Liam Byrne
MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North · Labour · United Kingdom
“The loss of 4,000 jobs at Jaguar Land Rover is a body blow for workers, families and communities across the west midlands, so I commend Richard Parker, the Mayor of the West Midlands, for moving quickly on Monday to put £500,000 on the table to help ensure that everybody gets back to work.”
“I wholeheartedly welcome this well-rounded statement from the Foreign Secretary, and put on record my thanks to the new Prime Minister for the hard yards that I know he has put in over recent days and weeks.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I offer my warmest congratulations to her on her appointment to the role; she will be a brilliant Minister.”
“Let me start with a word of thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who is not in her place, who said quite rightly that an awful lot has changed since the Bill was first introduced to this House. Indeed, a lot has been revealed over the course of the summer.”
“The effect of new clause 34 would be to ban off-ramping, ban new forms of digital currency transactions and ban memecoins, which are exactly the kind of measures that Ministers now need to bring forward. If we want to take the crypto system out of political finance, this is what we need to do.”
“No doubt we will learn that Mr Cottrell was in fact on the electoral register when that money was passed. No doubt we will discover that his mother, Fiona Cottrell, declared and did not disguise the fact that the money had ultimately come from her son.”
The complete record
Every one of 5,360 lines we hold for Liam Byrne, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 29 of 108.
“The Minister is being generous. The only danger with introducing such statistics, which all the social media companies are desperate to put into our hands, is that it creates the impression that somehow they are doing enough when they are not. We will never get to a solution to this problem by relying on voluntary action. That is why the law needs to change, and enforcement needs to change.”
“Before the Minister finishes, I am grateful for the opportunity to ask her whether she thinks that the Law Commission’s work is going to finish in time to allow her to bring a Bill before the House in the next Session.”
“The west midlands was the home of the industrial revolution. We sparked the carbon revolution; we would like to lead the zero-carbon revolution. However, it has been harder to decarbonise our power system since the Government phased out feed-in tariffs for solar. It is harder to decarbonise our transport system because of the confusion, identified by the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee before Christmas, around electric vehicles. It is harder to decarbonise energy in our homes when the Minister cannot tell me, in parliamentary answers, our share of the energy company obligation funding that might fund that retrofitting. Cities in this country would like to lead the green industrial revolution, so why does she not help them?”
“The rocket fuel for fake news and disinformation is the tidal wave of dark money flowing into dark ads that are targeted with psychographic precision. Vote Leave has admitted breaking the rules—cheating by pumping in way over the odds during the referendum campaign—but the Secretary of State has done nothing to ensure that we have the transparency we need ahead of a possible second referendum. Will he think again and bring in the honest ads Act we have proposed, so we can finally see who is paying for what—not least the dark ads targeted at Members of this House?”
“The best memorial of all, however, would be to end this scandal for good and to sweep the disgrace of homelessness into the history books once more.”
“I have met people in subways in their hospital gowns and people with rat bites fighting and fearing sepsis, and yet the homeless people in Britain’s second city, in the sixth richest economy on earth, face a health system that is rated inadequate and a mental health service in which the caseload is rising four times faster than funding, and where only 1% of the money promised to the West Midlands combined authority for housing has actually been paid over to build new homes. That roll of names is a roll call of shame. I hope that in our city, if not elsewhere, we build a permanent memorial, so that we are confronted every day with the names of those who died, the names of those whom we have collectively failed.”
“I was staggered to hear the Minister’s complacency about homelessness, which is wholly misplaced. In my region of the west midlands, which is under a Tory Mayor, homelessness or rough sleeping is up by 333%. Homeless people are dying at the rate of one a fortnight. I want this House to hear, to know and to remember the names of those who have died in the past 15 months alone: Paul Williams, Laura Cairns, Steve, Daniel Hutton, Alain Simmonds, Daniel Clements, Terry Taylor, Jayne Simpson, Michael Hill, Peter Mbugua, Simon Holmes, Linda Grimes, Remigiusz Boczarski, Peter Corker, Joby Sparrey, Julie, Thomas Pulham, Kane Walker and two men whose names are known only to God. The homeless people I see on the streets of Birmingham often live in medieval conditions.”
