Iraq Inquiry

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Straw]

I am afraid that the answer to that is well above my pay grade. My hon. Friend would have to ask the inquiry, or those responsible for the inquiry, about that. But I just say, parenthetically, that when this is all over, there will be many issues for parties on both sides of the House to consider about the conduct of such inquiries, not least whether they would be aided, as I soundly believe they would be, if counsel and high-grade legal teams were available to them.

There has been much nonsense around suggesting that it has been witnesses who have caused the extensive delays in the inquiry’s progress, and therefore its final report. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden for what he said, because these claims are wholly without foundation. A moment’s thought should convince anyone that no witness has had any interest in the inquiry’s being dragged out for this long. For example, to prepare for my evidence sessions in 2010 and 2011, I had to study hundreds of records. If the Maxwellisation process had taken place at the time, the detail from those records would still have been fresh in my mind. As it is, a further four years has elapsed, requiring fresh study of reams of documents. I am conscious too, as the whole House will be, of the anxiety and concern of those who have lost loved ones in the conflict at the delays in publishing the report.

When Sir John wrote to the Prime Minister last week with an update on the progress of his inquiry, he said that he could confirm that,

“individuals are currently being given the opportunity to respond to provisional criticism in the inquiry’s draft report”.

The House should note the use of the adverb “currently”, to which the adverb “recently” might have been an informative addition. It follows from this that no witness to the inquiry has remotely been responsible for any of the delays that have occurred to date. Nor, as Mr Blair has made clear in a recent statement, has he or any other witness been involved in delaying the process of declassifying previously sensitive documents.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Is there not then a question as to any obstruction that might have come from the office of George Bush, the former President of the United States, or the current White House, which seem to be very reluctant to reveal the details of correspondence and communication between former Prime Minister Blair and former President Bush?

[Mr Straw]

I have no information about any of the process of declassification.

At the same time, my hope is that in the Maxwellisation process, which is only “currently” under way, no one is suggesting that any person who is the subject of provisional criticisms by the inquiry should not be given a proper opportunity to consider those and to respond, with sufficient time, proportionate to the volume and complexity of the material involved. It has, after all, taken the inquiry more than five years finally to produce its initial report, and as the Prime Minister has conceded, even that may not be complete.

Let me deal briefly with the claims that if the last Government had established an inquiry earlier, we would have had the report by now. There are two responses to that. The first, the obvious one, is that no one anticipated delays of the length that we have seen. The then Leader of the Opposition’s complaint, when the announcement was made in June 2009, was that the inquiry

“is due to take—surprise, surprise—until July or August 2010.”—[Official Report, 15 June 2009; Vol. 494, c. 25.]

That is after that general election. There was never the remotest suggestion from anyone, nor anticipation, that this report would not be out well before the 2015 general election.

Secondly, although they were the subject of controversy, the previous Government did have sound reasons for not establishing an inquiry earlier than we did, because British troops were heavily involved in combat operations at the time when earlier calls were made. Our rationale—

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Richard Ottaway]

I will not give way to the right hon. Gentleman because I know exactly what he has to say and I will let him give his conspiratorial twaddle to the House in his own time, rather than mine. [Interruption.] I am sure he will let the House know shortly.

In the inquest conducted by Lord Hutton, he concluded that Dr Kelly took his own life. Although the case for war may have been exaggerated, he concluded that it was not “sexed up” in the sense that it contained false or unreliable intelligence. But the evidence that came out during that hearing was that the weapons of mass destruction that we had invaded Iraq to remove were, in fact, small-calibre shells and battlefield weapons—in other words, they were defensive weapons, not offensive weapons that would threaten the security of the western world.

When the report was published and we had the debate in the House on the Hutton inquiry, I intervened on Tony Blair and asked him if he knew that information on the day that we voted to go to war, and if not, why he had not told the House that. He replied that he did not know. So the question is, how could we be going to war when the Prime Minister of the day, who made the decision to go to war, was not properly briefed about the threat that we faced? I, the House and the nation want to know the answer to that. We expect that the Chilcot inquiry will provide the answers.

That the threat was only battlefield weapons was confirmed by the third inquiry, which was conducted by the Intelligence and Security Committee in 2003. It made no judgment on the rights or wrongs of the case for war, but it looked at the use of intelligence and it accepted that there had been convincing intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction programmes. That has subsequently been established to be manifestly wrong, so why was that information there? Again, we want the Chilcot inquiry and the Iraq inquiry to provide the answer.

The Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry led to the fourth inquiry—the Butler inquiry of 2004, which was a continuation of the ISC inquiry. Two members of the Intelligence and Security Committee sat on the Butler inquiry, together with Lord Butler, the chairman, who is now a member of the ISC, and Field Marshal Inge, who gave military advice to the committee. The final member was Sir John Chilcot. This was by far the most in-depth inquiry and looked at the many issues that had surfaced. It concluded that the 45-minute claim should not have been made in the way that it was. But—and it is an absolutely critical but—the inquiry still had not had full access to all the information, and questions remained. Those questions continue to reverberate. Eventually the Chilcot inquiry was established, and Chilcot had the great advantage that he was at least briefed when he started.

I feel that I have only scraped the surface of the high number of unanswered questions. I appreciate the enormity of the task faced by the Iraq inquiry. It has had to deal with former President Bush’s office, the security services, the Cabinet Office, Tony Blair’s office and the offices of the witnesses. It has had to cope with hundreds of hours of oral evidence and thousands of pages of written evidence. There has been personal illness on the committee. The committee has my sympathy, but six years? The prediction at the time, as has just been said, was that it would take two years. The Franks inquiry took six months and the issue in 2009, as has been said, was whether the Iraq inquiry’s report would be ready by the 2010 election. My only regret is that when it is published, I will not be here to debate fully the issues that have been raised.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Gentleman and I have been involved in all the debates on Iraq. Does he recall that a number of us, maybe including himself, felt that the whole inquiry process was wrong, and that there should have been a judicial inquiry that could have been seen to be totally independent of what has been revealed by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), which is, essentially, that pretty well everybody is involved in some way along the line in the decision making or the prevention of evidence coming forward?

[Sir Richard Ottaway]

The hon. Gentleman is right—we have been debating these things for a long time. He neatly leads me into the final part of my speech, which is the appearance of Sir John Chilcot before the Foreign Affairs Committee next Wednesday, when, I hope, we can establish answers to such questions. I want to give him a chance to put the record straight.

Sir John Chilcot is a distinguished public servant who has done his best to assist the country. There is no finger of blame pointed at him, or there will not be next Wednesday afternoon, and I quite accept that he will not be able to discuss substantive matters when he appears before us. What I want him to talk about is the process, and I want him to guide us on how to streamline procedures for the future, and maybe to provide the answers to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn).

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

It is always a great pleasure to follow the right hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), but it is also a challenge, because I believe that he has one of the finest analytical minds in this place.

Twelve years ago, the UK went into what I believe to have been an unlawful war against Iraq. That happened against the background of the protestations of thousands of members of the public and dozens of Members of Parliament, and on the basis of legal advice that Parliament was not allowed to see.

The impact of the war can be measured in bodies. Between March 2003 and May 2011, when UK operations ended, 179 UK armed forces personnel lost their lives in Iraq. Of those, 136 died in combat. As was mentioned by the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), whom I congratulate on leading the call for this debate, the Iraq Body Count project estimates that between 134,000 and 151,000 civilians have been killed as a result of violence in Iraq since March 2003. The number of violent deaths, including combatants, stands at 206,000 and is still growing. The website reports that only yesterday, 26 people were killed in Iraq. That is because Iraq was not left in anything like a stable condition when the UK and US armed forces pulled out in 2011.

In March 2005, I visited Iraq and travelled to Basra and Baghdad. It was plain to see then, as it is now, that little preparation had been put into planning for peace after the war ended. It is a distressing place to visit. We found open sewers, a lack of any infrastructure and badly underfunded social services, if any. The thinking in Washington, after all, was that it would take only weeks to get rid of Saddam. A former White House adviser, Kenneth Adelman, said that

“demolishing Hussein’s military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk.”

