Covid-19

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch, Llefarydd. At the start of the pandemic, there were concerns that visitors were gathering in crowds at beauty spots like yr Wyddfa—Snowdon. This happened again last weekend. Local lockdowns in Wales now require people to remain within their local authority area, except for essential reasons, but no such requirements exist in England. In those unfortunate situations where people face local lockdowns, will the Prime Minister give clear guidance against out-of-area travel for leisure purposes?

[The Prime Minister]

For local lockdowns, the guidance is given by the local authorities, following the decision in Covid-O about exactly what restrictions are to be put in place. Clearly the restriction the right hon. Lady suggests is part of the mix.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion & Programme motion: House of Commons
Monday 14th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ian Blackford]

I am grateful for the question. We will be voting against this Bill this evening but we will not be supporting the reasoned amendment, because of some of the other conditions attached to it, not least that there should be a single market Act that does not enshrine the rights of the devolved nations to be able to protect their own interests—that is the fundamental difference we have this evening. I ask the House to oppose the Bill and vote it down on Second Reading.

The provisions of this legislation recklessly and deliberately risk a bad deal or, increasingly, the economic devastation of a no deal. You cannot claim to support business while pursuing a bad Brexit. You cannot claim to support business by burdening it with yet more economic uncertainty, in the face of a global pandemic, one where we know the challenges we face. Yet, in the midst of this, the Prime Minister brings this Bill. The Government cannot claim to support the Scottish economy by taking more economic powers away from Scotland’s democratically elected Parliament.

I will turn now to some of the contents of the Bill, and specifically the numerous aspects that will undermine the powers and authority of Scotland’s Parliament. Clauses 2 to 9 contain sweeping powers that could act to compel Scotland to accept lower standards set elsewhere in the UK. That means standards on animal welfare, food safety and environmental protection to name but a few. We all know the risk and the threat that that will bring, especially for Scotland’s farmers and consumers. This law is a Tory invitation for chlorinated chicken and hormone-injected beef in our supermarkets. [Interruption.] We can hear the guffawing from the Conservative Benches, but yesterday morning on “Politics Scotland” a Treasury Minister more or less admitted that they could not stop chlorinated chicken coming into the United Kingdom. [Interruption.] Go and check the tapes; it is there.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I am sure that the right hon. Gentleman shares my dismay that the non-discrimination clause would mean that popular policies already made by the Welsh Government and our Senedd to do with the smoking ban, the ban on plastic bags, and organ donation could have been called in and not been valid under this legislation.

[Ian Blackford]

The right hon. Member makes a very good point. There are policies that we are very proud of introducing in Scotland, such as minimum alcohol pricing, which was so critical in dealing with misuse of alcohol in Scotland, but there is no guarantee that we would be able to bring in such initiatives in the future. We would have to go cap in hand to Westminster for authority. The days of us being “too wee, too poor, too stupid” are well and truly over.

--- Later in debate ---

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr, Mr Dirprwy Lefarydd. It is difficult to know where to start with the Bill, so numerous are the egregious assumptions, the pitfalls and the Trojan horses lurking within it, so I will be brief and specific.

For Wales, the Bill is damaging without precedent, emerging fully fledged as the single biggest sustained assault yet to threaten devolution and our powers. It scorns two referenda and seeks to overturn the reiterated will of the Welsh people, not only weakening the powers of the Senedd, but explicitly reserving new powers to this place.

This Bill would render Wales powerless to stop low-quality produce, such as chlorinated chicken, flooding our supermarkets and undercutting Welsh farmers by being cheaper. This Bill would permit a 21st-century Tryweryn by giving Westminster more spending powers directly over water infrastructure. It would invalidate “buy local” policies in Wales by making it illegal to place goods from another part of the UK at a disadvantage compared with local goods in Wales.

The Conservative party would hold the whip hand over our Senedd’s attempts to protect our NHS against privatisation through damaging trade deals. The Bill holds up the spectre of no trade deal with the UK due to the Prime Minister breaking international law, which would wreak havoc on businesses already suffering the effects of covid-19. It could force Wales to accept abuses of animal welfare and food production, with the Senedd powerless to block such produce from entering our markets if they were to be tolerated in other parts of the UK, and who is even speaking for the future of the port of Holyhead?

