Confidence in Her Majesty’s Government
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
Yes, this House can have confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, because faced with unprecedented challenges over the past three years, it has got far more of the important decisions right than wrong. Have there been mistakes? Of course. I am not aware of any Government, of any nation, even in the most benign times, who could claim to have made none. Of course, these have not been benign times. On the big questions facing the Government, our country is in a better position, with the Prime Minister having been in charge for the past three years, than it would have been in if the Leader of the Opposition had had his way.
On the decision to respect the referendum result, the Prime Minister broke the deadlock over Brexit that threatened to leave the country paralysed with indecision. There are still important issues to resolve, but it is clear that any of the five Conservative candidates to replace him will continue that work, and will secure Brexit, not reverse it. We know what the Leader of the Opposition wanted to do if he became Brexit Secretary in 2019: hold another referendum to overturn the first one. We know what he promised Labour party members in order to become its leader: free movement across the EU. However, he is now telling voters that he would not take us back into the EU internal market. People are bound to ask: who is he telling the truth to? This Government and this Prime Minister called it right.
Going into the global pandemic, the Government recognised that normal procurement and distribution systems would not get personal protective equipment to the people who needed it most urgently. The Leader of Opposition attacked the Prime Minister for putting in place too many checks, being too slow, and not awarding contracts quickly enough. Later, that criticism was reversed; suddenly there were insufficient checks and bureaucracy. Again, the Government called it right and struck the correct balance. They put in place the biggest job and business protection schemes in British peacetime history to make sure that our economy could build back once the need for lockdowns had passed: 9 million workers’ wages were paid; nearly 3 million self-employed workers were helped; and businesses right across our economy were supported. If the Leader of the Opposition had had his way, and the plans of the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) had been put in place, bankrupting the nation, we simply would not have been able to borrow the money for that emergency help.
Back when a covid vaccine looked a distant prospect, the Prime Minister and the Government backed a range of potential vaccines, as well as Kate Bingham’s superb taskforce, which the Opposition decried as waste and cronyism. The Opposition were wrong; the Prime Minister was right; and Britain got more vaccines more quickly than any other European country.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mike Wood
I really do not have time.
It was the Prime Minister’s personal intervention—he sent back early drafts of the roll-out strategy—that brought together the NHS, the armed forces and the private sector to get vaccines out quicker than other large countries did.
We can be proud that when Russian troops invaded one of our European partners, our Prime Minister did so much to lead international support for Ukraine. It is simply not credible to imagine that Britain would have stood as firmly against Russian aggression if it had been led by a man whose response to an assassination attempt on the streets of Salisbury was to demand that evidence be sent to Moscow.
Liam Byrne (Birmingham, Hodge Hill) (Lab)
Was it the right response to that poisoning to fix a meeting with a former intelligence agent of the KGB—a meeting without officials, minutes, or any report to this House of what the hell happened?
Mike Wood
I will tell the right hon. Gentleman what the right response was: it was to co-ordinate the biggest diplomatic response since the end of the cold war. The Prime Minister, then Foreign Secretary, got more diplomatic responses than have been seen in decades. The Prime Minister has many achievements of which he should be proud. His successor will have a strong foundation to build on, thanks to the decisions that he has taken over the past three years.
Functioning of Government
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Michael Ellis
The Government are functioning. I have already mentioned to the House that the great offices of state are still in place. The hon. Gentleman refers to our security and intelligence services. The Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary are in place.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
What provisions are being put in place for the continuing operation of the EU-UK Partnership Council and the specialised committees over the coming months?
Michael Ellis
I think my hon. Friend knows that I attended a meeting of the EU-UK Partnership Council in Brussels recently. The functions of Government, including in the international sphere, will continue apace.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 1 month ago)
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Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
The Prime Minister (Boris Johnson)
This morning I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others. In addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Mike Wood
Government support for households is greatly appreciated, but high energy costs are causing massive problems for businesses, particularly in energy-intensive manufacturing. Will the Prime Minister support the Repowering the Black Country initiative, which is backed by the local enterprise partnership and by Andy Street, to reduce reliance on fossil fuels? Will he meet me to look at how the Black Country can be a pilot project to decarbonise, reduce costs and protect the region’s manufacturing jobs?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is a great champion for Dudley and for the Black Country. In addition to the £1,200 for the 8 million most vulnerable households, we are providing £400 to help everybody with the cost of energy. We are supporting the Black Country with cost-efficient energy infrastructure, and the region has already received £1.5 million to develop a cluster plan for decarbonisation.