Instead, Iraq is a troubled, crippled state. How wrong the establishment was.

Six years ago, the inquiry was set up with the express aim of finding out why such a colossal mistake as this war was allowed to be made. At the launch of the inquiry, its chairman, Sir John Chilcot, said that the inquiry would be

“considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish…what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.”

The scale of the inquiry was significant. Those of us who had opposed the war from the beginning had some hope that at last we would hear answers to the questions that we had posed since 2002.

How disappointing it is for me to stand here today, four years since the inquiry concluded taking evidence, with the knowledge that those answers are no closer to being published. Indeed, if the reports are to be believed, the conclusions are yet to be written. Those criticised by the report have, of course, been given the right of reply by means of the Maxwellisation principle, which we have just discussed.

After all is said and done, the Chilcot inquiry finished taking evidence in early 2011—I believe that the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) was the last to give evidence—and the expectation was that the findings would be published in the autumn of that year. Prevarication followed each delay and in November 2013 the inquiry said that it had reached an impasse over the release of crucial documents, including transcripts of the conversations between Mr Blair and Mr Bush. In May 2014, the inquiry announced that those transcripts would have to be published in a redacted form. Now, in January 2015, we learn that the findings of the inquiry will not be published until after the election, with no guarantee of when they will be published. It is becoming a farce—a very expensive farce—and an affront to democracy.

I have had grave misgivings from the very beginning about the independence of the Chilcot inquiry. I believe that it may well have been flawed and even compromised from the beginning. I have a particular interest in the transcripts of the conversations between our former Prime Minister and the then American President.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Gentleman points to what I suspect will be a grave disappointment when the Chilcot report finally comes out. Would he then favour a totally independent judicial inquiry, so that we get to the bottom of this? I, for one, will not leave this subject, and I am sure that he will not either.

[Mr Llwyd]

The hon. Gentleman is right. He and I agree, as I believe does the right hon. Member for Blackburn, that it should have been a judge-led inquiry. It might have had two lay assessors, but it definitely should have had a counsel to the inquiry, who would have directed the line of questioning forensically and would not have been batted away by the simple answers that were given, often in artistic and heroic terms, by some individuals, the right hon. Member for Blackburn excepted.

The inquiry did not go into any real depth. Being a Privy Counsellor does not make one a forensic analyst. I am a Privy Counsellor and I happen to be a lawyer, so I am able to ask the odd question, but the fact that someone is a Privy Counsellor does not take them any further on from Joe Public on the Clapham omnibus. It was quite ridiculous. Those are some of my misgivings.

As I said, I have a particular interest in the transcripts of conversations between the former Prime Minister and the former American President. In 2008, confidential documents were dispatched to my office from an unknown source. The documents showed that discussions had been held between the leaders of the two countries in 2001 and 2002 relating to removing Saddam using military force. Mr Blair had committed us to war even then, before seeing any proof of weapons of mass destruction.

My colleague, Adam Price, and I were visited by two very senior Metropolitan police officers—I believe they were from SO13—and questioned about the documents. The fact that they visited us made me believe that the documents were genuine. They were marked “Top Secret”. I believe that one was an American transcript and the other a British transcript. To this day, I have no knowledge of where they came from. I thought that the proper course of action was to say to the police, “I do know where the documents are, but I am not going to make them public until we have an inquiry. When that inquiry is set up, I shall take them to the inquiry personally so that it can look at them.”

I therefore decided to hand the documents over to the Chilcot inquiry when it was set up. I have doubts that they ever saw the light of day, but I do not know what has happened. After submitting the documents, nine months went by before I received any response. When one came, it simply informed me that I would not be called to give evidence. That is fine, but I have since found out that the way in which the gatekeeper to the inquiry, Ms Margaret Aldred—the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway) referred to her a few moments ago—was appointed as the inquiry’s secretary did not follow the procedures in the civil service code. The Cabinet Office refuses to disclose any paper trail relating to that appointment, if indeed there is one. Ms Aldred was appointed on the nod by Sir John Chilcot —the same Sir John Chilcot, by the way, who criticised Tony Blair’s Government as a “sofa Government”. A good example of sofa government is when someone rings their pal to say, “Come and be a secretary to my inquiry.”

Margaret Aldred’s appointment showed a glaring conflict of interest, since she had regularly chaired the Iraq senior officials group, which co-ordinated across Government. Ms Aldred met US officials in October 2008 to discuss Iraq, and she even flew to Washington for discussions with her counterparts in the three weeks before the inquiry was announced. It was Ms Aldred’s section of the Cabinet Office that drew up the plans for regime change, and it was the Cabinet Office—the Joint Intelligence Committee and its staff—that produced the so-called dodgy Iraq dossier.

What I would like to know is the following. Why has the inquiry stopped publishing documents on its website? It did so for the first year, then it stopped. What is the total number of individuals who have been granted a right to reply to the accusations against them, when were they contacted by the inquiry, and what time scale have they been given to respond? Why has the inquiry been allowed to be so cowed by the establishment?

I am afraid that those and many other questions have not yet been answered. I sincerely hope that they are in the near future, because otherwise it will be an affront to democracy, an insult to Parliament and, more importantly, a gross offence to people who have lost loved ones out in Iraq and to the people of Iraq themselves. Democracy demands that something is done urgently, otherwise this Parliament will be the laughing stock of the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was worried for a moment that you were going to come up with the dreaded four-minute warning, so I am obliged to you.

It is a pleasure to be able to speak in this debate, but it is a pretty big indictment of our Parliament that there are hardly any Members here to take part in what ought to be an incredibly serious discussion, and a process of very serious self-criticism of the failure of Parliament both in 2003 and since to hold to account those who took crucial decisions on our behalf, the consequences of which all of us will live with for the rest of our lives, and the population of this country, and indeed of western Europe and the USA, are going to live with for many, many decades and generations to come. What happened in 2003 was a seminal disaster.

I respect the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) for his knowledge, his interest and his commitment, but I profoundly disagree with his analysis. It is essentially that we were good imperialists, then we became weak imperialists, and now we have got to be better imperialists. I have two messages. The first is that we cannot afford it. The second is that the lesson from the disaster of Auschwitz in the 70th anniversary of its liberation should surely be to say never again—never let racism raise its ugly head, be it against Jews, Muslims or anybody else—and also that we must learn a fundamental lesson: that the crazy triumphalism of the treaty of Versailles and that whole period in the 1920s led to the growth of the Nazis and to the disasters. The whole middle east region is still living with the disasters of Versailles—of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the borders we inherited.

[Rory Stewart]

The danger of the hon. Gentleman’s anti-imperialist rhetoric is that we are not going to come to terms with how to prevent genocides in the future. What is he proposing in terms of reform, energy, compassion and confidence to deal with an Auschwitz-Birkenau, a Bosnia or a Rwanda in the future, if all he has to say is that we are a small country that cannot afford to do anything in the world?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I propose a process of international law, a process of human rights engagement, a process of truth and honesty, and a process whereby we do not denigrate whole peoples and turn the other way when human rights abuses take place.

On a lesser example, but nevertheless an important one, we are apparently more interested in selling weapons to Saudi Arabia than we are in human rights in Saudi Arabia. That example can be multiplied in country after country across the world. If we were serious about human rights, we would not provide the Government of Bahrain with equipment to kill and injure demonstrators who oppose what they do. There has to be some honesty in the whole of our foreign policy, and if this debate does anything to make us start to think more seriously about foreign policy, rather than racing headlong into spending £100 million on Trident, developing more weapons and yet more weapons for our armoury, that will be something.

We have had inquiry after inquiry on Iraq. Parliament showed itself to be a failure and could not do it, and then there was the Butler inquiry and a Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry. We ended up with the Chilcot inquiry.

In 2006 I voted for an Opposition motion, despite the endeavours of the Labour Whips Office. I was not that bothered with its endeavours at that time—or on one or two other occasions for that matter—because I thought setting up an inquiry was the right thing to do. However, I do not think it is the job of Parliament to pass its duties on to somebody else and then complain vaguely when they do not report while saying that we are not going to interfere with the inquiry. This really is our failure. There should have been a serious inquiry, judicial-led in my opinion, with counsel that could have asked some really good questions of Tony Blair, the right hon. friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) and a whole lot of other people. Michael Mansfield QC would have been a very good interrogator, and I think that after a few days of interrogation by him we would have gained far more truth than we did from these showman-like trips by Tony Blair to the inquiry and his lucrative tours around the world to say he would do the same again. He clearly has not learned the lessons from this.