Whatever some Conservative Members like to say, devolution is no experiment; it lives and breathes in Wales. Our democracy has been growing in the last two decades and more, in confidence and in power, and our wings will not be clipped. Plaid Cymru will stand up for our powers and our Senedd every step of the way, and we will not be supporting this Bill.

Covid-19 Update

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

There is hardly any area of the country that I do not intend to visit in the course of the reopening of pubs and hostelries. There is a massive opportunity now for our pubs, with all their inventiveness, to think of ways of making their businesses covid-secure, exploiting hitherto unloved and unvalued outdoor spaces that may become havens for tables and chairs and using their ingenuity to open up in all the ways that they can.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

People crave confidence and competence. With England’s so-called world-beating app scrapped before it even launched, contact tracers unable to reach a third of positive cases and no financial scheme to support workers when public health requires them to self-isolate, what assessment has the Prime Minister made of the risks to business and public confidence if local lockdowns or a second peak prove beyond his Government’s ability to manage?

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Lady knows very well that the Government have invested record sums in protecting businesses, by comparison with any other country. We have done more to protect businesses around the whole of the country, including in Wales. I said that we are proceeding as one UK, and we are. I have my doubts about the 5 mile rule in Wales and wonder whether that might be something that was reviewed. But she makes a very important point about the need to protect against a second outbreak and to make sure that we are in good shape to crack down on flare-ups. I believe that we are and I believe to an extent that perhaps we did not think possible a month ago we are able to do local whack-a-mole in the way that she has described.

Covid-19: Strategy

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Monday 11th May 2020 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC) [V]]

I understand the sense of optimism that the Prime Minister wishes to convey, and I understand that people need hope, but we must not forget that more than 31,000 people are dead, so for the hundreds and thousands of grieving families this does not feel like victory in a fight.

There is now a three nations approach: Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland all agree on policy and message. I mean this with no malice, but for the sake of clarity, can the Prime Minister confirm that on almost everything he has announced today he is acting as the Prime Minister of England?

[The Prime Minister]

No, I reject that completely, and I think that most people will know that what we are saying is very good advice for the entire population of the United Kingdom, though I perfectly respect the inflections and variations that may be necessary locally, regionally and nationally to reflect differences in those areas. There is a higher R rating in some parts of the country, and as we come out of the disease, we will be applying different measures in different places in order to get that R down locally, regionally and nationally.

Oral Answers to Questions

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Wednesday 29th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I reassure hon. Friends and Members across the Chamber, of whatever persuasion they may be regarding HS2, that there will be an announcement and decision very shortly.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

I hope the Prime Minister has the humility to recognise that not everybody will be celebrating on Friday night. We have been promised that leaving the EU will bring power closer to the people and give us a greater say in our communities, but instead many people feel that they have so far been ignored and disempowered. Will he demonstrate his willingness to listen to all voices by meeting Plaid Cymru leader, Adam Price, and me, to discuss how Wales will win the tools to forge a better future?

Oral Answers to Questions

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Wednesday 15th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies]

My predecessors felt—and I share their view—that it would have been difficult to justify spending hundreds of millions of pounds on electrifying the line from Swansea to Cardiff, which would not have delivered any decreases in journey times. So we put £5.7 billion into the Great Western main line, £2.8 billion into the Great Western main line modernisation, over £1.5 billion into the Wales and borders route—all investments that have benefited Welsh travellers. We look to continue to do that, and I would be delighted to work with the hon. Lady to develop plans for further rail improvements in west Wales.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr, Lefarydd. Dw innau hefyd yn croesawu’r Ysgrifennydd Gwladol newydd a’i Weinidog i’w seddi ac yn gobeithio y cawn ni gydweithio efo nhw. [Translation: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I also welcome the new Secretary of State and his Minister to their seats, and look forward to working together.]

Wales currently benefits from EU funding to the tune of £680 million a year, including many infrastructure projects—£4.4 million for Blaenau Ffestiniog, £3.4 million for Tywyn, and £7.5 million for Llanbedr airfield, to mention just a few in my constituency. But as we leave the EU, we sadly leave behind the principles that underpin such funding—principles whose objectives were to tackle deprivation, poverty and inequality. The old political adage says follow the money. Can the Minister and the new Secretary of State allay my fears that, after this Tory Brexit, the money will not mainly find its way into the constituencies presently coloured blue on the political map of Wales?