“I am grateful. As the Minister knows, I have worked with his officials every day for the past month on one of the issues in one of my schools. The parents at that school believe that the Equality Act 2010 and every single protected characteristic in it should be taught, but as a result of the breakdown in consultation, the regional schools commissioner, an independent arbitrator appointed by the Department and I have had to come in and spend a month on the matter. Surely that situation cannot be replicated in thousands of primary schools if there is a breakdown of trust, so we need more prescriptive guidance to ensure that there is no retreat from the aims of this proposal.”
“That is not what Parkfield School has done. It has agreed to go into dialogue with parents to ensure that the Equality Act is taught. That is the fact of the position.”
“Let me correct the hon. Gentleman on a point of substance. The long-term curriculum plan of the school was set at the beginning of the year, and that is what the school continues to deliver. Of course the protests are unacceptable in terms of some of the abuse that has been hurled, and he is right to call that out, but I ask him please not to muddy this sensitive issue with facts that are incorrect.”
“The challenge for the Minister, as he knows, is that he is asking academies to take full school autonomy without the kind of accountability that delivers the dialogue that he says is at the heart of this guidance. He needs to put more guidance on the table, because inclusive education is too precious to risk in disputes like those we have had over the past month.”
“Disputes will arise as we translate this agenda into action. As the Minister knows, I feel the Government were much too slow to get a grip on their academy in Parkfield. That delay allowed those with intolerant and extreme views to hijack what was a group of parents simply wanting their voice to be heard and their role to be respected. I hope that we will send out a clear message from this Chamber to those who have been circulating that intolerant hatred aimed at the LGBT community that we will never see it go unchallenged. We stand united—united against that hatred in our city and in our schools. Parkfield parents want the Equality Act to be taught in full. They want every protected characteristic to be taught. They ask nothing more than for their voice to be heard and their role to be respected.”
“The Minister will know that in Parkfield School in my constituency, we have outstanding educators and pioneers such as Andrew Moffat, who is now up for global teacher of the year. We wish him all the luck in the world in securing that prize. However, Parkfield is a good illustration of the challenges that we all have in navigating this agenda not on paper but in the real world. That is where we saw the risks of what happens when consultation just comes to a halt for years on end. We saw what happens when parents become concerned that protected characteristics are not taught in full or in a balanced way. We saw, lit up in lights, the concern when there was a hint that this was a programme that was linked to the de-radicalisation programme, Prevent. That is still something that requires an apology.”
“These are important new rules and I am glad that my Front Bench is giving them our wholehearted support. On the Labour Benches, we are very proud of our role in repealing section 28, not just in law but in spirit. We are very proud of the role we played in getting the Equality Acts on to the statute book. I never come into the Chamber without looking at the words on the wall behind me. “More in common” is at the heart of the Equality Act 2010. That Act and inclusive education are the most important ways in which we deliver that message on the wall behind me, through inclusive education to the children and the future of this country. It reminds us that we cannot and will not pick and choose the equalities that we champion and therefore teach our young people.”
“I spent most of Saturday collecting a third of a tonne of food for our local food banks as part of our Winter of Compassion campaign. It is already clear that we will have to run such food-bank collections all year round. When will the Secretary of State join us in Birmingham to help collect the food needed to end the hunger that her policies are causing?”
“Home- lessness in Birmingham has increased by nearly 1,000% and almost 100 people have died homeless in the past five years. This is a moral emergency. My interviews with homeless people show that collapsing healthcare services are part of the problem, yet the homeless people in our city have a primary care system rated as “inadequate”. What steps can the Secretary of State take to fix this—not when the service is recommissioned in two years’ time, but now, before more people die?”