I remember those debates very well. I am chair of the Stop the War coalition, and I have been involved in every demonstration I can think of against this war. Indeed, I spoke to that million-strong audience in Hyde park on 15 February 2003. There was something amazing about that day. I was there with many others in this House on that huge platform looking out on Hyde park, with 1 million people and hundreds of thousands more who could not even get into the park. That was after we had been told by the Cabinet Office that Hyde park was not available and we should hold the meeting in Battersea park. I resisted the temptation to go into Battersea park on a Saturday afternoon, however, and we persisted with Hyde park. I saw people there who politically profoundly disagree with me, and people who had never been at a public meeting or demonstration in their lives, but who were moved to oppose the war because of the obvious lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and why we had to go to war. Everyone there learned a lesson that day. The cynicism that we meet on the doorstep as we approach the next election is in part due to the contempt shown by Parliament on that day.

I shall not go on much longer, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I just want to say this. The idea that Members were not aware of the misinformation concerning Iraq really does not cut much ice. We had the dodgy dossier. I remember arriving in Parliament at 8 am to read that heroic document; I was the first to arrive at the downstairs Table Office. I knocked on the door at 1 minute to 8 and the people there would not open it, but the moment the door opened at 8 o’clock I put my hand in and grabbed two copies. I gave one to Glen Rangwala, an excellent academic from Cambridge, and I kept the other for myself. He went off to read his, and I went to my office to read mine. When we spoke on the phone 20 minutes later, we said, “This thing is utter nonsense. Who could possibly believe this stuff?” But the House did, and some members of the Security Council did, although France, Russia, China and a lot of other countries did not.

I also remember the extraordinary pressure that MPs were put under to vote in that debate. A number of us who could reasonably be described as Iraq sceptics met Tony Blair in a room at the back of the Chamber. After we had been around the track several times, with him not wishing to engage in the discussion and others wishing to do so, he started looking at his watch and saying, “We’ve got to go now.” I said, “Tony, just one question: why are we doing this?” He slapped his hand on the table and said, “It’s the right thing to do. That’s why we’re doing it.” When I said, “That’s not an answer”, he said, “That’s the only one you’re going to get.” That was the enthralling answer that we got from him.

The lesson surely must be that when the Foreign Affairs Committee interviews Sir John Chilcot next week, they must ask him how he is getting on with obtaining records of the barbecue discussion between Blair and Bush and the correspondence that took place, along with the handwritten notes that civil servants and the Foreign Office maybe did not know about. Perhaps a lot of people did not know about them, because I understand that it was part of Tony Blair’s charm and style to do things differently from anyone else so that people did not know what was going on. I also hope that the Committee will get from him an exact date for the publication of the report, but I think I shall be disappointed when it is published. I suspect that it will be full of redactions and that we will have to read a million words before we discover which bits have been redacted. This issue is not going to go away. We need to get to the truth, and we need a war powers Act to ensure that every MP is involved in decisions to send British troops abroad to war.

To follow up on something that the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border said, I agree that we need a serious debate on foreign policy and on our place in the world. Other countries that once had massive empires have learned these lessons. I recall being in Vienna in December when the Austrian Government proudly said, “Our Government have no nuclear weapons, want no nuclear weapons and will never have any nuclear weapons. We want to be a force for peace in the world.” That was once the centre of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Most of the other European countries that were once the centre of empires have learned lessons. Maybe the disaster of Iraq and the growth of al-Qaeda, ISIS and all those other forces that have been let loose by the disaster of the Iraq war will provide a lesson that we will have to learn the hard way, but if we do not learn it, we will suffer by having to repeat it again and again. I do not want to go to war memorials. I do not want to go to memorial services. I want us to be a real influence for peace, for justice and for human rights around the world. We do not achieve that by lying to Parliament. We do not achieve that by invading countries that do not have the weapons it was claimed they had.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

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

I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) spoke before me and came up with some very practical suggestions about how things could be done. I am particularly pleased because those suggestions really underline the fact that we allowed the Government of the day to set up this inquiry in a haphazard and casual way.

I speak as someone who straddles two aspects of this matter. I was shadow Defence Secretary at the time and often spoke from the Dispatch Box in the run-up to the Iraq war. I am also taking part in this debate, in answer to the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), as someone who feels a deep responsibility for what has happened as a consequence of that war. It may surprise the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) that I agree with a phrase of his speech. It is that we need to understand the “set of conditions” that allowed us “to pursue this particular course of action”. It would have been nice if that had been put into the terms of reference, to which I will come in a moment.

The origins of the Chilcot inquiry go back beyond 2006, to which my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) adverted. I also congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) on securing this debate, because it has proved already to be a very informative and interesting discussion.

Just to go back to the origins of the inquiry, I have in my hand the resolution that was tabled by the then Leader of the Opposition, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith). Another five of us were named on the motion, including me and a future leader of the Conservative party, now Lord Howard of Lympne. The motion said:

“This House is concerned at the growing public confusion since the summer adjournment as a result of increasingly conflicting accounts of intelligence relating to and events leading up to the recent Iraq war and what has happened since; and calls for the setting up of a comprehensive independent judicial inquiry into the Government’s handling of the run-up to the war, of the war itself, and of its aftermath, and into the legal advice which it received.”

How long was it before we actually got an inquiry, and a rather watered down inquiry at that? Let me explain why we called for the inquiry at that point—and this is a significant point. I came back from Iraq shortly after the invasion, having been on a shadow ministerial visit to Basra and had a comprehensive briefing. I then tabled a paper to the shadow Cabinet on what I had found that had caused me a great deal of concern. The paper on post conflict Iraq mentioned

“the widening gap between expectations and reality.”

It said:

“Many are wondering how much longer before the coalition’s window of opportunity closes.”

I went on to explain that what we needed was a proper comprehensive plan, a road map and benchmarks in order to structure a proper coalition provisional Administration, backed by the necessary civilian and military resources. In the addendum to the paper, I wrote, “Quagmire?” and for that I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bradford West (George Galloway)—and it may disturb him that I am doing so. Of all the speeches that we heard on that fateful day when we voted to go to war, his was the most disturbing. I chose the word “quagmire” because I remembered him saying that we were entering into a quagmire.

We had done our best to satisfy ourselves from the Opposition perspective that there was plenty of planning. It is true that there was plenty of planning in Washington, but the problem was that the Americans had more than one plan. They had a Rumsfeld plan and a State Department plan and there was a competition between the two of them over which should be implemented. But neither plan was based on any proper understanding, depth of assessment or analysis of what we were going to find when we got in there, which is why it became evident so quickly that we were facing a disaster. I wrote:

“Currently all the elements for protracted insurgency warfare exist, though there is every opportunity to prevent the situation deteriorating.”

There was an inability to get anyone to hear this message in Government and, I confess, even some in my own party—this was the Government’s problem, not our problem. It is the same kind of truth blindness to which my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham (Mr Holloway) referred in the British political establishment, in the civil service, among the political leaders.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Who does the hon. Gentleman think took the extraordinary decision to destroy the whole of the state structures in Iraq after the invasion, dismiss all the armed forces and the police and leave chaos behind?

[Mr Jenkin]

Yes, it was Ambassador Bremer. In my paper, I wrote:

“The Bremer administration has 3,000 US officials, only 16 of which are Arab speakers. 650,000 Iraqi Government officials have failed to return to work.”

There was a complete misappreciation in the first 100 days —the golden 100 days after the invasion—that we were sitting on a volcano. I remember asking questions from the Opposition Benches such as, “What are we going to do about the Iranian insurgents coming over the border?” The border between Iraq and Iran was completely open. There was flat denial that any of this mattered or was actually happening.