Referral of Prime Minister to Committee of Privileges
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Keir Starmer
I will make some progress and try to come back to hon. Members when I can.
The conventions and the traditions that we are debating are not an accident. They have been handed down to us as the tools that protect Britain from malaise, extremism and decline. That is important, because the case against the Prime Minister is that he has abused those tools, that he has used them to protect himself rather than our democracy, and that he has turned them against all that they are supposed to support. Government Members know that the Prime Minister has stood before the House and said things that are not true, safe in the knowledge that he will not be accused of lying because he cannot be. He stood at the Dispatch Box and point-blank denied that rule breaking took place when it did, and as he did so he was hoping to gain extra protection from our good faith that no Prime Minister would ever deliberately mislead this House. He has used our faith and our conventions to cover up his misdeeds.
Keir Starmer
I will just finish this point. After months of denials, absurd claims that all the rules were followed and feigned outrage at his staff discussing rule breaking, we now know that the law was broken. We know that the Prime Minister himself broke the law, and we know that he faces the possibility of being found to have broken it again and again and again.
As the police investigation is ongoing, we do not need to make final judgment on the Prime Minister’s contempt of Parliament today. When the time comes, the Prime Minister will be able to make his case. He can put his defence—of course he can. He can make his case as his defence that his repeated misleading of Parliament was inadvertent; or that he did not understand the rules that he himself wrote, and his advisers at the heart of Downing Street either did not understand the rules or misled him when they assured him that they were followed at all times; or that he thought he was at a work event, even while the empty bottles piled up. He can make those defences when the time comes.
Ukraine
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 5 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
As the hon. Lady knows, you cannot give money to UK political parties if you are a foreign national.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
Without the courage and ambition of Franklin Roosevelt’s lend-lease programme, Britain and the Soviet Union might not have been able to resist Nazi aggression in 1941. Can the Ukrainian people depend on the United Kingdom and our allies in Europe and north America to provide similar extensive support so that they might be able to resist further Russian aggression?
The Prime Minister
Yes, and in every conversation I have had in the last few weeks and months about Ukraine, we have focused on this issue of supporting the Ukrainian economy. One of the reasons that Volodymyr Zelensky has been so reluctant to accept the idea of even the possibility of an invasion is precisely because of the threat to Ukrainian economic stability. We must shore up that country, and that is why I announced a further $500 million of support today from the UK Government.
Covid-19 Update
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
Many people were sceptical about whether the sunset clauses would ever be triggered, so I congratulate the Prime Minister on responding to the clear evidence by bringing plan B to an end. However, as covid will be with us for a long time to come, will he ensure that regional Nightingale hospitals maintain the surge capacity necessary to deal with any future variants, so that they do not put unsustainable pressures on our NHS and we do not have the kind of restrictions that we have seen over the past two years?
The Prime Minister
I thank my hon. Friend, who is completely right. We need to learn the lessons of the last two years. We need to make sure that if we are, heaven forbid, attacked by another variant—a more lethal variant than omicron—we have different ways of dealing with it, and we have resilience built in to the NHS and into the way we handle it. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health will be setting out our plans for how to live with covid, irrespective of what kind of variants we encounter.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I have every sympathy with the hon. Gentleman’s constituent—[Interruption.] I certainly do. I have every sympathy, but what I think is unfair is that people such as her are placed in a position of unnecessary anxiety about their homes when they should be reassured.
I sympathise deeply with people who have to pay for waking watches and other such things. I think it is absurd. But what people should be doing is making sure that we do not unnecessarily undermine the confidence of the market and of people in these homes, because they are not unsafe. Many millions of homes are not unsafe—and the hon. Gentleman should have the courage to say so.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
The new police and crime commissioner for the West Midlands has chosen to cut back on stop and search across the region. Can the Prime Minister confirm that while stops and searches must be proportionate and not discriminatory, they remain an important part of keeping our streets and communities safe?