“I do not accept the Minister’s argument that it was too difficult to broker some kind of agreement with UK mobile companies, which are big, global and highly profitable firms. I therefore do not accept that the consequences that she spelled out will come to pass if we do not pass the draft instrument. That is simply a failure of policy work and of political imagination. The Opposition cannot support a draft instrument that will shear away protections that many of our constituents have against exorbitant charges while travelling through Europe. We will therefore oppose the draft regulations.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. In front of the Committee is another example of how ill-prepared the Government are for a no-deal situation, which is why the Prime Minister should have moved much earlier to take no deal off the table. The draft instrument enshrines several important proposals, such as the need for transparency to protect consumers, but it falls hopelessly short of the level of consumer protection we ought to be able to promise our constituents in the event of a no-deal Brexit. In particular, it proposes an extraordinary degree of deregulation, which will allow the protection against exorbitant roaming charges to be stripped away from our constituents in the event of a no-deal Brexit.”
“The Government are prepared to accept caps on energy prices, yet they are not bringing that principle to mobile phone policy. If we have energy caps, why can we not have mobile phone caps?”
“Finally, there is complete confusion for our EU neighbours who have to pass the habitual residence test once again. In one of the richest countries on earth and in a city like mine, how can it be that homelessness has spiralled by 1,000% in five years? The system is in crisis, and this Government need to put compassion back into the system where it belongs.”
“Huge variations exist in the deductions made for advance payments. The self-employed experience long waits for correct payments. Sanctions are issued against those who are too ill to attend interviews. Those who challenge the inappropriate use of sanctions face huge benefit delays of up to five months. Constituents are forced to travel across the city to access IT to fill out online forms. Constituents with mental health problems are denied the right to face-to-face support. There are process delays and confusion about getting link codes to connect to childcare components, and the same applies to entitlements. There is total confusion about those moving from non-UC areas into UC areas. More confusion exists around eligibility for free prescriptions.”
“When Beveridge talked about his five giants, he talked about freedom from want, and yet nearly 60,000 people in our region last year had to rely on food banks—a third of them children—which is a rise of nearly a third over the past few years. The giants of injustice that Beveridge identified now hunt and haunt us on the streets because of the collapsing safety net, and it is the crisis of universal credit that is at the core of the problem. I was amazed to discover in an answer to a written question yesterday that the Mayor of the West Midlands has not written to the Government once in the past year to express concerns about universal credit. In my last minute I will rattle through the many different problems that Birmingham MPs have identified. There is wholesale confusion about eligibility for housing benefit and universal credit.”
“He was absolutely determined to see a social security system in this country that would deliver freedom from fear of want. He wanted to slay the five giants of injustice that Beveridge identified back in 1944. However, look at the evil giant of unemployment today. In Birmingham, youth unemployment has shot up by 23% over the past year, with 15,000 more young people now out of work. When Beveridge launched his report, he talked about the giant of disease. Today, disability is knocking more people into poverty than ever before, and yet 33,000 people in our region have been stripped of their right to PIP over the past few years, plunging them into a poverty from which it is difficult to recover.”
“A few hours ago, our city bid goodbye to Kane Walker. He was a young man who died on our streets in the cold of January. A man gone; a man who should still be with us; a man who, together, we have failed to save. And yet Kane Walker was not the only homeless man to have died in Birmingham. More than 70 homeless people have died on the streets of our city over the past four years. That is why I say to the Minister that the core of the debate today is not numbers or statistics but the moral emergency of homelessness that is now out of control because the safety net has been shredded around people who are only a couple of twists of fate away from the pavement. When the National Insurance Act 1946 was passing through Parliament, creating the Minister’s Department, Clem Attlee himself moved the Second Reading.”
“My hon. Friend is making a brilliant speech. Does she accept that that is a particular problem in academy schools, because the accountability points upwards to the office of the Secretary of State? At least with a local education authority school, one can go to one’s local elected representatives to try to sort the mess out.”
“I hope that will allow us to create a process that gives parents confidence that their views on age appropriateness are being taken into account, that faith background is being respected, and that consultation is being undertaken. The truth is that although the accountability mechanism might well be able to steer LEA schools, it will be a pretty voluntarist approach for academies. That is a recipe for problems in the future. I hope that all of this will have been taken into account in the guidance, with great clairvoyance by the Minister. If it has not, I urge him to bring that guidance back to the House and reflect seriously on the concerns we have heard from Members of all parties this afternoon.”
