opt out of the measure, and that is exactly what we should do. The rest of the EU would, of course, continue to be bound by the measure, and if there was a benefit to our citizens, they would benefit too. If the House felt the need to legislate independently of the EU, we could do so, but we should not simply accept the measure as it stands.
We have a choice. The Government propose to inch further down the path to greater European integration—a path that, I submit, runs in the opposite direction to that in which the vast majority of the British public wish to go. Although the two Front-Bench teams might agree, I suspect that millions of people outside this place agree with those who have spoken from the Back Benches who, in this argument, are on the side of the British public. Once we have chosen not to exercise our right to opt out, there will be no option to reverse that decision, and we will have slipped yet further into the EU’s clutches.
The Minister expressed concern that if we did not accept the measure, other European countries might choose not to co-operate with us. My first thought to that was, “Simple. Let’s tell them we’ll stop sending the cheque every month.” That might soon get them into order. Then there is this nonsense that we might be obliged to enter bilateral agreements and that it is all too difficult. What nonsense! We have thousands and thousands of civil servants who must surely negotiate bilateral agreements all the time.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Not only would it not be too difficult but we have an agreement in place already under which it is a requirement of the EU that every effort be made to maximise its effectiveness in the event of it being replaced. So the Government’s argument does not stand up.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. It would not be at all difficult, as the Minister suggested, for us to reach separate bilateral agreements, not just with the remaining 26 members but with the other European countries that are not members. We need to be doing deals with them as well, if this is such a good idea.
As pointed out, if we adopted this measure, it would have significant resource implications, as paragraph 33 of the Government’s explanatory memorandum, dated 13 February, makes clear. At a time when the whole thrust of Government policy is aimed at reducing the amount of regulation, our public services will have to contend with yet more rules and regulations. Many will rightly question why we are subjecting them to more Brussels red tape. The bundle of papers available from the Vote Office on this motion demonstrates the size of the problem. It contains well over 300 sides of A4 paper. So we have more regulations, the cost of which we know not. In essence, we are being asked to sign a blank cheque. We should not be taking this step, and I urge the House to vote against the motion.
London Local Authorities Bill [Lords]
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(12 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful for that intervention. I would be happy to be a car salesman, because that is an honourable and worthy profession. My reason for saying that is because trading cars is the way to starting in business. People can start off in a small way by putting the little Morris Minor that they bought 20 years ago outside their front door with a sticker on it saying, “This car is for sale for £500, with MOT. It has not been clocked or had done to it any of those terrible things that rogues do.” Somebody might then come along and give them £500, so they go out to buy a second-hand Mini Cooper, which they sell for £800. They then buy a second-hand Ford Cortina and sell it for £2,000. Eventually, they are buying Aston Martin DB5s and putting them outside their front door with a price of £150,000—cheap at twice the price, some might say. That is before they have even got on to thinking about Bentleys, great cars that they are, too—although some might say that they are not quite as good as Aston Martins in their style and sleek lines.
We need to get an entrepreneurial spirit and get people starting in business. How are we going to revive this economy if we do not encourage the small business man, and the tall business man, too? I always feel that this “heightism” on business men and business ladies, who should not be excluded, is a bit unfair. We want to help enterprise. We know that job creation comes from small enterprises, not from big business. Historically—very good figures from the United States are available on this—big business has reduced its labour force, year in, year out, and companies that are starting up develop into bigger businesses employing more and more people. A fascinating statistic in this week’s edition of The Sunday Times suggested that an American business, in its first two years of operation, increases the number of its employees by 160%, whereas an Italian company does so by 20%. That is because America, the land of free enterprise, encourages people to set up their own businesses and to do things in a little way without this overburdening, this overwhelming and this overweening regulation that makes it so difficult for them to earn an honest crust.
Clause 9 is where my objections are centred at the moment, but I can assure you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I have many more objections to certain aspects of this Bill to come. The clause states that “fees and charges” can be levied on people selling their car, but offering it on the internet is illegal and keeping it on the street for the period that it is on the internet is illegal. That is very unfair, because someone can put something up on the internet one week and it can then be cached—it can be caught—and it remains there ad infinitum. Someone could have traded their car and completed the transaction—they could be the new buyer—but the car could still appear on the internet under an historical cache. They may then find that a council busybody—not one wearing a bowler hat, because the councils did not seem enthused by that idea when I gave them it at an earlier stage in the debate—or some odd-bod could come along and say, “This car is now getting you a fine.” That is why I object—
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend refers to council officials today as “odd-bods”. When we considered the first group of amendments on 7 December 2011, he referred to parking attendants and council officials as “desperately scruffy tatterdemalions”. Has he subsequently received any adverse representations from any local authority officials?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. I ought to clarify things. A lot of council officials are splendid fellows. They are good, honest, hard-working people who do a difficult job that I would not particularly like to do myself. I am very grateful that I can find a parking space when I want one, as a resident. Some traffic wardens really are noble fellows. However, notwithstanding that, there are some carrying out these particularly pernicious activities whom I think we should discourage. We should try to persuade them that their career opportunities lie elsewhere. To answer my hon. Friend’s specific questions about tatterdemalions, I have had very little response from councils. I thought that I might be bombarded with letters from councils. Perhaps these might have come from people from the City of London saying, “This is not how we dress in our borough.” Such letters might have come from that other great city of London, Westminster, but no—there was no correspondence from them. None came from Barking and Dagenham; there was not a jot from Barnet; nor from Bexley, Brent or Bromley.
Camden was silent and Croydon had nothing to say on the issue of whether council officers should be smart and tidy. Ealing, Enfield, Greenwich—they were all lie-abeds, not a word, not a peep, not an utterance came from them. Hackney, Hammersmith—and Fulham, we must not forget poor old Fulham—Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon and Hounslow; all of them were horribly quiet on this important issue. Islington—one would have thought that somebody from Islington might have a word or two—
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend will have seen amendment 67, which was tabled by our hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies), proposing that the power be given to the Mayor of London. Would my hon. Friend like to give the House the benefit of his views about the merits of that proposal?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am very interested to think about that proposal. The current Mayor of London is one of the greatest men who has ever lived. That is without question. He is a genius par excellence. He is an exciting, charismatic figure who bestrides the nation as a colossus of political affairs. There is a “but” coming, as my hon. Friends probably realised, though it does not relate to the former hon. Member for Henley, Mr Boris Johnson. It relates to who may come after him.
I go back to what I was saying about Lady Thatcher. If it were possible to deify people, Mr Boris Johnson would be next on the list, after the great lady, but he will not live for ever. He will not be Mayor for ever. Indeed, some people think—some people are heard to gossip and to speculate—that the Mayor of London has higher ambitions and is looking to come back into alternative places to carry out his duties. Therefore “the Mayor of London” refers, sadly, not to the individual who currently holds the office, but to the office itself, so I am not entirely supportive of amendment 67 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I feel that we would be taking a risk, a gamble.
We would, to use that term that is rarely heard, be playing with fire. We would be risking the happiness of our prospective fellow countrymen, or of our constituents if we represent London constituencies, by putting in somebody who might be a left-wing firebrand—some dangerous socialist figure who wanted only to penalise motor car owners—as the Mayor of London. We might—heaven help us—end up with a Green Mayor of London. The mind boggles at the thought of what a Green Mayor might do—a red one would be bad enough. Therefore, I think that it is safer to leave the power with the Secretary of State, as my amendment proposes.
Mr Deputy Speaker, you might expect me to prefer my own amendment to another Member’s, however wise and good they are, but I fear that we might not always have the Mayor of London that we would want, particularly through a long parliamentary Session. Sometimes the electors become bored with the party in power, and they might elect someone else to the mayoralty midway through the Session just to show the governing party that they can do so. Of course, we are not worried about that happening this time. The great Boris Johnson is so far ahead, by every measure that humanity can discover, that it is extremely unlikely that we will find some red, green or—I will whisper this very quietly—yellow candidate getting close to the mayoralty. If they did, however, we might find that the protection that I am trying to put in the Bill was not there.
Some very fine people have been, and are, Secretaries of State. I am thinking in particular of the Department that is relevant to this debate, which has one of the finest Secretaries of State in Her Majesty’s Government, a man who is hugely respected by everyone, and not only in the Conservative party, but in all parties up and down the country, and probably further afield, but as they do not have votes in British general elections we are not too worried about them for the purposes of this debate.
Amendment 45, which stands in my name and those of my hon. Friends, seeks to ameliorate the pains and penalties of the Bill by giving people a chance to get things right and not to be penalised too quickly. It proposes that they should have 28 days, rather than 14, to abide by the notice that has been issued under the order of the Secretary of State, rather than the council, if my amendment 44 is accepted, or under the order of the Mayor of London if the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley is accepted.
It looks as though the cost of a Royal Mail second-class stamp is about to go up to 55p. Councils are rather mean when sending such notices out and are unlikely to use the recorded delivery service. E-mail is no good if the council does not have the individual’s e-mail address, and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency asks only for a postal address, not an e-mail address, when people register with it, so these things have to go through the post. It seems to me that, considering the standard of the postal service sometimes, particularly around Christmas, 14 days is far too short. People might find that they have been penalised extremely unfairly.
I reiterate that everything I am trying to do with this batch of amendments, as with others, is alleviate the penalties, pains, powers and restrictions of freedom set out in the Bill. It might not be the will of the House that I get rid of the entire clause, but at least the House will understand why it is important to ensure that people have justice. The great call of this House over many centuries has been to provide people with the justice they need to protect them from an over-mighty state that wishes to interfere in their liberties.
The next set of amendments relate to clause 14. I do not wish to sound like a broken record or for people to say, “Turn to the flip-side”, or whatever it is they say when they want the tone to change, but I believe that clause 14 ought to go in its entirety, and that is what amendment 46, which I and a number of hon. Friends have tabled, would do. Once again, we are dealing with the power to take people’s goods without the judgment of a court, and that cannot conceivably be right, just or in line with our understanding of the historic liberties of the individual, which should be protected.