What this inquiry cannot do is resolve the controversies about legality or intelligence, which have been raked over so many times. So many other inquiries have looked at those things. What this inquiry must do is address the machinery of government problem, the capacity problem—the understanding problem to which my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), the Chairman of the Defence Committee so capably referred.

The Select Committee on Public Administration produced—this is the other side of the equation in this debate—no fewer than three reports in the last Parliament about how to conduct inquiries. We produced a report at the beginning of this Parliament entitled “Who does UK National Strategy?” The informal answer that I received from the then Chief of the Defence Staff, which we put in our report, was nobody. Nobody holds a strategic concept for the United Kingdom. No one creates a single document and keeps it updated on how we are to conduct our statecraft in this increasingly troubled world in which we are increasingly vulnerable.

I say to the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) that we found that the Foreign Office had an aversion to any kind of strategy. Culturally, it does not like the idea of being tied to a plan, misunderstanding that a plan is different from strategy. We need to learn. How does the machinery of government allow us to go to war without a better understanding of the consequences? Those consequences have led to a complete loss of confidence in this Chamber in the ability of Whitehall to make those judgments, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gravesham said.

What sort of reform do we want to be able to drive—as my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border asked? Why does this disconnect exist between what people in Whitehall think is going on or think that they are able to control and what the people on the ground find out is actually going on and are unable to control?

When I came back from Basra on that occasion, I remember reporting to the shadow Cabinet that I had asked the General Officer Commanding in Basra what message he wanted me to take back home. He said in slightly less proper language, “Where the hell is DFID? What is the plan? What are we meant to do now?” There was no plan. I do not apologise for complaining about the lack of a plan in the aftermath because it reflects exactly what the General was saying. There is a lack of seriousness, a lack of trusting people who come with challenging information and uncomfortable truths.

We need more capacity in Whitehall to learn and understand, to gather real knowledge and information—capacity for analysis and assessment, which paradoxically we do quite well in the intelligence field through the Joint Intelligence Committee, unless it is sat on by political appointees. We need the ability to choose realistic objectives for our foreign and security policy; to formulate comprehensive plans and then be able to implement them.

As we wait for the inquiry to conclude and to report its findings, we must reflect on the process that we feel has failed us. The first lesson is that it is too late—much too late. It started too late, and it is taking far too long. Why did we not set a time limit? Leveson was set a time limit; why did we not set one for the Iraq inquiry? I have struggled to find definitive terms of reference for the inquiry. In fact, the terms of reference are drawn from a long and rambling statement made from that Dispatch Box by the then Prime Minister, who boasted about how broad and comprehensive and utterly large it was going to be. One wonders whether the words “long grass” were lurking at the back of his mind—the longer the better.

This House failed. This House failed to create an accountable inquiry process. We let it happen. We were all so desperate for an inquiry, so desperate to get it started, that we lost our perspective. If this was a judicial inquiry, as we originally called for, the issues of conflict of interests of people involved on the fringes of the inquiry would not be allowed to arise. There would not be any question about people being able to give their evidence in public, immune from prosecution, which the Chilcot inquiry has been unable to do. We could have ensured the inquiry’s independence. Speakers in this debate have asked why there are no politicians, lawyers or military figures on the inquiry. All those questions were asked when the inquiry was set up, and we are all now ruing the fact that those suggestions were not adopted.

I will recommend that my Committee follows up this inquiry in the next Parliament, covering such questions as how inquiries are established, why, what for, how they operate, judicial or parliamentary, lessons from the terms of reference, how the timing is organised when they are set up and how long they are allowed to sit. I fear this inquiry will turn out to be a shadow of what we really need and we will not learn the lessons. We did not learn the lessons before we went to Afghanistan, before we went to Libya, before we threatened Syria, and these are lessons that we must learn.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Civil Society (Mr Rob Wilson)]

I congratulate the right hon. and hon. Members who secured this debate on the Iraq inquiry. I thank all colleagues who have contributed to a very thoughtful and, at times, stirring debate. At times, with passions running high, it felt as though we were back debating the decision to go to war in the first place, all those years ago.

I am sure that I speak for all in the House in saying that when this inquiry was started in July 2009, none of us thought it would still not be completed by January 2015. It is frustrating and very disappointing that we still do not know when it will be published. It is clear that once it is published, the Government will need to look very carefully at what lessons could be learned for future inquiries. I am sure that everyone here will agree that the inquiry is unprecedented in its scope and scale. I agree with my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve) that Sir John Chilcot is trying to leave no stone unturned. Never before has a UK public inquiry examined in such depth and detail a decision to go to war and its consequences over a nine-year period.

At the risk of junking the rest of my speech, I will try to deal with as many of the points that right hon. and hon. Members have raised as possible. May I first pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), who made an excellent speech? He raised important questions about potential conflicts of interests, particularly regarding the Cabinet Secretary. The Cabinet Secretary was identified as a final arbiter in discussions about the declassification of documents because he is the most senior civil servant, is bound by the civil service code on impartiality and, crucially, can see the papers of a previous Administration. I am not aware of any opposition to his appointment to that role at the time.

I understand my right hon. Friend’s concerns about the process, but I have seen no evidence to date of Sir John Chilcot being prevented from going wherever his inquiry wished. The inquiry panel has had access to every paper, memo, e-mail or minute of a meeting—classified or otherwise—that it wished to see. As my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) rightly said, there is a difference between what is declassified and what is published.

The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) raised the involvement of the secretary to the Iraq inquiry in the foreign and defence policy secretariat. The appointment was agreed by Sir John in the full knowledge of that involvement, and he saw no conflict of interest, but the Foreign Affairs Committee may want to take that up and ask further questions.

The hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) and others asked about the involvement of the US. The US Government have not at any stage made any attempt to delay the publication of the report. They have not sought to block the disclosure of evidence, including the exchanges between the Prime Minister and the President of the USA, despite the fact that those exchanges are a privileged channel of communication. Because that decision was a very difficult one for the Cabinet Secretary, he consulted a number of parties, including US officials.

The hon. Gentleman asked about the declassification process. As Sir John has confirmed, the process of declassifying the most difficult and sensitive documents has been completed. In respect of other documents, Departments continue to meet every request made.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

If the British side is not blocking any correspondence or communications records between Blair and Bush, are the US or Bush blocking them? We need to be assured that all of that will come out if the inquiry is to have any credibility.

[Mr Wilson]

As I have said, there has been no attempt by the US to block any element of the inquiry. There have been discussions about the scope of what in the communications should be released. The gist of some conversations will be published, although they were previously confidential.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield asked why the Maxwellisation process has been held up. In a letter to the Prime Minister on 4 November 2013, Sir John Chilcot explained that the delay in Maxwellisation was due to the fact that the inquiry and the Government had not reached an agreement on the disclosure of the material that the inquiry wished to include in its report. Sir John acknowledged that disclosure of the material raised difficult issues, which had taken time to resolve but had been worked through in good faith by both the Government and the inquiry. The inquiry did not want to issue its provisional criticisms without a clear understanding of what supporting evidence would be agreed for publication. I think that the further delays in progress might be raised in the Foreign Affairs Committee on 4 February.

The hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), who is no longer in his place, asked why we could not subpoena the evidence. The inquiry has identified the evidence it needs to reach its conclusions. The publication of that evidence without the context provided by the final report would lead to the issues being only partially understood.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker), who is not in his place, asked about Maxwellisation and Salmon letters. Salmon letters are sent before a witness gives evidence, while Maxwellisation happens before an inquiry publishes its report.

The hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) asked about additional resources for the inquiry. That offer has always been on the table, not only from the Deputy Prime Minister but from the Government. The inquiry has, on occasion, asked for additional assistance and the Government have always provided it. I am not sure that Maxwellisation, which only recently started, as Sir John Chilcot has confirmed, could be speeded up by additional resources.

As many have recognised, it is a question of fairness that those who are provisionally subject to criticism are given the opportunity to make representations, and that the inquiry considers those representations properly. That process will take some time. It does not mean that the report will be watered down, as I understand the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale suggested recently. It will be up to Sir John and his colleagues to decide whether they accept the representations that are made.

The hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) asked why the report should not be published before the general election. The inquiry is completely independent of Government, and the timetable and processes for completing its work are matters for the inquiry. I can imagine the outcry there would be if the Government interfered in an independent process, and rightly so. If she listened to my highly respected colleague my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, she would have heard that there is still a real possibility that this will be a very good report indeed.

European Council

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can certainly give my right hon. Friend that guarantee. In my view, the eurozone will do more things together. That is precisely why we need the treaty change, to give Britain a better place in a European Union where some members will be integrating faster. As for the €300 billion package proposed by Jean-Claude Juncker, it is not very clear at the moment how much of that is public, how much is private, how much is new, and how much will be generated by new money into the European Investment Bank. We will seek further answers on that in December.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Around the table in Brussels, did any Minister bring up in a humanitarian way the crisis of hundreds of people dying in the Mediterranean as refugees from war, famine and environmental disaster? European policies as a whole and western policies in part have contributed to this disaster. Was there any discussion of it?

[The Prime Minister]

We did not have a discussion at this Council on the migration pressures in the European Union, but we have done so before when I have made the point that some of the action taken in the Mediterranean has almost encouraged people to get on to completely unsafe craft and head off to sea. We need to ensure that we tackle all those problems, but our aid budget does a huge amount to try to help people stay in their countries—dealing with the sources of conflict and poverty—rather than leave and seek a new life in Europe.

Recall of MPs Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I thank my Friend for giving way on that point. I support the amendment we will vote on later. Clearly, what he says about expanding democracy and participation is true—it is welcome and good. Does he agree that there is a very large elephant parked outside the Chamber, namely the House of Lords, which is not subject to any kind of electoral accountability, and yet has a huge influence on legislation and can decide the future of Bills and laws in this country? Surely we need the right to recall or remove Members of the House of Lords.

[John McDonnell]

We will draft amendments for the next stage of the Bill. I had not even thought of amending it to that extent, but my hon. Friend makes an important point. We could make it a constitutional reform Bill.

Recall of MPs Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Stuart]

The argument against the amendments of my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park is that powerful interests would come along and act. It always strikes me that the vulnerability of British politics to money is tremendous; yet I suggest that the cases in which it is abused are remarkably few and far between, notwithstanding the righteous efforts of the hon. Gentleman to highlight those he comes across. I simply ask him why we should not give this a chance for a Parliament. If the public in a local area was of the opinion that there had been an abuse, people would be able to divine who was behind such an attempt and see through what was behind it, even if the person named as bringing it forward was a front person. Time will tell: we perhaps need to give it a chance to find out whether that is true or not.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I support the principles behind the Bill. The hon. Gentleman must be aware that over the years there have been systematic intense media campaigns against Members of the House—Tam Dalyell, Tony Benn and others—as can be seen just from reading the newspaper headlines of the time. It is quite conceivable that a media campaign with a huge amount of money behind it could succeed in getting rid of a Member of Parliament who was taking unpopular decisions. That is big money: it might not be big money paid to individuals, but it is big money influencing public opinion.

[Mr Stuart]

Ultimately, however, it would not be the press barons but our electorates who decided. If the hon. Gentleman is saying that our electorates are easily moulded by the tabloid press, I point out that the public would decide, not the press barons. That goes back to the earlier point that this is about trusting the public to exercise their judgment and come to the right conclusion.

Iraq: Coalition Against ISIL

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Friday 26th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

This is the third time during my lifetime in Parliament that I have been asked to vote to invade or bomb Iraq. I have voted against on previous occasions, and I will not support the motion today. I ask the House to think a little more deeply about what we have done in the past and what the effects have been. We have still not even had the results of the Chilcot inquiry.

The current crisis descends from the war on terror, the ramifications of which have been vast military expenditure by western countries and the growth of jihadist forces in many parts of the world. Many people have lost their lives, and many more have had their lives totally disrupted and are fleeing warzones to try to gain a place of safety. Only two weeks ago, it was reported that 500 migrants had died trying to cross the Mediterranean to get into Malta, and many die every day trying to get to Lampedusa. Many of those people are victims of wars throughout the region for which we in this House have voted, be it the bombing of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, the intervention in Mali or the earlier intervention in Afghanistan.

We need to give a moment’s thought to where the problems come from. The growth of the Taliban came from 1979, when the west decided to support the opposition in Afghanistan. The Taliban morphed into al-Qaeda, which then morphed into various other forces in Africa, particularly in Nigeria, and of course into the current group, ISIL. That is an absolutely appalling group of people—there is no question whatever about that. Their behaviour, with the beheading and abuse of people, is quite appalling.

[Chris Williamson (Derby North) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend comment on the argument that the air strikes have so far prevented the expansion of ISIL forces? Would more air strikes go further in preventing ISIL from taking more ground?

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The air strikes have had some effect, but I do not believe that further air strikes and the deepening of our involvement will solve the problem. I will come to that in a moment, if I may.

We are right to talk about ISIL’s appalling human rights record, but we should be careful with whom we walk. The Prime Minister pointed out that there had been a ministerial visit to Saudi Arabia to get it on side in the current conflict. We sell an awful lot of arms to Saudi Arabia, and there is an awful lot of Saudi money in London in property speculation and various other investments. Saudi Arabia routinely beheads people in public every Friday, executing them for sex outside marriage, religious conversion and a whole lot of other things, but we have very little to say about human rights abuses there because of the economic link with Saudi Arabia. If we are to go to war on the basis of abuses of human rights, we should have some degree of consistency in our approach.

One should be cautious of the idea that bombing will be cost-free and effective. There was a military attack in Tikrit on 1 September, as reported by Human Rights Watch. It was an attempt to strike at a supposed ISIL base of some sort in a school. It resulted in 31 people being killed, none of whom was involved in ISIL, which was nowhere near. We will get more of that.

I believe that the motion that we are being asked to support will lead us into one war after another. There has to be a political solution and political development in the region. I have had a lot of e-mails on the subject, including one this morning from a lady aged 91 that said, “War begets violence, which begets the next war.” We need to take a different stance.

NATO Summit

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 8th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

The west went into Afghanistan 13 years ago, Iraq 11 years ago, and now a massive NATO summit agrees to spend yet more money on defence around the world. What consideration was given to why there has been such an increase in terrorism since those two wars, and to why ISIL has grown as such a big force? Should the NATO summit, and indeed all leaders, be looking at the causes of war, and at the perception of the role of the west in seeking commercial and mineral advantage around the world, rather than bequeathing us yet more military expenditure?

[The Prime Minister]

Let me try to find a little common ground with the hon. Gentleman. As well as believing in the importance of defence expenditure and keeping our defences strong, I also believe that international aid and development is an important tool not just for helping people out of poverty, but in demonstrating the compassion and generosity of the west in helping people who are less fortunate than we are. Where I think the hon. Gentleman is wrong is that we have to understand that a fundamental cause of the extremism and terrorism that we saw with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and that we see with ISIL in Syria and Iraq, is the poisonous ideology of Islamist extremism. We see people joining it who have not suffered poverty or deprivation, but they have bought into that perverted world view. Irrespective of what we might think of them, they are very clear that they want to kill us.

EU Council, Security and Middle East

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

It is worth listening to my hon. Friend. I am grateful for the travel he undertook to the Kurdish regional authority, and for the work he is doing to build our relationship with President Barzani. It is hugely helpful. I listened carefully to the other point he has made.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

Will the Prime Minister explain why the British Government did not support the call made by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights for an investigation of war crimes in Gaza, and why Britain and the other European nations abstained on that vote? Of course, the inquiry is going ahead. In the meantime, the Prime Minister has continued an armed relationship with Israel, despite 2,000 people dying in Gaza. Does he not think it is time to suspend arms deals with Israel because of the appalling loss of civilian life in Gaza, the continued occupation of the west bank, and the continued theft of Palestinian land by the Israeli occupying forces?

[The Prime Minister]

It is right that these claims and points are properly investigated. The reason for not voting for the specific motion was that it was unbalanced, and that was the view that many other countries took. With regard to arms exports, the Government have reviewed all existing export licences to Israel. The vast majority were not for items that could in any way be used by Israeli forces in operations in Gaza. Twelve licences were identified for components that could be part of equipment used by the Israeli defence force in Gaza, and no new licences for military equipment were issued for use by the Israeli defence force during that review period. That is the approach that we have taken, which has been sensible and balanced.