The Prime Minister
Yes, I certainly agree with that. It was a point that I raised recently with the Labour Mayor of London. We agreed on many things—he was very much out of line with the current Labour policy on lockdown, for instance—but I certainly thought that he was wrong about stop and search. We need to make sure that stop and search is part of the armoury of police options when it comes to stopping knife crime. If it is done sensitively and in accordance with the law, I believe it can be extremely valuable.
G20 and COP26 World Leaders Summit
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I do not know what planet the hon. Gentleman has been on. He is totally wrong. This Government have helped to cut the UK’s emissions of carbon dioxide by almost half from 1990 levels, which is an astonishing thing to have done. We have the most ambitious nationally determined contribution of any country in the EU—78% by 2035 on 1990 levels—and we are doing it through all the measures that he knows. Has he not heard about what we are going to do on zero-emission vehicles or what we are doing on our power emissions? I think he needs to look at what is happening. Yes, of course there is more to do. As for green bonds, we issued one the other day and got £10 billion out of it—so just keep up.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
As well as cars, the world will need clean, smart urban transport if we are to meet the climate challenge. Companies such as the one behind the Westfield PODs in Dudley South are developing products that can succeed, thrive and help us to decarbonise, but too often the regulatory framework lags behind the innovation. Will the Prime Minister work with Ministers and our international partners to develop international type approval standards so that these products can succeed and we can decarbonise transport on an urban level as well as lead on personal cars?
The Prime Minister
I agree 100%. I am looking forward to seeing the Westfield PODs and their means of conveying human beings around, although I cannot quite imagine what they are. What we want in this country is regulators for growth, and for green growth. We need a much more proactive approach that engages with brilliant ideas like that.
Oral Answers to Questions
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Michael Ellis
We have tried to operate the protocol in good faith, but the problems are significant and they are growing. The hon. Lady should be concerned about the fact that the Northern Ireland Executive noted that, from January to March, about 20% of all of the European Union’s checks were being conducted in respect of Northern Ireland, even though Northern Ireland’s population is just 0.5% of the EU as a whole. It is unacceptable, and those are the sort of problems on which she ought to focus.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Minister for the Cabinet Office (Steve Barclay)
We are increasing opportunities for small and medium-sized enterprises in a variety of ways, from transparently publishing contract pipelines to simplifying the bidding process. Those measures are working. The latest procurement figures show that £15.5 billion was paid to SMEs to help deliver public services. That is the highest since records began in 2013 and a £1.3 billion increase on the previous year.
Mike Wood
Dudley South has many fantastic firms doing innovative work, particularly in world-class advanced engineering, but, too often, the size of Government contracts mean that only a handful of multinationals are able to compete. Will my right hon. Friend do everything that he can to ensure that public procurement contracts are advertised in the smallest chunks possible so that Government and public services can take full advantage of the talents in our SMEs?
Steve Barclay
My hon. Friend raises a very legitimate point, and, in short, yes we will. To encourage the issue he highlights, we require public buyers to divide contracts into more accessible lots, or to explain why they cannot, so that tender requirements can be matched to smaller business specialisms. I know that he is a champion for Dudley South and that is exactly the sort of measure that will help businesses in his constituency.
Health and Social Care
Mike Wood Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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The Prime Minister
I know that the Labour party wants to nationalise everything, which would be typically insane since the vast majority of care is provided by the private sector. What we are doing is lifting people’s wages with the national living wage, investing in training and putting half a billion pounds into progression of the caring workforce, and we will also make sure that local councils get the funding they need to support a fair cost of care.
Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)
When people cannot get an appointment with their GP they often turn to hospital A&E departments, or miss out on early intervention which places greater pressure on our health system further down the line. As part of his plan for the NHS to recover, will the Prime Minister make sure that everybody can get face-to-face appointments with their GP without further delay?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is completely right and speaks for colleagues across the House: we need to reform the system so that GPs see the right people at the right time and in the right numbers.