Business of the House

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?

[The Leader of the House of Commons (Lucy Powell)]

I shall. The business for the week commencing 9 June includes:

Monday 9 June—Remaining stages of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (day one).

Tuesday 10 June—Consideration of a Lords message to the Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords], followed by remaining stages of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill (day two).

Wednesday 11 June—My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will present the spending review 2025, followed by Second Reading of the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Bill.

Thursday 12 June—General debate on the distribution of SEND funding, followed by general debate on the fifth anniversary of the covid-19 pandemic. The subjects for these debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 13 June—Private Members’ Bills.

The provisional business for the week commencing 16 June will include:

Monday 16 June—Motion relating to the House of Commons independent complaints and grievance scheme, followed by a general debate on Windrush Day 2025. The subject for that debate was determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Tuesday 17 June—Remaining stages of the Crime and Policing Bill (day one).

Wednesday 18 June—Remaining stages of the Crime and Policing Bill (day two).

Thursday 19 June—Motion to approve the draft Licensing Act 2003 (UEFA Women’s European Football Championship Licensing Hours) Order 2025, followed by a general debate on incontinence, followed by general debate on water safety education. The subjects for these debates were determined by the Backbench Business Committee.

Friday 20 June—Private Members’ Bills.

Colleagues may also wish to be aware that on Tuesday 24 June and Wednesday 25 June the House is expected to debate estimates.

[Jesse Norman]

Today has a great double significance. As the House may know, it is World Environment Day, when we celebrate the natural world and recommit ourselves as a Parliament to seek to protect it; and it is also the putative date of birth of Adam Smith, one of my great heroes, who did as much as anyone has ever done to explain the world in which we live. If I may move from the sublime to the sublimely incompetent, this week has otherwise been one disaster after another for the Government.

On Monday, we had to drag the Leader of the House to the Dispatch Box yet again, and she had to apologise—yet again—for the Government’s flagrant disregard for this House of Commons in briefing out the strategic defence review over the weekend. There is no more important issue than the defence of the realm. It is a UK-wide, long-term, all-party matter and has always been treated as such, yet the Government chose to share the document not only with their friends in the media, but with the industry, at least six hours before it came to this Chamber or to Opposition parties. It is a matter of deep embarrassment for the Government and raises serious questions about the private sharing of financially sensitive information. The Leader of the House and the Defence Secretary are both honourable people, and I have no doubt that she has made the case every week in Cabinet for doing such communications properly. It is just extraordinary that these two members of the Cabinet are being hung out to dry every week by the 12-year-olds in 10 Downing Street.

You could have granted an urgent question every single day this week, Mr Speaker, such has been the deluge of important announcements prematurely made outside this House. Today, it is free school meals. Yesterday, it was the reannouncement of Northern Rail spending. The only mitigating factor is that the Government have been so incompetent in handling their slow-motion U-turn on the winter fuel allowance that no one has noticed anything else—though we still await a statement to the House on that issue as well.

What about the strategic defence review itself? We should start by thanking the reviewers for their hard work over many months. I know everyone in this House will want to do that, but if we look at the hard substance of the review, matters become more difficult. First of all, many of the announcements largely repeat the decisions of previous Governments—for example, on submarines, on AUKUS and on warheads. Secondly, and most crucially, where is the funding? Government Ministers have tied themselves in knots over the last few days as to whether the 3% of GDP target is “an ambition”, an aim, or simply to be undertaken “when fiscal circumstances allow” or “in the next Parliament”.

Luckily, General Richard Barrons, one of the SDR reviewers, was more honest, saying that the SDR’s financial profile—the assumptions against which the reviewers were working—assumed that defence will get 2.5% of GDP in financial year 2027-28 and 3% of GDP by no later than 2034. The great irony is that, not three weeks from now, we will have the NATO summit, which will call not for 3%, but for 3.5% plus 1.5%. We are light years away from that commitment. The awful truth is that real money will not begin to flow into the armed forces until the defence industrial strategy and the defence investment plan are announced later this year, hopefully in the proper way to this House. That will be 15 months after the Government took office. It is lucky that we do not have a war in Europe.

Thirdly, where is the threat to our adversaries? No extra cash means no extra commitment, no commitment means no credibility and no credibility means no increased sense of threat to those we face. What do we know? We know that there is a war in Europe in which Russia is moving men and matériel not merely to push on in Ukraine, but to threaten the Baltic states. Ukraine had a glorious victory in the past few days, but we cannot rely on such victories, and we must support it in its struggle against Russia.

What do we know? We know that Xi Jinping has directed the People’s Liberation Army to develop the capability to invade Taiwan by 2027, and we know that NATO allies, who have a collective responsibility to each other, in some cases have a long way to go before they are even at 2% of GDP, let alone 3.5%. Instead of giving real leadership, and putting cash on the table, our own Government are talking about readying the country for war while in reality they continue to dither and delay.