Ukraine (Flight MH17) and Gaza

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 21st July 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

The answer on the black boxes is that we have seen the reports that they have been taken away by separatists and we have not seen anything to contradict that. They certainly have not yet been seen by air accidents investigation branch members from the United Kingdom. As for what else my hon. Friend says, I agree with him: a tough, predictable and clear response is required.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

What representations has the Prime Minister ever made to the Government of Israel concerning its illegal settlements, its occupation of the west bank and the siege of Gaza, which has gone on for a long time and has led to 70% unemployment? Does he not think that the current crisis and the carnage in Gaza is caused essentially by the failure of Israel ever to recognise the rights, needs or justice of the Palestinian people, and does he not think it is time Britain did something about it, such as by doing that?

[The Prime Minister]

To answer the hon. Gentleman’s question specifically, I have repeatedly made references—including in speeches and television appearances, including in Israel—to illegal settlements and illegal occupation. I remember, on my first visit to Israel, in East Jerusalem referring to it as occupied East Jerusalem, and I was quite surprised when one of the Foreign Office officials said it is very refreshing to have someone who is as clear about that, because the then Government were not always clear about it when they were asked the question.

G7

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Wednesday 11th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

That was an ingenious way of levering in a question on an aircraft carrier into a statement on the G7. The best thing is that the first aircraft carrier is soon to be launched—that will be a very exciting moment for the United Kingdom including, indeed, for Scotland—and, obviously, we can take into consideration how to handle the second carrier closer to the time.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

The Prime Minister must be concerned about the continuing remilitarisation of central Europe both by Russia and by NATO. Does he not think that we should pause for a moment and question the role of NATO and its continuous expansion eastwards, and start to put limits on what NATO does and what its ambitions are, as a way of de-escalating this crisis and demilitarising that region to avoid future conflict?

[The Prime Minister]

I cannot see any sort of point in trying to draw some moral equivalence between Russia’s totally unacceptable action with respect to Ukraine and the fact that NATO, as a defensive legal alliance, has sent extra forces to the Baltic states or indeed Poland to demonstrate our belief in collective defence. If we do what the hon. Gentleman has just said in his question, we would actually let Russia off the hook for everything that it wanted to do anywhere, and that is a terrible basis on which to conduct foreign and security policy.

Cost of Living: Energy and Housing

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davey]

I am afraid that the hon. Lady is completely wrong. Higher rate taxpayers did not get the allowance increase. This is one of the fairest tax cuts, because it is focused on the low-paid and people on moderate incomes. I must say that she does not understand how the tax system works.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Davey]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but then I will have to make some progress.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

As the Secretary of State is talking about living standards, is he proud of the fact that many people living in the private rented sector in central London and other big cities are being socially cleansed out of their homes by a combination of high rents and benefit caps? Does he not think that that is a disgrace, that those communities are being damaged and that those children’s life chances are also being damaged? Should he not do something about it?

[Mr Davey]

The hon. Gentleman has been a champion in the debate on housing in London for many years. I do not think that he can point to any halcyon days over the past 30 years. The cost of housing was the biggest issue when I became an MP in 1997, and for many of my constituents it remains the biggest issue. There have been changes, but many of the housing benefit changes that we have made have actually hit the landlords, not the tenants. I think that he ought to welcome that.

I am very proud of our record of helping people on low incomes, and not only the personal tax allowance increases, but the rest of our help with the cost of living—fuel duty freezes, council tax freezes, free school meals and help with child care. The coalition has listened and is helping. Of course, all those measures take time to feed through. Everyone knows that in some parts of the country people are yet to feel the turnaround, and that was always inevitable. Many people are only now beginning to experience the end of the post-recession squeeze.

I think that what is worrying the Labour party is that in 10 months’ time many more people will be feeling the benefits of the recovery and Labour’s latest economic argument on the cost of living will look ever hollower. Of course, last summer the Opposition already began to switch their economic argument again. It was not the general cost of living or general inflation that they were talking about, or the full basket of goods that people buy; it was a few specific ones. That is why we have today’s debate on energy and housing costs. They are very important issues, and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government will, I am sure, take on the housing costs debate. I am sure that he will cover not only our record of low mortgage rates, but our record and our plans to build more houses to reduce housing costs.

However, I want to deal with energy costs, because, unlike the previous Government, we have acted on energy bills. We have taken on the energy companies, unlike the Leader of the Opposition when he was doing my job, when he could have acted but did not. It is interesting to look at the record on energy bills. In almost every year under Labour, energy bills rose: in 2005 they went up by 12%; in 2006 they went up by 20%; and in 2008 they went up by 16%. In the previous Parliament, under Labour, energy bills rose by a whopping 63%, and Labour did nothing. Yet they lecture us. Of course, bills have also risen in this Parliament, but by 8% a year, compared with 11% a year in the previous Parliament.

Labour did act to reform the energy markets; they managed the great feat of reducing the number of energy market firms and creating the big six. In other words, they made it worse and created another mess for us to clear up. This coalition is really reforming the energy market and taking on the energy companies. From day one, we began reforming the market to create real competition, with new competitors. Twelve new independent suppliers have entered the market since 2010, and independents are topping the best-buy tables, increasing their market share from less than 1% to 5% and rising, giving people a real chance not only to freeze their bills, but to cut them.

Just look at what has been done to help people with their energy bills: Ofgem’s reforms are making bills simpler and forcing firms to put consumers on the cheapest tariffs; switching rates are increasing, with switching speeds getting faster; and Government action is taking £50 off the average energy bill. Where the Opposition wanted to legislate for a freeze, with all the impact such regulatory intervention would have on investor confidence, the coalition has worked to ensure that the Government and competition are delivering something better than a freeze. Scottish and Southern Energy, British Gas, npower, Scottish Power and EDF have all announced that they will not increase energy prices this year unless network costs go up or wholesale energy costs rise, and of course they are not.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Caroline Spelman (Meriden) (Con)]

It will certainly be in my interest to keep my speech relatively short. I rise to speak in support of the Gracious Speech and, in particular, of the historic significance of the Modern Slavery Bill. I realise that it has only a tenuous connection to the themes we are debating today, but I want to talk about the housing of trafficked victims and I hope that the Ministers present will take that into account.

It is no coincidence that my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) also chose to focus on this subject today. The Modern Slavery Bill is the proposal in the Queen’s Speech with the greatest historic significance. Who would have thought that we would need to pass further legislation to tackle slavery more than a century after all the efforts of William Wilberforce and his supporters? The brutal truth, however, is that the estimated number of slaves worldwide now stands at 21 million and that the slave trade generates £150 billion of illegal profits annually. That is three times more than was previously estimated. Those figures come from the International Labour Organisation. In this country, the trouble is that the slavery is largely hidden. It was no surprise that the Centre for Social Justice entitled its report on the subject “It Happens Here”, because it does. I hope that the publication of the Bill will raise awareness.

I could not speak on this subject without paying tribute to someone who has really raised awareness of modern-day slavery: the former Member of this House, Anthony Steen. In 2006, he began his work of shining a searchlight on this iniquitous trade in human beings. He has worked for the Human Trafficking Foundation and now plays a pivotal role in raising public awareness. The foundation includes among its trustees the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who was asked by the Home Secretary to chair the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee. He did so with remarkable skill, garnering support from both sides of the House.

The Home Secretary is to be commended for tackling this wicked issue head-on. It is also significant that the whole House came together during the pre-legislative scrutiny stage in recognising that we need to tackle the matter on a cross-party basis. My right hon. Friend has clearly been motivated by the shortcomings in the existing law. A good Queen’s Speech should contain legislation that brings together, rationalises and simplifies existing laws that are dotted around in other Acts. This Bill will do that.