Clause 14 applies to the city of Westminster; it is not a general clause. It states:
“An authorised officer of the Council or a constable may in the Borough seize any receptacle or equipment (other than a motor vehicle) which… is in a street”.
We could have someone wandering along the street who can seize a receptacle without so much as a “by your leave”, an order of a court or, at this stage, any proof that something is going on. The clause continues that the authorised officer may do this if he has “reasonable cause to suspect” that the receptacle is intended to be used in connection with unlicensed street trading. Who knows what could happen? Someone could be pushing a pram along the street and taking goods home in it while their baby was at nursery school, and the pram and goods could be seized because it might look as though they could be used for trading. Indeed, people might start trading their goods in prams because that might be a way of getting around the rules. The provision is so broad that all that it requires is for the officer to have “reasonable cause to suspect” that the receptacle is intended to be used in connection with unlicensed street trading. What if someone had been shopping and perhaps bought a few saucepans and a barbecue set and was wheeling it home? Would a council officer suddenly pounce on them and say, “I’d rather like that for my own home. I think I’ll take it, thank you so much, because you look like you’re about to do a little unlicensed street trading.”
It comes back to this desperate opposition to free trade, free markets and enterprise and a belief that regulating everything will create a perfect world. I am sorry to disappoint you, Mr Deputy Speaker, but however much we regulate, we will not create a perfect world. It simply will not happen, even in the great, noble and wondrous city of Westminster.
What are my various proposals? My first proposal is to get rid of the whole beastly clause. I understand that people do not like the smell of onions outside their front door when people are trading, and I know that one of the front doors in question is that of Buckingham palace, a front door that I think should be particularly protected from the smell of onions when people are doing a bit of street trading. Perhaps even this place should be protected in that way, although I do not think that it would do MPs any harm to walk past the smell of onions on their way to work in the mornings. I appreciate that that is unpleasant. I also understand that criminal gangs might be involved but, if they are, they should be got for serious criminal crime—that is a bit of a tautology, even when speaking so briefly—rather than for an invented crime of just looking as though one might want to sell something in the street.
What about Big Issue sellers? Will their copies of the Big Issue be confiscated because they might be doing a bit of unlicensed street trading? Some of them of course have licences. I hope that all the people who give out the Evening Standard have licences—they can hardly sell it, now that they give it out for free. This is just another attack on trade, and we need trade. We need people to be in employment and to work and we need the economy to boom. We will never get the boom back into Britain without some street trading or if we have some terrible and draconian regulations. I do not think that Draco would ever have thought up such regulations—I am not sure that there was a lot of street trading in Athens when he was around, but there might have been for all I know. They are draconian regulations that seek to discourage trade and penalise the entrepreneur and those who are trying to do their bit for society, rather than those who want something for nothing.
As with clause 10, I have looked at clause 14 in detail and thought that, although it is a nasty and pernicious clause—one might say that it is so nasty that it smells of rancid onions—if we are not to get rid of it in its entirely, let us at least try to ameliorate some of its faults and see what we can do to make it more reasonable and in line with our great traditions. Therefore, I have made certain suggestions. Amendment 47 would leave out “an authorised officer” and replace it with “a magistrate”. The magistracy really is the foundation of our courts system. It has a wonderful history and tradition. The lay magistracy has been particularly important in protecting our freedoms and bringing people from the community with a degree of wisdom and understanding of their local area to enforce the law there. The stipendiary magistracy, now called district judges, has formalised that, and in an urban setting it would more usually be a stipendiary magistrate who would have that responsibility, but Magna Carta still ought to count.
In these few words that is the third time I have mentioned Magna Carta—that was the fourth—but it is very important, because that document is what set us on the path to freedom, rights of property and the rule of law, which has led to the prosperity not just of this nation but of the United States and of Commonwealth nations that have had the benefit of that great history and tradition.
For some reason, and I think it is to do with the European Communities Act and the administrative approach taken across the Channel, in recent years we have removed the protection of the court from our subjects, and that is wrong. If we can put it back, we ought to put it back.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am extraordinarily grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way; he is most generous. I am concerned about who would decide whether it was a trade. Would it simply be a council flunkey or would there be any form of appeal to protect an individual who was not really trading but might be accused of trading?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a very interesting point. As we shall see in some of the later provisions—if time permits—the Bill seems to be trying to establish local authorities as judge and jury in their own case.
Mr Nuttall
Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs may well have reached a conclusion about the activities of an individual who is engaged in what might in another sphere be called hobby trading, in the way that many people engage in what is known as hobby farming by keeping a few hens, a couple of sheep or some cattle. But someone who sells two or three vehicles a year, having repaired them as a hobby, would probably not be regarded and ought not to be regarded as being engaged in a business.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
The position from HMRC’s point of view is interesting and important. Motor cars are exempt from capital gains tax. Therefore, if somebody was selling just one, it would not be subject to a profits tax and would be exempt from capital gains tax, so it is quite a good thing to do from a tax point of view.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. If the Revenue decided to investigate such matters and concluded that the profits were taxable, there would be the difficulty of ascertaining what was taxable profit, because much of the cost would be for materials expended on the vehicle. In any event, unless it was the type of vehicle that my hon. Friend mentioned in his speech—an Aston Martin or a Ferrari—I suspect that the “profit” would be less than the annual personal allowance for capital gains tax purposes, which would probably mean that although it ought to be properly disclosed to the Revenue, no tax was payable.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It occurs to me that a trader could be caught out by accident simply if someone took a car for a test drive and stopped by the side of the road. Suddenly, hey presto, the car would appear to be on the side of the road at the same time as being offered for sale on the internet and so could then be confiscated. That would be absolutely terrible.
Mr Nuttall
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. There is a risk that an over-zealous tatterdemalion—I have finally used the word—who was keen to impress his local authority superiors might be driving down that road and could photograph the vehicle and take action under this provision, should it pass into law.
The other, more fundamental, point about the clause is that it might prevent young entrepreneurs from setting out to make a living. I see car salesmen not as street traders but as entrepreneurs. One of the reasons I came into politics was that I wanted to encourage people to become entrepreneurs, to believe in the free market and to sell their goods and be buyers and sellers. We do not want a situation in which local government sticks its nose into every aspect of people’s lives.
Taxation Freedom Day Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
There is a great need for simplification of our tax system and a flat tax might well have a part to play in that.
Mark Twain is often attributed with the quotation that the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, and throughout the ages Governments have always cast around for things to tax. Over the years, we have had window taxes, beard taxes and brick taxes. I particularly like—only because it will give me the chance to mention that great son of Bury, Sir Robert Peel—the glass tax that was introduced in 1746, in the reign of King George II. At that time, glass was sold by weight and manufacturers responded to the tax by producing smaller and more highly decorated objects, often with hollow stems, which are today known as excise glasses. If anyone has ever wondered why the crystal glassmaking industry flourished in Cork and Waterford, it was because in 1780 the Government granted Ireland free trade in glass, which continued until 1825, when the tax in Ireland was restored. That led to a gradual decline in the industry until the glass tax was finally abolished by that great son of Bury, Sir Robert Peel, and his Government in 1845.
The complexity of today’s tax legislation is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that Pythagoras’s theorem can be set out in 31 words—I was told it was 24, but when I counted there were 31—the Lord’s prayer contains 66, the 10 commandments contain 179, the US declaration of independence contains 1,300 and the entire United States constitution, with all 27 amendments, apparently contains 7,818, but to get to grips with the United Kingdom’s tax system, one would have to purchase several weighty volumes such as Tolley’s tax manuals, setting one back several hundred pounds.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Is it, however, shorter than the acquis communautaire?
Equality and Diversity (Reform) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his typically helpful intervention. Of course sons of peers should be represented, and they are a minority too. Perhaps as a son of a peer I should be given special help and intervention to help me to get through all the prejudice there is against sons of peers—not that I would ask for it or that I have ever noticed a particular prejudice against sons of peers. Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope that such prejudices never fall upon so distinguished a figure as yourself either.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend may have seen the press reports today regarding possible new legislation to allow females to take hereditary titles in the House of Lords. Does he agree that this is the way forward?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Well, I do not really like change as a general rule, and I would be very nervous about intervening in the line of succession to the throne. I think that the line of succession to the throne works very well and changing the Canadian constitution is a particularly difficult thing to do. With Her Majesty’s fantastically successful visit to Australia, we want everything to have a settled continuity of that succession. However, I think that the world has changed and that it may not be unreasonable to allow hereditary titles to pass through the female line, particularly if they are in danger of becoming extinct, because it would be a great sadness for titles to die out over succeeding generations with no new hereditary peerages being awarded. I must briefly declare an interest, because my mother-in-law would be able to resurrect a title if this law were to be changed.
Mr Nuttall
It could have happened.
My previous comments related to positive action. Positive discrimination, affirmative action or discrimination generally means choosing someone solely on the grounds of their gender or racial group, or for any other factor, and not for their ability. We are now at the crux of the matter. I believe that, by definition, as soon as one positively discriminates in respect of any given group in society, one is automatically discriminating against another group. That cannot be right. The Bill makes a good start in tackling the problem, but it is just the first step on the long road to ridding this country of the culture of political correctness and dismantling the whole industry of diversity and equality.
There could be no better time, given the economic situation, for that to gather pace. I know from my experience as a practising solicitor that many small and medium-sized enterprises struggle under the burden of the legislation. We are not there yet—there is a long way to go—but if we could begin to remove the legislation that applies to public authorities, that would be a step in the right direction. All our public services are looking for savings but, because of the way in which the law is framed, the one area in which they are not allowed to look for them is diversity and equality legislation. They have to keep their army of officers to comply with the law and the tick-box legislation.