“Crucially, if rights to withdrawal are to be withdrawn, the Government need to set out more clearly the mechanisms by which parents can influence and change a decision taken by academies, which to many of us seem impervious to local opinion. On Friday, I wrote to the leader of Birmingham City Council and to the former chief executive of Stonewall to suggest that we create a proper consultation mechanism locally, in which we can take the brilliant work that has been undertaken in the education equalities toolkit but also bring to the table the views of faith leaders and the expertise of organisations such as Stonewall.”
“How on earth do they feel when graffiti is daubed on the building and protests are held outside the school gate? That is not the sign of an accountability mechanism that is working satisfactorily; it is the sign of one that is failing. I hope the Minister will reflect on the experience we have had in my constituency. I hope that he will be able to continue to work with Parkfield at speed as it works through the new way its curriculum will need to be developed and delivered in the light of the guidance issued this afternoon. I hope that he will reflect on some fundamental points. The first is to clear up the overlap between Equalities Act education and relationships education—clear up what will and will not come with the right to withdrawal.”
“If a school chooses to take a particular path, what is the accountability mechanism for parents to disagree and bend the course of that decision? We simply cannot have a two-class system in which the parents of a pupil at a local education authority school can go to councillors in order to make their argument heard, whereas it appears the parents of a pupil at an academy would have to go through their Member of Parliament up to the Secretary of State and try to influence the situation that way. I am afraid that that will lead to our having more and more parents who simply withdraw their children or, as is the case at Parkfield, organise demonstrations outside the school gates. What kind of atmosphere is that creating? We know that there will be some gay children at Parkfield.”
“I hope that today the Minister will guarantee that the three basic rights of parents—the right to have their voice heard, the right to have their role respected and, crucially, their right of choice—will be protected as the school reworks its teaching over the months ahead. My final point is the same as that made with such brilliance and eloquence by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood. I understand that the guidance will create particular guidelines for how relationships education is taught in primary schools. I understand that it will be down to the school to choose whether some kind of sexual component will be included in that teaching, but it is not clear whether there will be a right to withdraw from relationships education, because we were given to understand that there is no such right.”
“At the moment, I am afraid, there is wholesale confusion among parents and among teachers. Thirdly, we have to ensure that parents’ voices are heard all the way through the process. “No Outsiders” may well have been a path-breaking process, and there were lots of workshops when it was first undertaken, but those workshops were four years ago. Consultation must not be a one-off; it must be a constant golden thread running through the delivery of Equality Act education and relationships education. In light of the new guidance published today, I am afraid that “No Outsiders” will have to be comprehensively overhauled and refreshed because of the substantial overlap between the two kinds of teaching.”
“The challenge that we have is that parents were under the impression that “No Outsiders” was the only way in which the Act could be taught. That is simply not the case, but it has meant that parents’ right of choice over the delivery of education has not been delivered in the way that we should aspire to. Secondly, we have to respect the right of parents to be the principal educators of their children with respect to relationships education. Decisions about the age-appropriateness of material have to be made in the open, not behind closed doors. Where their relationships guidance is in collision with Equality Act education, I hope that the Secretary of State and the Minister will clarify what is what—and, crucially, which matters do and do not enjoy the right to withdrawal.”
“Although that is a different piece of legislation from the Children and Social Work Act 2017, which enables the proposed regulations, it is difficult to unpick relationships education from education that relates to a protected characteristic. All parents ask is simply that the teaching of relationships education and protected characteristics education be absolutely balanced and give equal regard to each of the characteristics, including the background of faith. As it happens, there are many ways of teaching the Equality Act. Birmingham City Council has one toolkit, Stonewall has another—I put on the record my thanks to Ruth Hunt, former chief executive of Stonewall, for her counsel over the past week—and there are also programmes such as “No Outsiders”, developed by the school.”
“The consultation was finished months ago; obviously, it is important that Ministers strive to get the guidance right, but we have been left in the unfortunate situation where we cannot debate its detail today, nor can the Minister reflect on this debate in perfecting the guidance for the years ahead. I will touch briefly on the three rights of parents that need to be given sharp focus in the guidance, which obviously I have not had the chance to read. First, we need to ensure that parents’ right of choice is respected. Our experience in Parkfield relates to the teaching of the Equality Act, particularly the protected characteristics in it.”