[David T. C. Davies]

I ddechrau, a gaf I ddweud diolch yn fawr iawn am y croeso? [Translation: First of all, may I say thank you very much for the welcome?] Can I assure the right hon. Lady that this Government are absolutely committed to ensuring that Wales does not lose out by one penny as a result of Brexit. Indeed, as a result of the growth deals that will now be taking place in all parts of Wales, we are going to see hundreds of millions of pounds invested in the economy of Wales, levelling up communities.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

I am delighted to hear the Minister’s commitment that Wales will not lose a single penny. We should be building the whole of our nation. One idea is a railway from north to south, so that we no longer have to travel to the neighbouring nation to go from one end to the other of our country.

I hope that the Minister has had a chance to look at the iTunes charts, where Dafydd Iwan’s protest song “Yma o Hyd”—“We’re Still Here”—has been going up the charts. It has reached No. 1 this week. It was originally, of course, released in the midst of Thatcher’s relentless attacks on Wales, and it might be time to update the lyrics:

“er gwaetha’r hen Foris a’i griw;

ry’n ni yma o hyd.”

[Translation: Despite Boris and his crew, we are still here.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Minister, answer what you can and we will have to move on.

Debate on the Address

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2019 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, and he can certainly be assured of my commitment to ensuring that the beautiful buses continue to be built in Ballymena. I will do everything we can to ensure that that continues to be the case. As for his desire for a bridge to connect the two biggest isles of the British Isles, all I can say is that it is a very interesting idea. I advise him to watch this space and, indeed, to watch the space between the islands, because what he has said has not fallen on deaf ears.

When it comes to standing by our friends, whether in Northern Ireland or elsewhere, one innovation that this Queen’s Speech introduces is that we will stop public bodies taking it upon themselves to boycott goods from other countries and to develop their own pseudo-foreign policy against countries that, with nauseating frequency, turn out to be Israel.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Will the Prime Minister give way?

[The Prime Minister]

No.

The scale of our programme is matched only by the sense of responsibility that now falls on all of us who have been elected. Again, I congratulate all new Members, and a huge responsibility now falls on all of us to redeem and repay the trust of the British people. I say to the people of this country that we owe you, we know it and we will deliver. We have now the energy, the ideas, the mandate and the people and we will spare no effort in fulfilling that mandate. As we engage full tilt now in this mission of change, I am filled with invincible confidence in the ability of this nation, our United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, to renew itself in this generation as we have done so many times in the past. After the dither, after the delay, after the deadlock and after the paralysis and the platitudes, the time has come for change and the time has come for action, and it is action that the British people will get from this Gracious Speech, this most Gracious Speech. I commend it to the House.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

It was a pleasure to see our new Speaker in the Chair at the start of the debate, and I would like to send my congratulations to him through you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I was delighted at his election, and I am quite sure that he will be a fair and experienced judge of our affairs and will look after our House very well.

The recent election and the conversations that I was able to conduct even more intensively than usual with the electors of Wokingham told me that they do want some changes. I made promises to them that I would come here again as an advocate for more money for our local schools, which have been short-changed in recent years, so it is a pleasure to see in the Gracious Speech the down payments promised for next year, and I look forward to those continuing in the years that follow.

My electors and I agreed that we need more money for our local surgeries, more nurses and doctors to be recruited and better support for our local district general hospital in Reading. Again, I see that answer already in the Gracious Speech, with a promise of substantial new resources—financial and personnel—for the national health service, which will be laid out in legislation for a five-year period. I welcome that. It is a pleasure to say to my electors that two parts of the job seem to be well on the way to being done, but having a little experience of government, I know that there will remain, day by day and month by month, issues to sort out, to ensure that my constituency gets its fair share of the money.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

In his capacity as a former Secretary of State for Wales, does the right hon. Gentleman share my concern and disappointment that there was no mention of Wales whatsoever in the Queen’s Speech, as well as my concern about how the money being promised to England will find its way to Wales, through the Barnett formula or wherever? Finally, will he perhaps ask the same question as me: how much longer do we need the Wales Office for? Looking at the behaviour of this place, there will be people outside saying, “Surely Wales could do a bit better than this.”