Under the Disability Discrimination Acts, positive discrimination in favour of disabled people is not unlawful, and if disabled people meet the minimum criteria for a job, they are guaranteed an interview. The only other exemption relates to the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002, which the Bill seeks to abolish. The Equality Act 2010 includes a provision giving employers the option, when faced with two or more candidates of equal merit, of choosing one from a group that is under-represented in the work force. There is a whole Government Department—the Government Equalities Office—that exists solely for the purpose of issuing and enforcing guidance, red tape and regulations on that legislation. It has published guidance for employers on how to make those changes and use them in everyday life. The provisions on positive action in recruitment are, I am pleased to say, entirely voluntary but, as we all know, the public sector has seized on them with great glee. There is no requirement for an employer to use either the general provisions or those relating to recruitment and promotion.
Positive action in that regard will be used in cases in which an employer reasonably thinks that people with a protected characteristic are under-represented in the work force or suffer a disadvantage connected to that protected characteristic. As my hon. Friend the Member for Shipley made clear, the problem is where we draw the line. Why not, for example, protect and give help to those who are particularly tall?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
What an excellent idea—there should be special benefits for everyone over 6 feet.
Mr Nuttall
I am pleased that my hon. Friend is interested in this matter. If someone, for the sake of argument, is 7 feet tall—there are people of that stature in society—an employer might secretly think that they had better not take on such an employee, because they might complain about the size of the company’s doorways and it would have to spend a fortune going round the building and enlarging all the doors. One can easily see how an argument could be made for heightist, stoutist or shortist legislation to be introduced—
Access to a Lawyer
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(12 years, 7 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. That is one reason why opposition to our membership of the EU is growing in this country. As I often say to people, in many ways every directive that passes is another nail in the argument of those who will one day argue in a referendum—I believe we will eventually have one—that we should stay in the EU. People are increasingly fed up with the ever-growing competences of the EU. It is all very well to argue that the European Union Act 2011 will put an end to all these things, but we can see—day by day, week by week, month by month—that slivers of competence are going to Europe, and this would be another of those slivers. If the directive were adopted, it would be a classic example of this country’s handing over a further tiny piece of its competence. It might be only a sliver, but this is still a matter of sovereignty. At present, we can decide what our rules are.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Is this not also a classic example of the European ratchet? First the European arrest warrant allows British subjects going about their lawful business in their own country to be arrested by foreign Governments; then it is decided that there must be basic standards to protect them from such action, because that is only fair and proper; and that then leads to the conclusion that there must be more harmonisation of the criminal law across Europe. In fact, what Her Majesty’s Government should be doing is not just not opting into this, but getting out of all the other measures to which they have agreed.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend has made an excellent point, which I am sure would find widespread support outside the House. Far too much legislation from Europe is already foisted on our constituents, and we certainly do not need this as well. It is, in my view, an example of a solution looking for a problem. There is certainly no great clamour for it. When our constituents go abroad, they may well choose to go to Europe—there are, after all, another 26 countries in the European Union—but they may equally choose to visit any of the other 170-odd countries in the world, where none of this would apply. What do they do then?
We ought to consider speaking—quietly and diplomatically, of course—to plenty of other countries which have judicial systems that are far less helpful to the accused than any that might be found in the European Union. This is, I submit, a criminals’ charter. If it were to become law, the criminals and their lawyers would not only have to comply with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, but would have recourse to this directive as well as the European Rights Act 1998 and the European convention on human rights. It would be yet another hurdle for our police to surmount in dealing with crime and disorder on our streets, and, in my opinion, a problem that we could well do without.
The other group of people who would profit from the directive are the lawyers, particularly legal aid lawyers. As has already been mentioned this evening, it has been suggested that advice be given face to face. I know from my own experience many years ago that when a suspect is arrested, advice is given quite adequately on the telephone, and I see no reason to change that arrangement. Again, there has been no clamour for it to be changed. I see no reason why this country should have to change its practices and procedures purely on the basis of this directive. It may well benefit other countries—indeed, it may well benefit some of our constituents when they travel abroad—but I feel strongly that there is no need for it to be adopted now or at any time in the future. I hope that even when the negotiations have been completed, this will be the last that we hear of it, and that we shall never see it back on the Floor of the House again.
Drugs (Roadside Testing) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(12 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr David Nuttall (Bury North) (Con)
I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope) for showing such determination and persistence in bringing the Bill before the House. I think he has been hiding his light under a bushel to some degree, as he has attempted no fewer than four times to get his Bill a Second Reading. Today is very much a red letter day in the life of the Bill. It was first brought to the attention of the House in April 2007 under the ten-minute rule. A similar, if not identical, Bill was presented to the House on 10 December 2007. Sadly, as the time-honoured phrase “due to lack of parliamentary time” so aptly describes, it befell the fate of so many private Members’ Bills and proceeded no further than that first hurdle.
Unperturbed by this and remaining convinced of the merits of the case, my hon. Friend presented the Bill for a second time in the following Session and it had its First Reading on 26 January 2009. Sadly, the legislative gods again did not smile kindly on the Bill. Despite being on the Order Paper so many times, it failed to make any further progress. Until I looked at the list of sponsors of those previous Bills, I was unaware that I, as a sponsor of this Bill, was replacing one of the Deputy Speakers or the Leader of the House. Had I known that, I certainly would not have changed my decision to support it.
We have already heard my hon. Friend explain the thinking behind the Bill and what it seeks to achieve. I think it makes good parliamentary sense, because essentially it seeks to amend what is effectively a dormant provision in an Act of Parliament.
It breathes life into the provisions of section 6C of the Road Traffic Act 1988, so that rather than being just words they can be used in practice, which is no doubt what was intended so many years ago when they were introduced as an amendment to the 1988 Act. The whole purpose of the Bill is to make it easier for the police to detect those who drive under the influence of drugs.
My hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) quite rightly raised concern that if machines are not accurate innocent drivers might be convicted and receive a criminal record. I acknowledge that risk, but, as I will outline later in more detail, medical evidence shows that even an infinitesimally small amount of drugs can impair one’s driving ability. The reading from the machine will not represent proof beyond all doubt, because it will be for the courts to assess its strength and validity, but it surely must be better than what happens at the moment.
There are penalties for people who drive under the influence of drugs, and the police are advised about the steps to take if they think that someone is doing so. Five exercises are designed to assess their abilities: a pupil dilation test, designed to test for the presence of drugs; counting out 30 seconds; walking in a straight line, nine paces forward and then back—the classic test to check co-ordination and balance; raising a foot in the air 6 to 8 inches off the ground, which is designed to test the balance; and touching one’s finger to one’s nose with the eyes closed.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
It occurs to me that those tests are rather unfair on people who are not necessarily particularly numerate or athletic, and that standing on one leg with one’s foot 6 to 8 inches off the ground might be rather difficult for a lot of people on a normal day.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. The police are concerned that many completely sound people, who had never been within a mile of a drug or been involved in any drug taking whatever, would fail such a test. I would doubt my ability to perform all those functions without some error, and I have to concede that it would be difficult for even a sober person to pass all those tests easily.
In the Romberg test, for example, motorists are asked to stand up straight, tilt their head back, close their eyes and count to 30. If they sway and lose count those are regarded as an impaired ability to drive. It is like a scene from a Hollywood movie, seeing a suspect have to walk nine paces in a straight line and then nine paces back, and the idea of somebody having to stand alternately on their left and right legs without falling over is really rather ridiculous, so anything that moves away from those subjective tests and puts things on a more scientific basis can only be a step in the right direction.
The evidence obtained by the police must be of sufficient quality to enable them or the Crown Prosecution Service to secure a conviction in court, and it is important to determine what is meant by “drugs”. We all might think that we know what is meant, but what does the legislation state? Fortunately for us, and for the purposes of the 1988 Act, we are enormously assisted by section 11, entitled “Interpretations of sections 4 to 10”. Section 11(2) states that
“‘drug’ includes any intoxicant other than alcohol”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
That is an enormously important point. I do not know whether my hon. Friend reads the Daily Mail regularly, but it pointed out earlier this week that if one had five cups of coffee in a day one could hallucinate, so under the Bill will we roadside-test people who have had just one extra cup of coffee?
Mr Nuttall
That is indeed a problem, because caffeine can be regarded as an intoxicant, as indeed—I was very surprised to find out—can water. Those apparently harmless substances, if consumed to excess, can result in intoxication, so the definition in section 11 captures not just the obvious drugs that we think of when we hear “drugs”.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. Although the statistics show that thousands more people have been convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol than of drugs, whenever a survey is carried out we find that people, especially if they have been to a club, will admit that they are more likely to have been driven in a vehicle by somebody who has had drugs than by somebody who has had alcohol.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
This is a very interesting discussion of the effects on people’s behaviour. One of the most dangerous ages for driving is 18 to 25 for young men. If they are having accidents because they are going too fast, and cannabis slows them down, are you saying that they ought to be using cannabis when they drive?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way again; he is being enormously generous. Are not the same drugs sometimes illegal and sometimes legal? Drugs that are banned for use in the wrong circumstances, such as opiates, may be prescribed by physicians to treat pain. Such drugs would be illegal if you bought them—sorry, Mr Speaker, I mean if my hon. Friend bought them, because I think it inconceivable that you would buy them—in a corner shop in Cheam.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes the valid point that a drug that for all other intents and purposes is illegal becomes legal if it is prescribed by a GP. As Members on both sides of the House will be aware, we are often lobbied by those who feel that cannabis should be more widely available to make it easier for those with certain medical conditions to bear the symptoms. I understand that cannabis can make it easier for people to bear certain symptoms that are otherwise unbearable.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend raises a good point. With alcohol, the law sets a specific limit of 80 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood. It is relatively easy to test whether someone has more or less than the proscribed amount of alcohol in their blood, whereas a subjective decision has to be taken on whether someone is driving a vehicle under the influence of drugs. The 1988 Act is specific about that. That is indeed part of the difficulty that the Home Office has faced in proposing an appropriate device, because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch said, no standard for device specification has been set. As I will say later, some studies show that as little as 1 nanogram can adversely affect one’s ability to drive.