“Parents in my constituency are passionate about the Equality Act and are as determined to tackle homophobia as Islamophobia, but in this situation what they want is what I will fight for: the right for their voice to be heard, their role to be respected and their choice to be protected. We know that relationships education is vital to raising children in the realities of modern Britain and the modern world; it is helpful that that has been acknowledged by Members across the parties today. However, if we do not pay regard to those three basic rights of parents, we will fail in our duty as legislators. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) that it is deeply disappointing that the guidance was discussed on the Floor of the House today, yet we are debating it here in the Westminster Hall Chamber.”
“I am grateful for the hard work of certain departmental officials, but I know that if Parkfield were a local authority school, I would have had the two cabinet members responsible outside the school gates defusing the tension that has been allowed to grow and grow. Parkfield is an outstanding school with outstanding school leaders, but we now confront a breakdown of trust between parents and the school leadership that has created unacceptable tensions. On the one hand, parents are very angry; on the other, teachers are feeling intimidated—and there was a graffiti attack on the school this morning. Both of those are absolutely unacceptable. The tragedy is that school leaders and parents both want the same thing.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Sir David. I think that more of my constituents than anyone else’s have signed the petition, but my speech will be based on the particular experience of Parkfield Community School in my constituency over the past three weeks. The debate has come to a head there much earlier than elsewhere, and I have had to step in and try to broker very difficult meetings between school leaders and local parents. The Minister will know, because I have told the Secretary of State for Education so, that I feel that parents and teachers at Parkfield have both been let down by the Department. The situation has been allowed to grow unattended for much too long and the Department’s approach has been much too ponderous.”
“I am listening to the Minister very carefully. What will be the mechanism for resolving disputes where parents disagree with the judgment a school has come to?”
“The Minister managed to get through her speech without saying anything about the additional resources that the commissioner will enjoy in order to enforce such a critical part of our regulatory architecture. Nor did she say anything about whether the draft regulations will increase our chances of getting an adequacy agreement with the EU, about whether they will accelerate the timetable for getting such an agreement, or about her Department’s contingency plans in case there is no adequacy agreement. The Opposition broadly support the draft regulations; indeed, we think that a permanent customs union for data should be replicated across the piece for UK trade with the European Union. However, the Minister has important questions to answer before we can give the draft regulations our consent.”
“During the passage of the Data Protection Act, the Opposition were not particularly comfortable with that approach, which she is asking the Committee to sign off before presenting her much anticipated White Paper on internet harm. Since she is asking us to sign off a derogation that will lower the age of consent to 13 before we know what legal provisions will safeguard our children against bad social media firms, perhaps she could say a little more about whether Her Majesty’s Government agree with the duty of care architecture that we proposed before Christmas. Furthermore, the draft regulations will be meaningless unless the Information Commissioner has the resources to enforce them.”
“In introducing them, the Minister is dramatically constraining this country’s ability to strike free and unfettered trade agreements with other countries around the world, because on the critical issue of data, she is locking us into the European Union’s provisions. The Opposition fully support that approach, but we have five important questions for her to answer. The draft regulations are just one piece of the jigsaw, so it is difficult for us to sign them off without having due regard for the full picture of regulation required. Regulation 8 will write into UK law a derogation from GDPR rules on age. As the Minister knows, the GDPR gives countries latitude to lower from 16 to 13 the age at which consent is deemed to have been given; she is now writing the 13 limit into UK law.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Evans. The draft regulations are a wise precaution, although it is slightly ironic that Her Majesty’s Government are presenting us with what is basically a foundation stone for the permanent customs union and free trade agreement on data that we have been advocating for the United Kingdom in the round. I look forward to Government Members, including the hon. Member for Wycombe, presenting a united front this morning on laying this important foundation stone for a critical part of our customs union with our nearest neighbour. The draft regulations are a wise precaution because 43% of tech companies in Europe are based in our country and three quarters of our cross-border data flows are with our European neighbours.”