[John Redwood]

The right hon. Lady knows full well that there is a formula and consequentials from the English settlement. I am quite sure that my right hon. Friends in the Government will look after Wales, and it is her job to test them out in the appropriate debates. This speech is not the appropriate moment, because I am not here to speak for Wales; I am here to speak for Wokingham and West Berkshire, and I am here to speak for the wider nation, as we all do.

I am also looking forward to the promises on infrastructure. The Government have rightly said that we have a big job of work to do to improve our railways and roads, to make sure that people can get to work and get their children to school, that we can bust the congestion and that people have easier journeys. That, too, will reduce pollution and increase safety.

Wokingham is a very fast-growing area, because we are doing more than our fair share for the national housing achievement. We particularly need support on putting in additional transport links, with digital signals on the railways so that we can have more capacity and more trains, and an improved road network. It was a pleasure to work with the previous Secretary of State for Transport in the last Parliament on the idea of strategic local highway networks. We needed more money and support for those important roads, which are under the control of councils. They do not qualify for trunk status but can often relieve trunk roads and provide an important means for my constituents and others to get to work or get their children to school. The previous Government answered that, but it falls to the new Government, with the more generous financial settlement that I look forward to, to ensure that we can work together, so that I can get some of those road schemes and rail improvements for the Wokingham area, which will be much needed.

The big thing, which represents a seismic shift in Government policy and which I welcome, is the introduction of optimism and enthusiasm—the belief that this country can achieve great things, that we do not have to constantly cut under the Maastricht criteria and that we should no longer make state debt the main objective of economic policy. I have been working away for some time to get that change of policy, but Philip Hammond was not sympathetic to my views in all sorts of ways. I am delighted that the new Prime Minister and the new Chancellor are enthusiastic about the idea that the aim of economic policy for this Parliament must be prosperity— prosperity for the many, and tax cuts for everyone.

Tax cuts are a very important part of creating greater prosperity. People work hard, and they want to keep more of their own money. They are often better judges of how to spend their money than councils and Governments. It falls to a renewed Conservative party to take that message to every part of the country, implement that message in the forthcoming Budget and show that not only will we find more money for schools, hospitals and roads, which is needed, but we will also have some money for tax cuts.

Some tax cuts do pay for themselves because our rates are too high, and if we cut them to an affordable rate, people work harder, stay here, contribute more and are more enterprising, and we get more money in. Other tax cuts will reduce the revenue, so we need to grow the economy, and over the years it works because growth generates more jobs and higher incomes, and in comes more money.

To fulfil this new objective, the Government have rightly changed the basis on which the economy is going to be governed. We have gone away from state debt as a percentage of GDP, the iron rule that dominated the last dreadful years of the Labour Government—a period of collapse, when state debt got out of control—dominated the coalition period of recovery and dominated the Philip Hammond Conservative Government period, when he seemed to like that particular proposition. Now we have a much more sensible idea, which is that we should of course be prudent—there is no magic money tree, and we cannot spend safely on the scale Labour recommended to the country—so what we are suggesting now as the golden rule is that any current expenditure must be covered out of taxation, but we can borrow up to 3% of GDP to put in those big new investments and the myriad smaller investments in broadband, rail, road, water and the other things where public money is needed as an adjunct to the substantial private investment that will in many places be going into those important developments.

This will make a lot of difference, because this Parliament needs to understand that there has been a very nasty world manufacturing recession over the last six months or so and there has been a worrying slowdown in the world economy over the last year. It began, as these things always do, with the central banks that get it wrong. It began with the tightening of the central bank in America, the Federal Reserve Board, in the third and fourth quarters of 2018. We could feel the shake on the world economy, and we saw what was happening to world markets. It spread to the eurozone, which stopped all its quantitative easing, although its economy was still very weak and could not really take that particular shock, and it came to the United Kingdom, where we had a very severe policy being pursued by the Bank of England. Very predictably—I remember warning about it some time ago—these changes in central bank policy did indeed slow the world economy.

Now things have changed, but they have not changed yet in the United Kingdom, so I urge the Prime Minister and the Chancellor to get the UK authorities into line with the analysis and the prescription of the world central banks outside the United Kingdom. What we have seen in the last six months is a very big move to cut interest rates worldwide by most of the major central banks not only in the advanced world, but even more dramatically in quite a number of the emerging market countries from Turkey to India and Brazil. We have seen cuts in the United States of America, and we have seen the reintroduction of quantitative easing—bond buying, created money—in the eurozone, because the eurozone economy has shuddered to a halt in some places. We have seen further developments in Japan, which carried on with quantitative easing and zero or negative interest rates throughout the difficult period, but it too needs to boost things rather more.