I was surrounded by erudite lawyers during the pre-legislative scrutiny stage, and I was struck by the fact that the prosecution rate was so poor because of misunderstandings surrounding the definition of slavery. Indeed, those misunderstandings extend as far as the European directive that covers the problem, which highlights trafficking. Those prosecutions often fail because victims of trafficking stand up in court and swear on oath that they came here of their own free will. Indeed, they are sometimes paid to come here, only to find themselves subject to servitude. When we try to prosecute on the ground of trafficking, the case therefore often fails because the witness says that they moved here of their own accord. In a funny sort of way, if the European directive had been drafted in English first, we would have spotted that problem: trafficking is not actually the overarching term that needs to be used. We need to refer to “exploitation”, of which trafficking is an aggravation. This Bill is an opportunity to get that balance right, and we are indebted to such people as Lady Butler-Sloss, who applied her razor-sharp mind to that pre-legislative scrutiny Committee and helped all of us to understand where these kinds of problems lie.

The Bill will break new ground because it will pay attention to the need for victim care and support. If it had neglected that aspect of this problem of modern-day slavery, I would be a good deal less enthusiastic about the Bill than I am. But I was delighted to hear that need to improve victim care and support spelled out in the Queen’s Speech. I do not underestimate the political challenges of protecting those who admit to breaking the law under coercion, but we will never stamp out this iniquitous trade in human beings until we get enough victims to testify. That is why I was encouraged to hear that a serious crime Bill will strengthen powers to seize the proceeds of crime as part of this Queen’s Speech. I firmly believe that some of those proceeds need to come back to the victims, which would help them to come forward to give evidence against the real criminals, who are the ones we need to catch. The care of victims of slavery in our country is nothing short of a scandal. I am sure there will not be a Member in this House who has not sat in a surgery hearing from someone—often someone young—who has been brought to this country under false pretences and still remains stateless within our society.

We also face real problems in trying to distinguish between those victims and the genuine criminals. I have heard evidence from victims who, just hours before being deported, were saved only by the swift intervention of lawyers, often working on a pro bono basis and some funded by the POPPY project, at detention centres. That happens all too often because of the inherent conflict of interest whereby UK Visas and Immigration, formerly the UK Border Agency, which is primarily responsible for getting immigration down, is the agency overseeing the decision about who stays and who goes. In some cases those almost deported faced a dangerous future, returning to families complicit in their trafficking in the first place. Anyone alleging slavery is invited to use the national referral mechanism, which contains questions designed to elucidate their real status. If they get through that, they are given just 45 days’ protection. That is my point about housing: what are these victims of trafficking expected to do about accommodation, after just 45 days of protection, while their whole situation remains uncertain? That is a cross-departmental consideration, so I hope the Ministers here today could give it some thought.

America is ahead of us, with statutory victim care and support. It has a designated independent anti-slavery ambassador, with a full-time complement of 80 staff, reporting directly to the President. The plan in this country is for a commissioner to be appointed by the Home Secretary, but an anti-slavery commissioner must be able to crack the whip round Whitehall, precisely because of the example I have just given about the lack of suitable housing for trafficked victims. We will not be the first country in Europe to have a commissioner; countries that have developed the role include Finland and the Netherlands. Of course I understand that the commissioner needs to have the sponsorship of one Department in order to secure adequate resources from the Treasury, but the commissioner must remain sufficiently independent to put a rocket up the prosecution service, as a Home Office Minister put it.

Children who are victims of slavery are a particularly important concern to us. The Government have recognised that with pilots for children’s advocates. A young person does need someone to fight their corner with authorities and stay on their case. A particularly worrying aspect of child slavery in this country is the fact that sadly children are often send to the UK to serve family members as slaves, even for sex. One victim told us that even when she was allowed to go to church on Sundays, she was forbidden to speak to other people. That shows how we need to open our minds and our eyes to the hidden slaves around us. We should try asking the chamber maid, the cleaner and those we fear might be under duress and offer a friendly hand of help where we can.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

The right hon. Lady is making an excellent speech. She must be aware of the problem of children living in informal foster care with distant relatives in this country, which means that nothing is done to regularise their immigration status and they are threatened with removal at age 18, having been completely unaware that they had no status whatsoever. The Home Office needs a different approach to the matter.

[Mrs Spelman]

The hon. Gentleman raises an important anomaly, and it certainly ought to be debated in relation to the Bill.

I have two more points to make. The first is about the Gangmasters Licensing Authority’s transition from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs—it was under my wing when I was Secretary of State— to the Home Office. The Gangmasters Licensing Authority does an excellent job in the sectors of the economy that it currently covers—agriculture, fisheries and horticulture—but sadly, slavery is rife in many other sectors, such as catering, cleaning and hospitality. I urge all Government Departments to make use of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority model to tackle slavery in the economic sectors for which they have responsibility.

Finally, I believe that the Bill must contain a clause on supply chains. That would make the legislation world-class. Businesses in general need to reappraise the risk of slavery in their own supply chains. That has already been achieved in America, where the Transparency in Supply Chains Act has been passed in California. Any European company that wants to do business in California must be compliant. The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Michael Connarty) introduced a private Member’s Bill on the subject, which I am sure he would wish me to remind the House of. We need a clause in the Bill that tackles the problem. Until businesses are made to report on due diligence, ruling out slavery the length of their supply chains, they will continue to be at significant reputational risk and, sadly, the victims will continue to suffer.

The UK has the potential to provide global leadership on this important issue. Frankly, with our heritage and the Wilberforce spirit behind us, we ought to be able to do that, and this Queen’s Speech opens the way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I am pleased to be able to speak in this debate, which takes place in the atmosphere generated by the negative attitudes of the UK Independence party and others in the recent local and European elections. I urge people to be very cautious about starting to dance to the tune of xenophobes and closet racists or, indeed, open racists in their attitude towards society as a whole.

I compliment in particular the speeches of the right hon. Members for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) and for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Sir John Randall) for highlighting the human consequences of what happens to people who migrate from one place to another. We should be aware of the fact that in every story there is a human story and in every tragedy there is a human tragedy. We should not suddenly shut the doors against anyone who is fleeing from violence, oppression or destitution, which is, indeed, what many people are doing.

Of course, the situation has consequences for our society, but people from this country have also sought to migrate to many other parts of the world in order to make a better life for themselves. This is the way of the modern world. If we start saying that nobody can come here, other countries might start saying that none of us can go there. These things go full circle, and we should be more cautious in our attitude to issues of migration and society.

I want to make two germane points and I will try to adhere to the 10 minutes suggested by Mr Speaker. First, the Queen’s Speech stated:

“The Bill will enhance the United Kingdom’s energy independence and security by opening up access to shale and geothermal sites and maximising North Sea resources.”

I urge a degree of caution before we rush down the road of fracking all over the country, particularly the north-west, which will have environmental consequences. Many different organisations hold briefing sessions in this House—it is a form of lobbying and there is nothing wrong with that—and I was astonished at the large attendance at yesterday evening’s Friends of the Earth briefing on fracking and its consequences. A very interesting speaker from Australia, where there has been much fracking with apparently limited controls, explained what has happened there. She pointed out that a vast amount of water is used for fracking and that it causes pollution when it is pumped up to ground level. Storage ponds are needed to allow the water to settle and the process has longer-term environmental consequences.

Indeed, the first line of fracking has caused earth tremors in Lancashire, and there has also been a significant number of earth tremors in the United States as a result of fracking. Although it is presented as a cheap form of energy—any cheap form of energy sounds attractive when we first hear of it, and there is all kind of talk about Klondike and the new gold rush—there are two problems. One is the congestion caused by extra traffic and the noise and other pollution caused by the process itself, and the other is the clean-up phase afterwards. Are we not building in potentially huge costs to the public sector in having to clean up all the environmental pollution that will result from the process?

Surely we should be thinking even more strongly than we have up to now about energy sustainability and security, by which I mean not necessarily producing vast amounts more, but using a lot less through better conservation, better insulation and more efficient forms of transport, as well as, increasingly, the use of renewable energy. It is populist to attack wind farms, but they make a significant contribution to our electricity supply and will continue to do so. They do not, of course, create the pollution problems of fracking or any other fossil energy. There will be a huge debate about fracking and I would be very cautious about going down that road, because of the pollution problems it causes.