Fortunately, those who have to draw up the specification will be aided by the fact that some research has been carried out on the appropriate level to be set. A research programme was initiated by the Department for Transport, the Home Office, the Coroners Society and the Association of Chief Police Officers, aimed at establishing systematically the incidence of drug use among fatal road casualties—not just illicit drugs but those that are prescribed or sold over the counter. The interim results were released in February 1998 and included in the road safety White Paper entitled “Tomorrow’s roads: safer for everyone”, published in March 2003. That White Paper stated:
“Studies have shown that compared with ten years ago, five times as many people killed in road accidents had a trace of an illegal drug in their body. Cannabis was by far the most common illegal substance found. However, whilst it is likely that shortly after use the active ingredient of cannabis impairs driving, traces of the drug can remain in the body for up to four weeks, long after it has ceased to have any effect. This can present difficulties for enforcement until we have further research findings.
Class A drugs are most likely to have an adverse effect on driving. According to interim survey results, they were found in 6% of cases (compared with 12% for cannabis). This was a small increase compared with 10 years ago.
In the studies of road accident fatalities referred to above, it was found that there had been no change in the incidence of medicinal drugs over the period. There is scope, nevertheless, to improve enforcement and to make people more aware of the risks of driving while their ability is affected by drugs.”
The RAC has also surveyed a group of young drivers and found that young people are twice as likely to have been driven by someone who has taken illegal drugs than by someone over the drink-drive limit. A Transport Research Laboratory report on the effects of cannabis on driving was published in December 2000, and found that there were measurable effects on driver performance and that drivers could be impaired. A report on the effects of cannabis and alcohol was published in 2002, which confirmed the earlier observations and judged that the general medical examination and standardised impairment testing applied by police surgeons were generally effective in determining impairment.
It may well be that those reports led the Home Office to think that the testing that was already being done was generally satisfactory, and that the matter was therefore not as urgent as supporters of the Bill feel it is. However, there have been several other small-scale qualitative and quantitative studies that have examined patterns of recreational drug use and driving. I wish to refer in particular to one, undertaken by the Scottish Executive. It was published in 2001 and examined aspects of driving while under the influence of recreational drugs. It identified general patterns of personal drug use. When stopped on a toll bridge, some 3% of survey respondents aged 40 and over, and 13% of those aged 17 to 39, had taken an illegal drug in the previous twelve months. Among those attending dance clubs, 76%—three out of every four—had taken illegal drugs in the previous month. Drug-driving was particularly evident among those attending nightclubs.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend says that 76% of those who have been to dance clubs have been taking drugs before driving. Ought we therefore to have a test for people who have been to dance clubs, since it seems so many of them will be unfit to drive when they leave?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a very good point indeed. The statistics that I mentioned show the importance of the police monitoring closely those who seek to drive a car after leaving a dance club where drugs must clearly have been available.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a very good point indeed. That is one beneficial and happy side effect of the Bill. As a result of fewer people driving under the influence of drugs, there will hopefully be fewer accidents. Therefore, insurance premiums for everyone else would be much lower.
If I may, I shall continue my brief explanation of the contents of the Department for Transport consultation document, which states:
“The public rightly perceive users of these drugs”—
drugs that are controlled by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971—
“as a danger to road safety. As this paper has shown, it is difficult for the police to deal with these offenders. The nature of the effects of the drugs they take mean it is inappropriate to regulate the use of impairing illegal drugs using a prescribed limit based on the same principles as the limit for alcohol, even if it was acceptable to do so…Such an offence could be framed in such a way that a driver could be convicted of a new offence if an appropriate test showed such an illegal drug in their body. The effects of particular drugs on different individuals are complex, and, as set out below, there would be a lot of further work to do to develop this possibility, but our ultimate aim would be to treat in this way any illegal drug that is capable of impairing driving…The penalties for drivers exceeding the prescribed limit for alcohol are the same as for those convicted of the alternative offence of driving while unfit through drink or drugs. We therefore envisage that penalties for the possible new offence should be the same as for the existing offence of driving while unfit through drugs, which is a mandatory minimum disqualification of 12 months; offenders may also be fined up to £5,000 and sent to prison for up to 6 months.”
That consultation closed in February 2009, and in December 2009 the then Labour Government announced that they would seek further advice on the matter from Sir Peter North—it was his review that I referred to earlier as the North review. Although Sir Peter North provided initial advice to the then Minister, Lord Adonis, before last year’s general election, his final report was not published until 16 June last year, which of course was after the change of Government. The main recommendations of the North review relating to drug-driving were that police procedures enforcing current drug-driving laws should be improved, and that there should be early approval for saliva testing. The press notice accompanying the review stated:
“The Review also assesses Great Britain’s less well-understood drug driving problem, challenging the lack of reliable statistics, out-dated research and police emphasis on drink driving detection. In the short term, Sir Peter recommends that police procedures enforcing current drug driving laws are improved, making it more straightforward for police to identify and prosecute drug drivers by allowing nurses, as well as doctors, to authorise blood tests of suspects. Medium-term, he recommends early approval of saliva testing of drug driving suspects in police stations, which will largely overcome the environmental problems in roadside use that had previously slowed technological development of so-called ‘drugalysers’.”
On the question of a new law setting banned drug levels, Sir Peter was keen to say:
“The focus should be on public safety. Any new offence should therefore focus on establishing levels of drugs in the blood at which significant impairment – and therefore, risk to public safety – can be reasonably assumed, as is the case now for drink-driving”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way for what must be the dozenth time. Has the issue of cannabis remaining in the body for up to a month been settled in terms of this type of testing? If limits of this kind are to be set and people have not taken an illegal substance for a month, would it be reasonable to penalise them? Is the testing yet sophisticated enough?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. It is one of the difficulties arising in this area. It might well be that the body retains chemical traces of an intoxicant drug—if I may use that term, as we have now learned that it is perhaps the correct way to describe these drugs. The question would be whether that trace was having any effect on the ability of that person to drive, and that would be a matter for the court to determine. The court might well decide that a person was guilty of the offence—if it were to be an offence—of driving while having drugs in the body. Were that to be made an absolute offence, of course they would be guilty of it.
I made the point that the focus should be on public safety, and that any new offence should therefore focus on establishing levels of drugs in the blood at which significant impairment—and therefore the risk to public safety—can be reasonably assumed, as is the case now for drink-driving. Responding to concerns from patients and health care professionals that people taking medicines would be banned from driving, Sir Peter stresses that this is not his intention. Instead, he highlights that although medicines can be as impairing to driving as illegal drugs, there is an important opportunity for the relevant parties to work together to improve public awareness and the driving patient’s safety.
The power that the police have to conduct roadside drug testing was introduced under schedule 7 to the Railways and Transport Safety Act 2003. However, in the absence of any approved device, testing was of a rather more subjective nature. Guidance was issued in December 2004 on the conduct of the preliminary impairment tests. As I mentioned earlier, the police may ask drivers whom they suspect are under the influence of drugs to perform a series of physical tests, usually at the roadside, such as walking along a straight line, touching the tip of their nose with their finger, and standing on one leg. The police also examine drivers’ pupils to see if they are dilated while checking for slurred speech and poor co-ordination. If the police officer is not satisfied, the suspect is taken to a police station and a blood test is undertaken.
The problem with these tests is that they are subjective and not scientific compared with breathalyser tests. However, the police still feel that they are successful in identifying those who have been taking drugs. Moreover, the law does not make a distinction between illegal or misused drugs and over-the-counter prescription drugs taken as directed by a medical practitioner. For these reasons, there were often problems associated with prosecuting those who drove under the influence of drugs. In practice, the police have preferred to use the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, as amended, if they stop a person whom they suspect of taking drugs. Section 5(1) of the Act makes it unlawful to possess a controlled drug unless authorised by regulations under section 7. It may more often be the case that drivers thought to be unfit to drive and found with drugs in the vehicle would be prosecuted for possession of drugs and not for driving while unfit. However, problems may arise with the prosecution of a driver found in possession on the basis of a positive blood or urine sample, because once drugs have been consumed their character is altered and the person consuming the drugs is no longer considered to be in possession.
The same problem was highlighted in the submission by the Department for Transport to the North review team last June:
“The complex nature of drug pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics makes it difficult to establish values that would represent impairment in the general population. The main challenges in determining suitable cut-offs include: individual variations, drug tolerance, interactions with other drugs, and the variable effects of the same blood concentrations of drugs depending on whether the concentration is rising or falling. One review of the evidence for levels of cannabis related to impairment has suggested a cut-off for THC in whole blood of between 3.5–5 ng/ml, although a population-based study in France suggests that impairment is evident at lower levels (above 1 ng/ml). Attempts to develop comparable levels for amphetamines, however, have found greater variation in the association between blood concentrations and tests of impairment and thus recommend that per se cut-offs are inappropriate for this drug group. Tolerance issues and interactions with other drugs suggest that identifying suitable cut-off values for other drugs may also be inappropriate. Within Europe, a variety of drug driving policies has been adopted by the different countries, ranging from zero tolerance per se limits (e.g. Sweden) to proof of impairment (e.g. current UK laws), each with subtle variations. A zero tolerance approach overcomes the difficulties associated with: a) proving impairment; and b) deciding on scientifically valid cut-offs from conflicting sources of data. However, zero limit per se laws also have the potential to penalise drivers who are not impaired and pose no risk to safety. Studies of the effectiveness of Sweden’s zero tolerance laws have found them to have been unsuccessful in deterring DUID”—
driving under the influence of drugs—
“re-offenders. Further research into the correlations between blood concentrations of certain drugs and impairment may help to move toward developing suitable cut-offs (like those developed over time for alcohol). However, ‘before’ and ‘after’ studies of newly introduced laws to evaluate the performance of these various approaches in practice may be more useful.”