However, there has been no response in the United Kingdom. Indeed, only in the last few days the Bank of England has gone the other way. It has done a series of stress tests on the major banks, and I am delighted to say that our major banks passed with flying colours. The worst case in the stress test was very severe, but there were no problems for the banks, as the Bank of England reported. However, the Bank of England then said that the clearing banks had to double the counter-cyclical buffer of capital they keep. That is technical language. What does it mean? It means there is about £20 billion less available for mortgages, car loans, business expansion and new investment. That is what it means—a very fundamental monetary tightening. It happened at the same time that sterling went up about 10%—another very strong monetary tightening.

Money growth is eye-wateringly low in the United Kingdom, unlike in the eurozone, and it is well below that in the United States of America. At exactly the point when we were doing this, the Federal Reserve Board, with 2%-plus growth in America, which we would love to have on this side of the Atlantic, was injecting billions—I think about $150 billion was injected in a single month—into the money markets to keep things liquid so that the American consumer, car buyer, mortgage demander and small businesses would have access to the money they needed to continue the very successful American growth strategy. Let us ensure a growth strategy in which monetary policy does not stand too much on the brake.

There is also the issue of how the Treasury has been recalculating our obligations at official level. Around October, when it probably thought that we might be leaving the European Union—there was a chance of that at the time—it decided that the student loan system was costing us £12 billion a year more, although that system had not been accounted for in such a way up to that point. There were no changes to the student loan system, or to the experiences of those who could not repay their loans, yet the figures that we presented deteriorated sharply as a result of that decision. I do not think we should allow that to deviate from what I hope will be a positive Budget—probably at the end of next month, given the rumours I see in the press.

We need the Budget to provide that boost to growth. I think it is eminently affordable to have the increases that we promised and talked about in the general election regarding schools, hospitals and infrastructure, and also eminently affordable to have those promised tax cuts to business rates and national insurance. We would not need to offset that with other tax increases, because this economy desperately needs a boost.

In a world where some other Governments are boosting on the fiscal side, and practically every other country is boosting on the monetary side, in order to see off the threat of the world slowdown turning into something worse, it is important that the United Kingdom authorities do the same thing. I have every confidence in my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, who I think is single-handedly turning around the mood with his message of confidence and enthusiasm for how we can do better. That will take some cash, however, and now is the time to spend a bit of that.

This country and its economy can achieve a lot more, so let us ensure that the new message of prosperity for the many and tax cuts for everyone is seen through. That is the way to bring most people in this country together, and honour the promises that many of us made in the general election. That will show that the country has made wise decisions up to this point, and that Brexit will not be damaging to our economy, but can be part of a positive move towards faster growth, better jobs, and more paid jobs, just as we have experienced in recent years and months.

Election of Speaker

Liz Saville Roberts Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2019 Commons Chamber

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

Diolch yn fawr, Mr Darpar-Lefarydd, a llongyfarchiadau i chi yn eich parchus, arswydus swydd newydd. Thank you, Mr Speaker-Elect, and congratulations to you on your respected, sublime new role. I and many people here were present on 22 March 2017, and there is no doubt in my mind that the leadership and care that you showed us on that day have inevitably given us the faith to return you with pleasure today. Of course, we sympathise with all the victims of terrorist attacks in the intervening time.

Let me take the opportunity to call on you, Mr Speaker-Elect, to work with the Llywydd in our Senedd in Wales, the Presiding Officer in the Scottish Parliament and the Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly in the spirit of equality and mutual respect. I call on you also to continue to develop the principles of equality, including equality of voice and equality of opportunity, much of which was upheld in the Speaker’s intern scheme, an excellent scheme that has brought people into this place who would not otherwise have had the opportunity.

I close by saying that all Members here were returned in exactly the same way: by their—our—constituents. Those constituents all stand equal, regardless of whether their MP is a member of the Government or the Opposition; of a large party or a small party; or, indeed, the single representative here. All those constituents are equal and they deserve respect. I have every confidence, Mr Speaker-Elect, that you will ensure that their representatives here will have that equality of voice so that they can best represent their constituents.