The other issue I want to address is housing. I represent an inner-city constituency and am very proud to do so. We face massive housing problems. We have an image problem, in that everyone thinks that Islington is an extremely well-off, wealthy and great place to live. It is, indeed, a great place to live, but the housing market is totally out of control. A first-time buyer seeking to buy in my borough would need to be on a very substantial income indeed, so no MP need think about buying as a first-time buyer in Islington.

We also have a large social rented sector—it is mainly council-run, but there are some housing associations—which makes up about 40% of the market. Thirty per cent. of the population in my borough live in the private rented sector. They pay very high rents and have very good security as a result. Those in the private rented sector who are in receipt of housing benefit or any other kind of benefit now find that the Government’s benefit cap affects them in a very damaging way. They are unable to pay the rent from their housing benefit, and they cannot make up the gap between their housing benefit and the rent level from any other benefits or, indeed, their wages—their low wages; many people receiving housing benefit are already in work. The council does not have enough houses to put them in, so they are forced to move away from the borough to a private rented flat somewhere else in London or, in the case of other London boroughs, outside London. That means that families have to up sticks and move, caring and child care support arrangements disappear, and children travel very long distances to remain in local schools to try to maintain a link with the community in the desperate hope that there will one day be a council flat available for them to come back to. Not just in my borough but all over London significant numbers of very young children make very long journeys every morning to keep a place in a primary school.

Is all this avoidable? Yes, I believe it is. I welcome the moves that the Labour party and its Front Benchers have made on changing our attitudes to the private rented sector, the regulation of letting agents, environmental conditions, longevity of tenancies and the ending of the ludicrous charging and deposit scheme that many agencies promote. I suggest that at some point, however, we will have to face the fact that we cannot go on controlling benefit levels but not rent levels, and therefore forcing people who rely on benefits for all or part of their income to move away from the areas where they have traditionally lived and been a very important part of the community.

In introducing a ten-minute rule Bill last Session, I pointed out that London was significantly different from the rest of the country in this respect. Rents are significantly higher and there is a significantly greater churn of people in London than in most other parts of the country. I do not see why we should not involve local government in the solution. After all, local government is the primary housing authority. Why can we not have some form of rent registration and regulation—London-wide—that takes account of the needs and costs of producing and providing housing in London so that we do not lose out on the private rented sector altogether, but can keep our mix of communities?

I would not normally go along with much of what the London chamber of commerce and industry says, but it points out in a briefing note sent to Members for today’s debate that of their members in London

“59% of firms are experiencing a greater pressure to increase wages as a result of higher housing costs…42% of firms believe that higher housing costs are having a detrimental impact on their ability to recruit and retain staff”

and

“33% of firms believe that their employees’ punctuality and/or productivity is being affected by longer commutes as a result of not being able to afford to live in the capital.”

All that is absolutely true. Unless we ensure that there is a sufficient supply of housing for a whole range of people in London or any other big city, we will end up destroying our communities and increasing the pressure on longer and longer commuter rail lines, bus routes and roads, while not actually solving the problem. I hope that we will be able to make some progress on that.

My last point on housing is that my local authority, like others, assertively uses its planning powers to try to ensure planning gain from any private sector development that takes place, as is absolutely right and proper. Hitherto, it has been able to ensure that any new housing development of more than 10 units must include a proportion of affordable housing, including a proportion of social housing. Many developers try to get around that, so the council has levied a surcharge to try to ensure that there is sufficient money for local housing development. Islington has done very well. It has one of the largest council house building programmes in the country, which, ultimately, is the only solution to the housing crisis.

However, the Government came along and changed the regulation on office conversions so that these no longer require planning permission. A developer who buys an office block can therefore convert it into private sector housing without any social housing requirement whatsoever, and no local authority or planning authority has any say in whether the conversion should take place. I can understand the point that some local authorities might oppose the conversion of office blocks into housing to retain jobs, and I think that local authorities should have the right to do that and that local people should have the right to have a say. However, when a large number of office blocks are converted into housing, with the developer making no contribution whatsoever to resolving the local housing crisis, it is time for regulation and for the local authority to have a say in the matter.

For example, Archway tower, near Archway underground station, which was originally built by London Transport in 1967, has been used for a succession of offices, mostly in the public sector, but is now empty. It has been bought by a company called Essential Living, which is converting it into 120 flats for tenants earning somewhere above £80,000 a year, which is far more than anyone earns who works in the area. No contribution whatsoever is being made to the social housing needs of my borough. That is happening all across London; indeed, it will soon happen in cities across the country.

We therefore need regulation, local government input and more council housing, but above all we urgently need tough regulation of the private rented sector so that very many people do not go through the insecurity and indignity of being forced to move out of their community simply because landlords can put up rents to whatever level they like and that they think the market can bear. Surely we must understand that housing is a necessary right for everyone, and that all children deserve to be brought up in a decent, clean and dry household and to attend a local school without the insecurity of moving every six months.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Pickles]

We have been very clear that we want an increase in the minimum wage and want to do things to prosecute employers who do not pay it. We want to see people on the ladder. We do not take the Labour view: “You know your place and you’ll never get any better.” We believe that once people get on the employment ladder they will get a better job, move on and get promoted, and then reach a point when they want to put something back into society. There is nothing wrong with the dignity of labour.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank the Secretary of State for giving way. Going back to planning regulation, will he reconsider the question of the lack of planning requirement for the transfer of office accommodation into housing? When a transfer takes place there is no social housing obligation. Does he not realise that it is quite an important issue in areas such as mine?

[Mr Pickles]

It is exactly the same as it is for housing in the rest of the country. We found that placing those numbers created an unnecessary burden nationally. We are happy for local people to come to an agreement on the mix and some minor adjustments have certainly helped, but building 50% of nothing is still nothing.

I can announce today that we will introduce new measures to allow London home owners to rent out their homes on a short-term basis to visitors. Londoners currently have to apply for planning permission from their council, with extra red tape, confusion and cost. Ending that outdated rule from the 1970s will allow Londoners the same freedom that home owners across the rest of the country enjoy. It will not mean that homes will be turned into hotels or hostels, but it will allow hard-working families to earn extra cash when they themselves go away. In our fifth parliamentary year, this Queen’s Speech builds on the foundations we have laid.

The hon. Member for Ynys Môn (Albert Owen), who is not in his place, expressed concern about new homes in Wales. I understand why, because the number of new homes in Labour-run Wales has fallen. House builders have shifted their business across the border to England, because the Welsh Government are so anti-business. The devolved Administration in Wales have hit the housing market with a mountain of red tape and have failed to support home ownership. Some builders have estimated that it costs up to £13,000 more to build a house in Wales than in England. It is a matter of public policy and the regulations hurt business and jobs.

Members do not need to take my word for that, because the Federation of Master Builders has stated that the Welsh Government’s waste plan is “counter-productive” and is

“going to drive the industry further into the doldrums”.

The Home Builders Federation has warned that the cost and regulation of building seem to be increasing:

“For example, proposed change to Part L of building regulations on energy and carbon efficiency could potentially add nearly £20,000 to the build cost of each new home in Wales.”

That is not satisfactory.

Labour Front Benchers will forgive me for saying that two Labour Back Benchers made immensely interesting speeches. The hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart) spoke powerfully about Birmingham and Joseph Chamberlain. I cannot help believing that he would have laughed his socks off at her contribution and the idea that he would stand around and wait for the Government to grant some powers. He took the powers and I think that frightened this Chamber enormously and led to a lot of the regulations that pushed down on local government. I think that the general power of competence and the city deals are the future, and local government should grab that opportunity.

In the remaining minutes, I just want to say that the speech of the hon. Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts) really reflected the massive importance of housing in any social change. The changes we are attempting to make to get more private money into the private rented sector are about trying to build more resilience. Whether the hon. Gentleman sits on the Opposition or Government Benches, the truth is that there will be no public money for a massive house-building programme. We can only do that by making it attractive for private money to come into the private rented sector. That was our concern about the proposals made by the hon. Gentleman a few weeks ago. My point is that they gave uncertainty in suggesting that they might be a harbinger of Venezuelan rent controls.

I commend the Queen’s Speech to the House.