Perhaps I should add by way of explanation that pharmacodynamics explores what a drug does to the body, whereas pharmacokinetics explores what the body does to a drug. It is also worth bearing in mind the infinitesimally small amounts of a substance that have to be detected. The review of evidence that I have just quoted stated that some studies had found impairment at levels as low as 1 nanogram per millilitre, and a nanogram is one billionth of a gram.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I know that we are tied up heavily with the European Union, but I wonder whether my hon. Friend could translate that into ounces.
Mr Nuttall
I am sure that there is a method of doing so, but I could not do it now. However, my hon. Friend will be pleased to know that I will briefly touch on the European Union later. In all seriousness, however, 1 nanogram is one billionth of a gram, which may account for why it has taken the Home Office so long to produce a realistic specification for such a device, given the extremely small—indeed, unbelievably small—levels that it is expected to detect.
With all that in mind, it is perhaps worth considering some of the tragic cases of people losing their lives as a result of drivers taking the wheel while under the influence of drugs. It is perhaps all too easy to get bogged down in the technicalities and the dry scientific details of the drugs that we have been considering, and to forget the human tragedies that lie behind the problem. The road safety charity Brake has briefly and helpfully summarised some of those cases on its website. For example, it cites the case of a 20-year-old young woman, Katharine Davis, who was killed by a banned driver, Lee Fitzgerald. The case was reported in The Northern Echo, which stated that Fitzgerald was not only almost two times over the legal drink-driving limit, but had taken a cocktail of drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy. He then got behind the wheel of a friend’s car and gave a lift to Katharine and a work colleague. As he was being followed by the police, he crashed the car and Katharine lost her life. Fitzgerald was jailed for five years.
In another case, a young girl, Lucy Bellamy, aged only nine, was hit and killed while on a pelican crossing by one Andrew Wilkinson, who at the time was just 20. Wilkinson admitted to police that he had been smoking cannabis through a makeshift pipe. He apparently had not even tried to brake, even though he was approaching a pelican crossing. He was jailed for four and a half years. Further such cases arise all the time.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Such education starts at school, with teachers and parents explaining the dangers of drug taking and the terrible damage that it can cause to the individual and, if they get behind the wheel of a car, to others. We would do well to send that message out loud and clear this morning.
Let me turn to the very heart of the Bill: the drug-testing device. For about a decade now, the Home Office has been developing a type approval specification for a drug- screening device—known as the “drugalyser”—that will help police at the roadside to detect the presence of drugs. A Metropolitan police trial took place between January 2001 and 2002. It had some success, but was hampered by the fact that testing had to be voluntary. In their February 2007 review of road safety, the then Labour Government stated that the first devices developed to specification could be available by the end of 2007, and that the Home Office was developing a prototype device that could both screen and analyse samples, and which was likely to be ready in two to three years. In February 2008, the then Minister told the House of Commons that the Home Office scientific development branch,
“in consultation with the Department for Transport, continues to discuss possible improvements to the field impairment test currently used by the police…HOSDB continues to investigate a possible impairment measuring device through established contacts working in this area. Opportunities for partnership with a suitable university or other outside agency continue to be sought.”—[Official Report, 19 February 2008; Vol. 472, c. 582W.]
This is rather like a mirage of an oasis in the desert—the nearer we get to it, the further away it appears to be. The Times subsequently reported that the Home Office was “preparing to approve” hand-held drug-screening devices, and that
“Philips…announced that it will start deliveries to police next year”—
that is, 2009—
“of a machine that detects five different drug groups, including cocaine, heroin and cannabis, in just 90 seconds from a single saliva sample”.
However, no type approval has yet been given. There is the rub: the Home Office might have thought that it was about to approve such a device, but, as we know, that never happened.
I have seen a picture of the machine, and it is a very simple device. A person is asked to provide a sample of saliva, which is placed into a small tube that is inserted into the machine. The sample goes into the measurement chamber, which contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with ligands that bind to one of the five different drug groups. This delivers test results in one and a half minutes. Philips had apparently been busy developing that device since 2001. It was built as an optical device that would be easy to mass-produce for law enforcement purposes.
Sir Peter North’s review reported on the problems as follows:
“To date a type-approval specification for such a device has not been produced. Consequently, while a range of commercial drug screening devices is available, none is suitable for enforcement purposes in the UK.
Home Office Scientific Development Branch has been working on the development of a roadside screening device based on surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) over the last 10 years, both in house and externally. A SERS based device would be a considerable advance over existing commercially available devices in that it would be capable of identifying any drug.
Following an expert peer review in 2008, the in-house development by HOSDB of the SERS substrates required for such a device was halted and the emphasis placed on developing external technologies, including those based on SERS. Following two calls for research initiated at the start of 2009, two external research contracts were placed, with the aim of developing prototype devices within the next three years.
With regard to drug screening devices for use at the roadside, the preferred matrix for analysis is oral fluid, which is easy and convenient to collect, and any drugs detected in this medium are indicative of recent use.
Early trials of roadside drug screening devices based on oral fluid…concluded that none of the devices tested at that time was suitable for use in enforcement at the roadside. However, recent evaluations of drug screening devices have highlighted continued improvements in sensitivity and the general performance of oral fluid drug testing devices, but also that the reliable detection of cannabinoid use and benzodiazepines still remains problematic.”
Mr Deputy Speaker, you can imagine my delight when I discovered that the long tentacles of the European Union had found their way into this subject. I promised my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset that I would touch on this matter. It appears that there is a project funded by the European Commission—using some of the billions of pounds that we contribute to the EU each year—and I hope that you will not think that I am straying from the subject if I mention the word “DRUID”. It is actually an acronym for the project funded by the European Commission, and it stands for “driving under the influence of drugs, alcohol and medicines”—[Laughter.]
Jacob Rees-Mogg
That reveals another criticism of the European Union. They cannot even spell.
Mr Nuttall
It is a kind of organised acronym. We have the D and R from “driving”, and the U from “under”. Then we miss out the “the”, adopt the I from “influence”, miss out the “of”, adopt the D from “drugs” and miss out the “alcohol and medicines” bit. That is how we get to DRUID.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I almost entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), who put absolutely clearly and rightly his point that most people want this desperately serious issue to be dealt with fairly and forcefully. There is undoubtedly a scourge in the country of people taking illegal substances and then doing unwise things, which include driving cars, but, although we are talking about cars, we need also to talk about carts and horses, because with this Bill the cart is being put in front of the horse, for one very obvious and clear reason: we have the test, but we have not set the limits that apply.
We have heard learnedly from my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall) about nanograms, a term that I had not previously been particularly familiar with, but if we are dealing with nanograms of substances in people’s blood we need to say whether a nanogram is a legal or illegal nanogram when we test it, because if we have not established that, we will not know what the benchmark is; hence the cart is in front of the horse.
In that context, a great deal more work needs to be done, because, as has been widely discussed, there are varying views on what level of substance in somebody’s blood could impair their driving and, indeed, what combination of substances could impair or unimpair their driving. Earlier, we discussed the person—the youth perhaps, or the dangerous driver—who was calmed by taking cannabis. But then he might have had a cup of coffee to pep him up, so how are we going to balance those substances in one little drop of spittle, which I must say is not an ideal way for the police to go around collecting samples?
I feel rather sorry for the officer on duty at the roadside who stops somebody driving in zig-zags and not absolutely on the straight and narrow and then has to get him to spit. I feel sympathy for the enforcers of law and order, given that we cannot find a better roadside test than one based on spittle. We need to be clear, as we are with alcohol, however, about the amount that is allowed before we can make the test effective.
If I have misunderstood this point, I hope that somebody will intervene on me to explain it more clearly, but the current law states that one has to be shown to be impaired, hence the roadside tests, the standing on one leg and all that, because the police can turn up in court and say, “Mr Bloggins couldn’t stand with one leg 8 inches from the ground for more than 30 seconds while counting up to 100,” or whatever the test is. That is evidence either that he is a poor unbalanced man anyway, or that he has taken illegal substances and that conclusion might be backed up by a blood test taken at the station, showing that an offence of operating a motor car when under the influence of drugs has been committed.
First, let us be absolutely clear: we have not set the benchmarks, so the test does not test anything particularly evidential. Secondly, however, there is the point, which my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North again made so wisely and rightly, about drugs themselves and what is legal and illegal. [Interruption.] Does my hon. Friend want to intervene? He looks as if he is about to spring from his perch, coiled as he is.
Mr Nuttall
I wish merely to comment on my hon. Friend’s previous point about what the offence is. He is quite right that it is not an offence merely to have drugs in one’s body, because that is not what the 1988 Act states. It states:
“A person who, when driving or attempting to drive a mechanically propelled vehicle on a road or other public place, is unfit to drive through drink or drugs is guilty of an offence.”
The difficulty facing the court is in determining, first, whether the person was unfit to drive and, secondly, whether it was as a result of drink or, in this case, drugs.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend, in his opening remarks, put it extremely clearly that the courts should determine these matters, but I do not agree. The courts should not determine the levels. They can determine the individual case. They can say, “Yes, we accept what the police are saying, yes we accept that that person was unable to hold his leg 6½ inches off the ground for two hours”—or whatever it is—“and that therefore he was affected by drugs.” However, it would not be right for the courts to establish the broad principle that 1 nanogram of some substance was the limit, or 2 nanograms. I could keep counting up to one full gram; on another occasion, Mr Deputy Speaker, I may find it advisable to do so, but not today. This should be decided by Parliament, because that is what we are here for—to determine the principles that are then applied by the courts.