[Lucy Powell]

Mr Speaker, I understand that today is Press Association parliamentary editor Richard Wheeler’s last day in the Gallery. He has covered our proceedings for 12 years, and I am sure we can all agree that that is quite a shift, with Brexit, covid, six Prime Ministers and many interventions from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), all having been covered by him.

As I have announced, on Monday 6 June we will debate a motion in my name to implement the recommendations of last year’s independent Kernaghan review of Parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme. The ICGS was set up in 2018 in response to many serious incidents of bullying, sexual harassment, unacceptable behaviour and poor culture. Through its work and its existence, strides have been made in addressing our reputation and improving working culture. However, we must continue to do better and to respond. That is why I have tabled proposals from the independent review to strengthen and improve the processes of the ICGS. I have asked its director for a fuller briefing, which, upon receipt, I will place in the Library ahead of the debate so that Members can consider these issues more fully.

I thank the shadow Leader of the House for wanting a replay of the urgent question on Monday. Following some of the questions that were put to me then, I did say that, with your permission, Mr Speaker, I would come back to the House on some of the issues that were raised. Without going through the whole thing again, I want to be clear about some of the things that did and did not happen. The Government were endeavouring to act in good faith and to follow the procedure and practice for many previous SDRs—and I have looked at all of the procedures and practices for previous SDRs.

We recognise that there is room for improvement—there always is—but I want to let the House know that advance briefings were offered to all Opposition spokespeople, the Chair of the Defence Committee and a select few from the defence community. An embargoed copy of the full SDR was provided to the Select Committee Clerk shortly after 10 am, and hard copies were provided to the Conservative and Liberal Democrat spokespeople 90 minutes before the statement. As I reiterated on Monday, the full document was laid first in the House in the afternoon. I have spoken with you, Mr Speaker, and the Defence Secretary, who I am sure the whole House will agree takes his responsibilities to this House incredibly seriously. He wants to draw up a clear process for this Government and future Governments to follow, so that the expectations of all concerned are clear.

I really will not be taking advice from the right hon. Gentleman about respecting Parliament. He was a Minister and a Member of Parliament under the previous Government, whom the Supreme Court said had acted illegally by proroguing Parliament. There could be no greater disrespect to this House than that. He also served under the former Prime Minister who was found to have misled Parliament. Again, no worse crime than that could be committed.

The right hon. Gentleman wants to talk about defence spending, but the Conservatives had 14 years in government to get to the 2.5% target. Did they get to 2.5% in any one of those 14 years? No, they did not. When was the last time this country spent 2.5% on defence? Oh yes, it was the last time Labour was in government. That is what we are doing again now, so he might want to look at his own record on that.

I see that today we have had a big move on the economy from the Conservatives—yes, a big move. They want to draw a line under Liz Truss. But where is the apology, because I did not hear one? They finally seem to recognise that crashing the economy was “a big error”, but they do not seem to understand that it is the ordinary working people of this country who are still paying the price for their actions. The Conservatives should be apologising for that, yet the right hon. Gentleman wants to go around spending more money. He does not seem to have got the memo on that.

Let us just be clear. It is really important that we are clear about why we took the decisions we did at the start of this Parliament. The right hon. Gentleman’s Government left no fiscal responsibility—something they now want to try to retain—and they left huge, gaping black holes in the public finances. Borrowing costs were at record highs and there was a cost of living crisis crushing ordinary people. When markets lose confidence, which is what they did under his Government and what they were potentially doing at the start of this Parliament, and the economy crashes, it is those on low, fixed incomes, such as pensioners and families living in poverty, who see the cost of living going up. It is they who pay the heaviest price when the economy crashes. That is why this Labour Government put economic stability first. That was our first priority, because we recognise who pays the heaviest price when that goes wrong.

I welcome the recognition from the shadow Chancellor today, but it does not seem like everybody got the memo. The right hon. Gentleman seems to want to spend even more money from the Dispatch Box, without saying where it will come from. The shadow Business Secretary, the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith), seems to want to get rid of some of the tax increases from the Budget, again without saying where the money will come from.

Now that we have stabilised the economy, we are putting our values into practice further. We are seeing huge investment in the north and in the midlands on key transport infrastructure, investment in the jobs of the future, bringing down waiting lists month after month after month, and 3 million more NHS appointments. The right hon. Gentleman did not want to mention this, but today we are announcing the biggest expansion of free school meals in years, lifting 100,000 children out of poverty. That is the difference a Labour Government make: securing the real incomes of ordinary working people, putting our public services back on their feet and lifting children out of poverty.