“I know how little this Government care for Britain’s second city, and I know it will take a Labour Government to bring justice back to our city.”
“They could not stop for long because they were rushing to hospital to see a friend, homeless too, who had been bitten in the face by rats and they feared sepsis—the sepsis that they think killed Kane Walker just a week or two ago. But Kane Walker was not alone: one homeless person a week now dies in the west midlands, sometimes in medieval conditions. This, in the fifth richest economy on earth, is a moral scandal, and this statement this afternoon has done nothing to reverse it. This Secretary of State takes the issues of Birmingham so seriously that, when its entire number of Labour Members of Parliament wrote to him demanding an urgent meeting last November, he cleared his diary immediately to offer us some time five months later—in March.”
“This Government were able to rustle up £1 billion for their friends in the Democratic Unionist party in the space of days. In Birmingham, we have taken the biggest cuts in local government history—£690 million to date, £85 million still to come and £46 million to come out of our budget this year. That is a total of nearly three quarters of a billion pounds. The bad news is that it could be worse because we face £161 million of pressures over the next two to three years. That is why I say to the Secretary of State today, on behalf of all the Labour MPs in Birmingham: this battering of our city has to stop and it has to stop now. Yesterday morning, I met the friends of Kane Walker, the young man who died on the pavements of Birmingham a week or two ago.”
“The ladder in life is harder to get on to because apprenticeship numbers in the west midlands have fallen by a third. That is 10,000 fewer apprentices in our region over the last year. How can it be just for a child born in Ladywood to live eight years less than a child born in Sutton Coldfield? How can it be right that a kid born in Alum Rock has a third less chance of going to university than a kid born in Solihull? How can it be right that someone born in Bordesley Green has a one in five chance of being overcrowded, even if their parents or siblings are disabled? How can it be just that someone born in Birmingham this year has a four in 10 chance of being born in poverty? These injustices are wrong. These inequalities demand an answer, not the proposals from the Secretary of State this afternoon.”
“Many of us on this side of the House came into politics for a simple reason: because we wanted to tackle the basic, fundamental injustice that the postcode in which people are born defines their possibilities in life. That is why I gave up a career in business to serve what is this country’s most income-deprived constituency, where four generations of my family have lived and worked. Nine years into this Government’s austerity, those injustices are now looming larger than ever. This Government have given us a slower recovery than after the great depression. What that means in Birmingham is that it is harder to earn a good life than ever before. The employment rate in our city is now lower than it was before the great depression. In some parts of the west midlands today, people are now earning 9% less than they did in 2008.”
“I want to start by associating myself with the remarks of the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), in what I thought was a brilliant exposition of the injustice at the heart of this statement this afternoon. Be in no doubt: this statement today is a basic question of injustice and unfair deserts. It shows this Government’s wilful determination not to do anything about tackling the injustices that now scar this country, including communities such as mine in Birmingham. If they did want to tackle them, at the heart of this statement would be a bold determination to make sure that we were investing most in those communities that need it most. Instead, as the shadow Secretary of State has set out with such brilliance, we have exactly the opposite.”
“Does that mean someone who is seeking office a long time before an election, or a candidate who is seeking office and has been approved by a relevant political party, because political parties are regulated with all sorts of important regulations? Furthermore, what on earth are the safeguards around a person acting on the instructions of someone who is seeking office? When in the electoral cycle does that particular exemption bite? There was a degree of dissonance between the Minister’s remarks and the regulations as drafted. Perhaps she could clear that up before we approve the motion.”
“The second point of clarity that I seek from the Minister concerns regulation 2(3)(c), which is drafted incredibly broadly in saying that the exemption will be enjoyed by “a person seeking to become (or remain) an elected representative” or, indeed, “a person acting on the instructions” of someone who is seeking office. In the Minister’s remarks, she used the phrase “validly nominated”. That is not the definition used in the regulation. There is nothing about valid nomination in the regulation, which is pretty de minimis in that regard; it simply defines the exemption as being for a candidate who is seeking office. What does that mean?”