I worry when we give either too little or too much discretion to the courts, because it depends so much on the area that is covered. When it comes to the appropriate sentence, we should set the maximum, and possibly the minimum, but we do not want to set the finer details. With quantities of drugs, likewise, we want to set the minimum and the maximum for legality, but we do not want the judges to develop their own precedent that gives them a power that rightly belongs to Parliament. That is why the Government are right to consider this. I have not suddenly decided that I am in favour of bureaucratic dithering, because it is not bureaucratic dithering; it is a right understanding of the very difficult issues that exist.
I move on to the question of what is legal and what is illegal. I thought of quoting Coleridge:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree”.
That was written under the influence of what would now be an illegal substance. Coleridge had been taking opium for some time beforehand, and he wrote out his poem until interrupted by a gentleman from Porlock, which is notably in the county of Somerset. Taking opium was perfectly legal at the time. He was not committing any offence by doing so, nor are some people today who are prescribed opiates for the relief of pain. If somebody is prescribed an opiate for the relief of pain and is driving perfectly well, is it conceivably reasonable to say to them, “We’ve found a nanogram of this substance in you and therefore you’ve committed an offence and must be banned from driving for a year”? It is not the same with alcohol, because very few people absolutely need to take alcohol. That is not entirely true, as I knew a man who was prescribed gin and tonic by his doctor towards the end of his life, but that was for more complex reasons than as a curative—I think it was more of a palliative. Some people need these serious and otherwise illegal drugs for good and proper medical reasons, and therefore a blanket test could be a very unfair and unjust way with dealing with them. That is why the Government are right to consider this thoroughly and properly so that ultimately we can not only set the limits but differentiate as regards where the limits ought to be set and what we are trying to include and to exclude.
Beyond the drugs that are illegal in certain circumstances and legal in others, there are the drugs that are always legal but can, in certain quantities, create an impairment. That leads to a balance of advantages. Lots of people suffer from hay fever, for example. If someone is driving along and has a fit of the sneezes, that is quite dangerous, as they could drive into a ditch, or something worse. If they take a more old-fashioned type of antihistamine, they may find that it makes them feel a little sleepy if they have that type of reaction to antihistamines. Are we suddenly going to say that someone who takes an antihistamine cannot drive because it is better that people should have a fit of the sneezes? Would it show up in the test anyway?
The broad problem that, I am afraid, often comes up on Friday mornings is that the laws that we look to pass are about motherhood and apple pie. They are saying, for example, “The world is simple and it’s all very straightforward—we’ll have a nice test, and bingo, we’ve got the drug dealers and the drug users off the roads.” But it is not quite like that; the situation is much more complex and nuanced, regarding not only the levels but the legality and the illegality, and then some of the broader general principles.
I want to return to the piece in the Daily Mail on coffee earlier this week. I was astonished to read that anybody who has five cups of coffee a day is likely to hallucinate. I should think that I have had at least five cups of coffee every day since I was a young teenager, and I have never, to my knowledge, hallucinated; it may be that one does not notice these effects. I would be very reluctant to see the Government introduce some hand-held device to test Members of Parliament as they drive out of New Palace Yard to see whether they have too much caffeine in their system. After some of our sittings that last until 4 in the morning, quite a lot of Members have a lot of caffeine in their system, not to mention some who might have other things in their system. I would not think it right for the police officers on duty to ask us to spit at them, as I mentioned earlier, which would be most unpleasant and improper. There are real issues and difficulties in how we deal with legal and illegal drugs, and the measuring of them.
There is also the general principle. I have a certain sympathy with the US constitution, and the fifth amendment in particular, which allows people not to incriminate themselves. We have made an exception for drink-driving. The motorist, oddly, is the one person in British life who is not protected from the general principle of non-self-incrimination. The motorist who does not reply to a speeding ticket is guilty of an offence and therefore incriminates himself, and occasionally members of his family. There are obvious questions over the breathalyser, because a failure to provide a sample without good reason is an offence and one incriminates oneself by failing to give one. Already with drug-driving, as I have said, it is an offence to refuse to stand on one leg for the specified time with the other leg a specified number of inches from the ground. That ought to worry us constitutionally.
Coinage (Measurement) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Nuttall
In that case the amount from the silver coins would be more than doubled, and there are more of them as well.
Let me turn to the size. On Second Reading I mentioned my disappointment that the coins were to be minted in kilograms, and suggested that they be minted in a multiple of a troy ounce. It was said that the coins are for the international market. If the object of the enterprise is to raise as much money as possible for the Treasury, the coins might be worth even more—with more collectors for them, raising even more money for the Treasury—if they are minted as a multiple of a troy ounce, because of their rarity on the international market.
Mention has been made of the suggestion made in Committee that the coin should perhaps bear an image of my hon. Friend in an athletic pose. He has been very modest today, because he has not mentioned the fact that, as he told the Committee, on the weekend before it sat he did his combat fitness test for the Army, running 8 miles while carrying 25 kg on his back. That is no mean feat, and I am not sure that many of us in the Chamber this morning could do that.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I wonder whether the 25 kg that my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Mark Lancaster) was carrying was made up of coins.
Food Labelling Regulations (Amendment) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(13 years, 1 month ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I must intervene on that point. The best quality rain, if that is what I heard my hon. Friend say, must surely fall in Manchester, in particular that part of Greater Manchester which comprises my constituency, Bury North.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
There are occasions during a test match at Old Trafford when the rain falling can be the best possible rain, when it saves England from a notable defeat, but the rain that falls on the edge of the Mendips is the finest rain. That, as it happens, is why Joseph of Arimathea visited. He just wanted to see quite what high quality the rain was.
I was talking about the high quality of the beef in Somerset. When one looks at a piece of meat in a farm shop, like the farm shop that I used to live next door to, it has a quality that makes one look forward to one’s Sunday lunch. With some Yorkshire pudding—I know that is not meat, but it would be most upsetting to think that one’s Yorkshire pudding came from the continentals. I am sure that they have no clue how to make it. Where their eggs would come from would be not quite the thing. I know that I am going on to other food products that are not mentioned in the Bill.
I want to say a few words about one detailed concern—perhaps a pedantic concern—that I have about the Bill. That is the reference to the Union flag. Many of our most favoured nations, countries with which we have a great fellow feeling, use the Union flag as a jack. I am slightly worried that we might stop our friends in Australia and New Zealand putting their flag on because of the Union flag being used as a jack, with the stars in the fly. We want to be entirely clear—this may be a point to be discussed in Committee—that flags that incorporate the Union flag should be permissible as a representation of the country of origin when the item comes from that country.
That is a particularly welcome thing to do, because those tend to be countries that share a sovereign with us. We should have a particularly favourable attitude towards them, rather than countries such as France, which of course used to share a sovereign with us—I think of Henry VI, crowned king of France in Paris some time in the 1420s; Mr Deputy Speaker, you will know better than I the precise date—but no longer do so and have therefore lost out in the development of European history. One can only have sympathy for them in lacking such a wise and benign system of government as we have here.
Estates of Deceased Persons (Forfeiture Rule and Law of Succession) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(13 years, 3 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
I certainly wish the Bill well. I am about to express my concern at how long it has been held up in the legislative process. The report from the Justice Committee referred to that.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I am loth to disagree with the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who always makes fine points, but on this occasion may I encourage my hon. Friend to give us a full explanation so that we can thoroughly understand why the Bill is necessary? Legislation is a big and weighty matter and should be brought in only for major issues where there is real concern. We need to understand that, and I am grateful for the fullness of my hon. Friend’s explanation, which I hope will be even fuller.
Mr Nuttall
I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. The Bill would not be before the House had it not been for the original case. It raises the question how many other cases in solicitors’ offices throughout the land have been determined on the back of that Court of Appeal case without ever going to court because the solicitors would say, “We know what the law is because of the Court of Appeal ruling in that case.” Many cases may have been dealt with in that way.
It has now been 18 years since the murder, and 10 years since the judgment, which raises the question of how fast we have progressed with the matter.
Mr Nuttall
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that helpful information. If we extrapolate from that, disregarding the fact that the legal proceedings took six years from their launch to their conclusion, we can calculate that in the past 10 years around 2,000 cases have been affected by the delay in bringing the matter to fruition.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) referred to the evidence that Professor Beale gave to the Justice Committee when it prepared its sixth report, which was part of the pre-legislative scrutiny procedure for the draft Civil Law Reform Bill. Professor Beale had indicated the difficulties in implementing the Law Commission’s recommendations. With regard to limitation periods, one problem was that the delay had been so long that new cases had come along in the meantime and changed the legal position.
The Secretary of State for Justice at the time, the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), had accepted that there had been delays in implementing the Law Commission’s recommendations. He said that the draft Civil Law Reform Bill had “been in process” since he had been at the Ministry of Justice. He said:
“One of the difficulties… is that this is an important measure but there have always been other… demands on the legislative programme in the past which have meant that it has been squeezed out, because it is worthy—I actually think very important in terms of what it is doing—but it has not been seen as such a high priority.”
I am sure that those affected by that in the 2,000 cases would think that it is an extremely high priority. He continued:
“That is the honest trust about it… There has also been an extensive period of consultation.”
Well, he is certainly right there. He continued:
“The original proposals, for example, in respect of damages following fatal accidents, which were in the Law Commission proposals, have themselves been refined since then. But if you are saying: ‘Does that take 11 years?’, the answer to that is no.”
There are clearly problems with the procedures. If the case highlights anything—it is perhaps something that the House should look at—it is how the recommendations of the Law Commission are put into legislation. The Minister might have something to say on that later.
The Justice Committee did much pre-legislative scrutiny on that draft Bill and produced an excellent report on it, so it is interesting that the coalition Government have now announced that they do not intend to proceed with it. Were it not for the good fortune of the decision by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire to adopt the Bill after his name was drawn in the ballot, I wonder how long the work of the Law Commission and the subsequent legislative scrutiny of the Justice Committee would have languished in the parliamentary waiting room.
If the Bill passes into law, the position would be clarified by virtue of the inclusion of proposed new section 46A, which provides that where a person is entitled to inherit on an intestacy but has either disclaimed their right or is precluded from inheriting by the forfeiture rule, that person is to be treated as having died immediately before the intestate. Clause 2 makes a similar provision to cover cases in which a person dies having left a will and a beneficiary under that will either disclaims or is precluded from inheriting by virtue of the forfeiture rule. Clause 3 provides that in the tragic case of a single parent under the age of 18 dying intestate and leaving a child or children surviving, the estate of the intestate—
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Would my hon. Friend explain a little more about the circumstances under which a testator could leave provision that would not be affected by the Bill? I have been unable to work out how a person who is murdered could have expected and anticipated that in their will. Would he elaborate on that point?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. One of the problems is that the affairs of a person who is murdered are left hanging in mid air. If they have not made a will, their affairs might be left to the vagaries of the intestacy laws. If they have made a will and have been murdered by their son, law might provide for the estate to pass to that son anyway.
Sustainable Livestock Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(13 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Nuttall
Indeed, but I am sure north Yorkshire is up there, at the top of the league table. From the comparatively small number of farmers in my constituency, Bury North, I know that what my hon. Friend the Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith) says is true. Farmers are sick to the back teeth of the amount of rules and regulations imposed on them over the years. Many arise out of the common agricultural policy, but some come from our own legislation. It is not the way forward to impose yet more rules and regulations on farmers, and I fear that that is what the Bill will do.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill is particularly concerning because it is so broadly written, and that therefore we will not know what regulations could be introduced? It will become justiciable before the courts, and the House will lose power over the detail of regulation to the courts. That continues a trend that we have seen over recent years, to the disadvantage of the democratic procedures of the House.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a valid point, to which I shall refer later. One of the major problems with the Bill before us is that it is not clear on specifics. There is a danger that all we are doing, ultimately, is leaving the matter to be decided by the courts.
The effect of the Bill will be that the Secretary of State has no alternative but to increase the rules and regulations for the nation’s farmers. It will serve only to damage the prospects of our farming communities.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. There is a danger that the Secretary of State would be in a cleft stick in trying to deal with the obligations imposed by the Bill and the competing obligations under the rules and regulations of the common agricultural policy.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Further to that point, it would be illegal and would be struck down by the courts if we were to discriminate against European meat, so the provision would be purely to the disadvantage of our Commonwealth friends: New Zealand lamb and Australian beef would be affected and we would not be able to do anything about French lamb. That would be the worst of all possible worlds.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a good point. That is a real danger arising from the Bill. We would finish up with people having no choice but to eat only food that we could do nothing about and which was produced in the European Union. That would be bad for consumers, it would damage choice, and our good relations with countries such as New Zealand would be put at serious risk.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. My hon. Friend has more farmers in his constituency than most people in London—[Laughter.] I entirely appreciate that the traditional view of the farm with its green fields is one that most people—
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is enormously generous in giving way. Is it not true to say that the glories of England are created by God and the farmer, and not the bureaucrat?
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend raises an interesting point. The Bill requires the Secretary of State to ensure that these policies are consistent at an international level. One would think that the first place to start would be our overseas territories, and I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) would support that view and ensure that that is where we started, although whether the overseas territories would be that keen on having these burdens imposed on them is another matter.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Has my hon. Friend, with the help of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), not pointed out the total flaw in the Bill? If we amend clause 1(4) so that it refers not to the United Kingdom, but to England and Wales, we would have to object to imports of meat into England and Wales from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Surely that would be bonkers.
Mr Nuttall
I thank my hon. Friend for that point. What he says would be clearly be the case. If we had to start distinguishing in the United Kingdom between the areas from which particular livestock products had come, that would indeed be a significant problem for not only farmers, but retailers, who would probably face a whole new raft of rules and regulations that would apply only to meat produced in Scotland. Perhaps we would need to consider that issue separately.
The Bill is at best premature. I set out a list of issues that the Government are already looking at, and the Bill may even be unnecessary in the light of the work that has already been undertaken by those engaged in farming and of the commitments that the coalition Government have made. There is no doubt that the Bill will significantly increase the bureaucratic burden on the Secretary of State. If the Secretary of State is to avoid constant threats of judicial review, there will be no alternative but for him or her to impose yet more burdens on our already struggling farmers.
I acknowledge that the Bill’s promoter and supporters are all well meaning, and it is indeed a laudable aim to have livestock eating entirely home-grown food in the green fields and natural pastures of England. My fear is that the Bill and the additional rules and regulations that will inevitably result from it will drive food production overseas. UK farmers will be put at a competitive disadvantage, and the only winners will be our foreign competitors. For all those reasons, I urge the House to oppose the Bill.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I would not, of course, wish to repeat the poem, but I think it reminds us of the importance of supporting farmers. As I said in an intervention on my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North (Mr Nuttall), who made a quite brilliant speech, our countryside was made by God and the farmer; it was not made by bureaucrats in Westminster or in Whitehall. It would be sad to see in this Bill the final triumph of bureaucracy—of the view that the man in Whitehall really knows best—with a range of things covering farming and agriculture to be decided by one person in Whitehall, rather than by the multifarious decisions of farmers across the world and, in particular, in our own country.
Let us examine every detail, clause and part of this Bill to see what it really means. When we do that, we find that it divides neatly into two parts; there are two clear options for us to examine. The Bill could be re-titled “Sustainable Livestock (Motherhood and Apple Pie) Bill”, a Bill that everybody agrees with and thinks is wonderful. However, that raises a question of parliamentary procedure. Is it right for us to pass laws that do not actually do anything specific, but just talk vaguely about how nice the world could and should be, if only we all clubbed together, rallied round and jollied along?
I have great doubts about the seriousness of the Bill as a proposition. We could go back to motherhood and apple pie: I imagine that apple pie would be the responsibility of DEFRA, because it is food, and that motherhood would be covered by the Secretary of State with responsibility for welfare, but this is not how laws ought to be made. They should deal with specifics and detail and should have causes and consequences; otherwise we get the vagueness, vagary and randomness of our laws being decided in the courts. If the Bill is merely aspirational, we should not be debating it at all and the issue should come before the House not in this format but in a general debate.
Of course, I want the rainforests to flourish, of course I want farming to be sustainable and of course I want people to eat British meat. If they have any sense they will buy their meat from Somerset, which is well-known for providing the best and most glorious cuts of meat in the world. Some people like Kobe beef, but I think it rather fatty and that one can get better beef from Somerset. That is the answer to most of our food problems. I want my eggs from Somerset too. There is an egg factory, or poultry plant, near Keynsham in Burnett—a wonderful place that I have visited. It is a small family operation that is committed to the highest standards of food production, but does that mean there should be a law that my friend from Ulster, the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley), should eat only Somerset eggs? He might think that a great imposition on him and his fellow Ulstermen, and we know what Ulster says when it does not want to do something—usually, no.
We do not want this kind of legislation. We are talking about public procurement of livestock produce. Is that just an aspiration? If so, it is probably one that the Government have anyway. If clause 1(2)(a) is aspirational, it is pointless because that is already the Government’s hope and aim. Clause 1(2) would place a duty on the Secretary of State in relation to sustainable livestock and
“providing appropriate public information and food labelling”.
I do not see a connection between the sustainability of livestock and the suitability of labelling, as they are different things. We are all in favour of honest labelling. We have heard terrible scare stories about chickens being injected with water and salt, which sounds a pretty ghastly combination. I can tell hon. Members that that does not happen to Somerset chickens. Of course, such food should be labelled as chicken, salt and water rather than just as chicken, but that is a matter for the Government to deal with through other means and regulations, not through a vague responsibility for the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Clause 1(2) also addresses “sustainable livestock practices” research, but where will the money come from? We have sat in the House and listened to erudite speeches on both sides about how we should cut expenditure and raise taxes and how to afford the enormous Budget deficit that we have been left by our socialist friends. The deficit will not be magicked away, abracadabra-style, by passing more costs on to Secretaries of State. We must be responsible about what we wish for, how we go about getting it and the costs we wish to impose.
Food waste has been addressed in a wonderful discussion about pigs and what they might decide to eat. I had hoped that someone might mention the Empress of Blandings, the only pig in history to win the silver medal at the Shropshire show for three successive years. It ate a vast quantity of potatoes every day and was more than happy to eat waste food. If we are not careful, however, we will risk reintroducing problems such as foot and mouth disease, which cost the country, the taxpayer and Her Majesty’s Government billions of pounds to put right. There has to be a sensible balance when it comes to dealing with food waste.
Mr Nuttall
I can understand it being necessary to reduce food waste, but what does my hon. Friend think could possibly be meant by
“finding sustainable methods for use or disposal of…food waste”?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Sustainable methods of dealing with food waste conjures up all sorts of nasty thoughts. In the 19th century, there were people who went round collecting what was politely described as night soil. It was then taken to farms and used as a fertiliser. Night soil was replaced by guano, which is the same thing, really, but from seagulls. It made a great deal of money for one particular family, who live in North Somerset, rather than North East Somerset. My hon. Friend is right to conjure up thoughts and horrors about what might be done in the recycling of food. We do not want to go back to the days of people collecting night soil. Mr Bazalgette and the sewage system that was installed in the 19th century are more capable of dealing with some waste products than the means perhaps suggested in the Bill are.
As for
“changing the subsidies available to and support for farmers”,
I come back to my question: is the Bill a sort of parliamentary wallpaper—a wish-list of what we want—or serious business? I doubt that there is an hon. Member, an hon. Friend, a right hon. Member, a right hon. Friend or an hon. and gallant Member who does not want some reform of the common agricultural policy and a change to the subsidy system that seems to make it cheap for the French to produce food but comes down on our farmers like a ton of bricks. There is a uniform view that that should happen, but there is one grand obstacle. There is entente cordiale, as long as it is not about agriculture. As soon as it is about agriculture, we are back to Agincourt and Crécy. I will not go on about Agincourt and Crécy because, although I know that those two battles are particular favourites of yours, Mr Deputy Speaker, I feel that they are not immediately pertinent to the Bill, but the behaviour of the French in matters of agriculture is. If we think of the French, we need only think of the riots that we had the other day; French students do that day in, day out.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I appreciate that sedentary comment of outrage from my hon. Friend. That is one of the issues, if the Bill is real. It applies also to increasingly onerous tests on food labelling. We already have bonkers food labelling regulations from the European Union. For example, if one buys a Parma ham and chops it up in Westminster, one cannot then sell it as Parma ham. The EU is so protective about food labelling for its friends that there are very limited things one can do. We do not have a system that is very onerous for our farmers, and nor should it be. We need to have a sensible balance that keeps farmers in business, and does not over-regulate them and destroy their livelihood.
If we are really going to change the subsidies, we must do so fairly. I was once a candidate for the seat of The Wrekin in Shropshire, where there was a sugar processing plant. The French decided, when they held the presidency of the European Union, that they would change the subsidies for sugar beet production. They abandoned that as soon as their presidency ended, perhaps not surprisingly. People made long-term investment decisions on the basis of that subsidy. It is therefore very unfair if the Government turn around and say that the subsidy we give you today and promise will be there for ever is gone tomorrow, because businesses cannot then invest.
I am against subsidies in principle. We want get to free trade in agriculture. That is a tremendously important ambition, but we have to do it in a staged process. Like alcoholics whom one cannot necessarily wean off the bottle straight away, one cannot wean industry off subsidies overnight. Industry expects those subsidies for the investment decisions that they make, reasonably and rationally, and it is tremendously important that long-term decisions are made.
Mr Nuttall
On the question of subsidies, is my hon. Friend aware of the NFU’s view that in order to encourage arable farmers to switch production to protein crops
“they would need to be incentivised by at least £100-£200 per hectare”?
Jacob Rees-Mogg
I thank my hon. Friend for another invaluable contribution to the debate. I have indeed seen the NFU’s briefing and the expensive process that would come about if some of this was done. We cannot afford that extra £100 to £200 per hectare to subsidise farming. We need to come down on all forms of public expenditure, and Bills that propose more expenditure are rotten Bills—if they are indeed real Bills. On the second half of this point—the first half was about whether the Bill was just wallpaper—if the measure is real, we cannot afford it, and neither can the British people.
I want to stand up for the British consumer, who never seems to get a look in. We never talk about the fact that having cheap meat is great. It improves people’s standard of living. They can afford to buy food that used to be the preserve of the wealthy. The fact that more people eat meat today than ever before is good. That has come about because people are more prosperous, but also because meat is cheaper.
Clause 1(4) states:
“The Secretary of State has a duty to ensure that the steps taken in accordance with this Act do not lead to an increase in the proportion of meat consumed in the United Kingdom which is imported.”
If that is, in fact, rank protectionism, we should treat it with the deepest suspicion. The House was much divided over the corn laws, the argument for which was cheap bread. The argument against the Bill may well be cheap meat. I want the shoppers of North East Somerset to be able to get access to affordable, good-quality meat and not to have the wealthy and great telling them that they cannot afford that meat and that they must only have vegetables, or something terrible like that.
Most people do not really like vegetables, particularly people who are meat-eaters. Those of us who are meat-eaters could do with a few chips on the side, but we do not want to be forced by Opposition Members to eat our greens, whether they be cauliflower or cabbages, spinach or marrows, turnips or carrots. I particularly dislike carrots, and I remember that George Bush Senior got into terrible trouble—
Lawful Industrial Action (Minor Errors) Bill
Debate between Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Nuttall(13 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Mr Nuttall
There are various areas of the law. We have a de minimis rule, for example, which covers cases where there has been a trivial or minor breach. The judges will often overlook such a trivial or minor error if it could be construed as complying with the de minimis exclusion for understandable human error.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way so graciously and so often and for elucidating so many points in this debate. Does he agree that it is only right that trade unions be held to the highest standard of accuracy in holding these ballots, because they get a special exemption from the contract law to which their members would otherwise be subject? As they are getting an exemption under the law, should they not be required to do things absolutely properly? Perhaps the Bill should be amended to tighten the regulations rather than to loosen them.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was about to come on to the history of how we arrived at where we are today, albeit briefly as I do not want to go too far back. It is important to remember that a couple of hundred years ago it was completely illegal for workers to join together at all. We have now happily moved on, but there is perhaps a case for tightening trade union legislation, and I believe that a number of other matters could be more usefully included in the Bill. I assume that people in the trade union movement want to see it prosper, go forward and make itself ready for the 21st century.
Mr Nuttall
There is a real danger of that. One of the reasons why it would be wrong for us to pass this Bill in its current form is that it would damage the standing of the trade unions. There is a real risk that they will find it more difficult to recruit new members if they are seen to be moving back to the 1970s, and if there is such a return, there is a real risk that our economic competitiveness will be damaged. Before I deal with which groups might be affected by this measure—it is important that we examine that and consider who will be affected outside this House if the Bill is allowed to pass into law—I shall address the requirements of subsection (5). Placing the burden of proof on the employer would be a major change and such a provision was not in the previous legislation. I have heard no good reason this morning why it would be a sensible way to proceed.
Clause 2, which deals with the short title of the Bill and commencement, is relatively uncontroversial. However, it might be suggested that the period of one month before the legislation comes into force is not sufficient. Clause 2(3) contains a fairly unusual provision. It states:
“This Act applies in relation to industrial action taking place (or proposed to take place) on or after the day on which it comes into force.”
That leaves the definition of what “proposed to take place” means open to some doubt.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Does my hon. Friend agree that the clause is particularly dangerous, because it allows errors that have been made, which may or may not have been considered to be substantial before, to be reconsidered after the fact? It is most unsuitable to legislate in that way, so the clause is one of the worst in the Bill.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend is quite right. It is slipped in at the very end, in the last couple of lines of a clause that might otherwise be uncontroversial and remain unconsidered. I might have overlooked it, were it not for the fact that in parentheses, it says
“or proposed to take place”.
That changes the whole ballpark of the meaning of the clause. One could understand if action were actually taking place—that would be quite understandable, and we can see whether someone is on strike or not—but where there is a requirement to consider whether it is proposed to take place, who makes the proposal? Is it someone who has proposed action in a branch meeting? Should it be proposed at a national level? Should there have been a ballot? Should there have been notification? How far down the line does it have to have gone before it is regarded as an proposed action? What happens if one union member has proposed it to his mate? Is that regarded as a proposal for action? The whole Bill is a minefield; it is a treasure trove for lawyers and I submit that in its current form it will do nothing to help trade unions and industrial relations in this country.
Before we go further, we should consider the groups that will be affected by this Bill. Principally, four groups will be affected. The first group is the trade union members. Some members might have their views excluded because, if one assumes that the thrust of the Bill is to make it easier for mistakes to be made—that is what we are talking about; we are making it easier for people to be missed out—there will be a greater likelihood that ordinary trade union members will not have their views taken into account. They will quite rightly ask why they are being denied a say, and they are certainly a group that we should have in the forefront of our minds when we are deliberating on which way we should vote on this Bill.
The second group is the trade union members who are consulted. Regardless of whether they are consulted in support of or against any particular proposed industrial action, there is a real danger that their hard-earned moneys, which are paid over as union subscriptions and union dues, will be wasted and lost in the pockets of the lawyers and in payment of court fees while day after day is spent debating in the courts the merits and demerits of the Bill.
The third group is the employers. Where is the line to be drawn? The law already allows small accidental failures to be disregarded and it is reasonable to assume that the Bill is seeking to relax those provisions. It does prompt the question of what degree of error is now to be disregarded. I would ask the House to accept that as the current description is “small”, the proposed disregard must by definition be a level higher than “small”. The question is what degree of disregard is greater than “small”. Is it, for example, “quite small”, but not “small”? Is it “little”, but not “small”? Is it “modest”, but not “small”? Perhaps it is not “quite small”, “little” or “modest”, but in fact—I suspect that this is where the law is intended to go—quite a major failure. We are moving towards “substantial compliance” allowing for quite major failures of the law and allowing fairly major breaches of the law to be disregarded. That cannot be right.
Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)
Listening to the debate on the Bill since just after Prayers this morning has been of great interest, as have the points that have arisen and been made by hon. Members on either side. However, I ought to start with a point made by the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who said that we were in some kind of new politics. I think we should be very suspicious of that phrase, because if we look at the annals of history, as I know the House likes to do from time to time, we will see that every generation looks back at the past, and says, “That was a golden age, an age when they knew what to do and did things right and properly. And now look at the times we live in! O tempora! O mores!” as the great Cicero so famously said. He lived in the time of Julius Caesar, so people were making that complaint back in the 50s BC.
It seems to me to be wrong to expect the procedures of this House to be adjusted for some absurd new politics. As we all know from the book of Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. That is actually right. Politics is never new or old; it is always the same. People want to get what they want and use strategems and sometimes even tricks to get it. We may be shocked at the tricks, but that is the reality.
The hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington said on a point of order that the will of the House was not being shown, but I think it was. The vast majority of the House decided that, actually, the Bill was not of sufficient importance to warrant their attendance.
Mr Nuttall
My hon. Friend makes an interesting point. The Bill’s title was designed to encourage exactly that response from Members. To be fair to them, I can quite appreciate that they would look at that title and think, “There’s not much here, move along,” but in fact, when we study the detail of the Bill, we find that it is a very substantial piece of legislation indeed.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was about to say that his speech reminded me of an age of politics when things worked. His was the form of speech that this House was used to when it was at its greatest, when it was the House from which legislation came that ruled an empire and a quarter of the world.