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.”
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“In particular, the authority seems to find it difficult to spell out the difference between caseworking data and data collected during the course of canvassing, for example, or other such political campaigning functions. Both are covered by the terms of the Data Protection Act. We, as data processors, can process both kinds of data, but the proximity of a candidate, or Member of Parliament, and a political party working in this field will often lead to some confusion about who precisely is responsible for what, and who therefore pays what. As it happens, political parties, candidates and Members are covered in terms of the data processing obligations, but none the less there remains some confusion overhanging from last year.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the case for this important exemption. The debate was rehearsed during the passage of the Data Protection Bill and in previous Delegated Legislation Committees, and the regulations enjoy cross-party support. I want to put two requests to the Minister. The first is for her to underline in guidance to Members of both Houses precisely what their obligations are when it comes to the payment of data processing fees. She will remember that at the back end of last year, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority got into a bit of confusion in overstating some of the new responsibilities.”
“The Minister uses the word “candidate”, which elides two important definitions. One is that set out in the regulations: “a person seeking to become (or remain) an elected representative”. The second is that of an individual who is in that position and has been nominated by a political party. Most Members present think of a candidate as someone who has been validly nominated, rather than the definition in the regulations.”
“The Minister has sought a test that is not in the regulations, so she is inviting the Committee to approve them using a definition that is not in the regulations, but in her speech. Will she undertake, before she concludes her remarks, to write to me and provide an assurance that she will re-present the regulations if necessary? I am happy to give them our leave this afternoon, but I am also happy for her to re-present them if she thinks the definitions need tidying up to bring them within the definition that she set out in her remarks.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for being very generous and giving way again, but that is not good enough, because anyone could seek to stand for elected office. If she and the Information Commissioner want to avoid a very large number of people seeking those exemptions and destroying the economic base of the ICO, the Minister must act, because otherwise that is what she will get. I think she will have to re-present the regulations, but let us just get something in place now to ensure that there is no lacuna in the law. However, please introduce stronger proposals.”
“In the cold of Sunday, Kane Walker was found dead on the pavements of Birmingham. He was 31, and he became one of over 2,600 homeless people to have lost their lives in the last five years. When will the Prime Minister recognise that the scale of homelessness today is a moral emergency, and that we cannot wait until 2027 for this Government to end homelessness for good when we need action now?”
“The Secretary of State will know that the battering of Birmingham next year will be all the more severe for his decision to rule out access to the council’s reserves. Birmingham’s MPs have written to him to ask for a meeting. When he finally wrote back, he refused to meet. May I say to him that he can take these decisions but it is incumbent on him to front them up to Members of this House?”
“I am grateful to the Prime Minister for giving way. She must recognise that she has built a cage of red lines, which produced a deal that was overwhelmingly rejected by this House. We rejected the deal because we rejected the cage. This afternoon, she has yielded nothing about how any one of those red lines will change. If she is not prepared to change, how on earth can we in this House continue to place a shred of confidence in her?”
“I was naive to honour a Treasury tradition that went back to Churchill with a text that is pretty much the same, but I was proud to be part of a team that stopped a recession becoming a depression. This is the Government who— [ Interruption. ]”
“The Prime Minister was a member of the party that backed Labour’s spending plans up to late 2009, and she has presided over a Government who have doubled the size of the national debt.”
“When the Prime Minister took her seals of office, she had the temerity to stand on the steps of Downing Street and say to an anxious nation that she was going to tackle the burning injustices of this country. She said that she was going to tackle the burning flames, yet those flames now rage higher than I have ever seen in my lifetime. She now leads a Government of shreds and patches, and the Opposition say that this country deserves better and that she should do the decent thing and resign.”
“Above all, we said to the people of this country that they should be able to live and raise a family free from fear of want. Well, on the doorstep of this Parliament people are dying homeless, including one of the 5,000 people who have died homeless over the last five years. Many people in this House know that I recently lost my father to a lifelong struggle with alcohol after he lost the woman he loved to cancer, a few years older than me. I know at first hand how a twist of fate can knock you down, but for millions of people in this country, a twist of fate knocks them on to the streets, on to the pavements and into the soup kitchens where I work in Birmingham on a Sunday night. That is not the sign of a civilised and decent country, and it is something of which this Government should be ashamed.”
“For me, the best definition of our poetry was set out back in 1945, when we offered that plan to reconstruct a war-weary nation and win the peace. At that time we said, “What we need in this country is industry in service of the nation.” Do we have that today? The Chancellor himself is the first to berate the terrible rates of productivity growth in our industry, which are worse today than they were in the late 1970s when we used to call it “British disease”. We said that everyone in this country should have the right, through the sweat of their brow, to earn a decent life. Yet half the people in work in the west midlands are in poverty. There are now people going to food banks who never thought they would be in this position.”
“I am grateful for the chance to speak in this debate. The essence of our argument was laid out with force, passion and eloquence by the Leader of the Opposition. The Prime Minister is this afternoon charged with the greatest political failure in modern times. On the most important question that this country faces, she has secured the biggest defeat that Parliament has ever delivered. That alone should be grounds for her to go. How on earth does she think she is going to command a majority in this House when she cannot command a majority on the biggest question of the day? The truth is—the Leader of the Opposition made this point eloquently earlier—that the Prime Minister’s failure of leadership stretches well beyond the failure of her policy on Brexit. It is often said that we campaign in poetry but we govern in prose.”
“Jaguar Land Rover is today set to announce 5,000 job losses in what will be the biggest hammer blow to manufacturing in this country since the closure of Longbridge. When Longbridge closed, it was all hands on deck: we had taskforces and visits from Cabinet Ministers. When will we get an action plan of that kind of force from this Government? Will the Leader of the House tell us when she expects Cabinet Ministers to come forward and explain how we are going to ensure that every single one of those people who lose their jobs today is back in employment as soon as possible?”
“The advent of 5G will require authorities in this country to work incredibly closely with their former partners in the EU. It is obviously a matter of regret that we will not have voting rights over the way the new standards are set. It would be extremely welcome if the Minister can assure us that we will nevertheless be able to influence some of those cross-European standards. This set of regulations is important in itself, but it is merely a piece in a much bigger jigsaw puzzle. If the Minister is not able to get the jigsaw puzzle right, significant bits of British industry will shut down very quickly. I hope she can reassure us about a few of those points.”
“The Minister did not say anything about whether she is satisfied that Ofcom and other regulators have the capability to perform those new responsibilities satisfactorily. Secondly, we heard nothing about any kind of contingency planning for no deal if the adequacy agreement is not forthcoming. We heard nothing about when the timeframe for negotiating it might start. Finally, can the Minister assure us that there will not be a regulatory race to the bottom? The tone that she struck in her remarks suggested that she is trying to ensure the regulatory regime remains in lockstep. Is that indeed her view of how regulation will evolve in this country when it comes to data adequacy? We have some pretty big new telecoms regulations to get sorted over the next few years.”
“It also made the point that it has taken a long time for an adequacy agreement to be pronounced in some cases, even when a country looks like it meets the requisite conditions. In Argentina, it took about 18 months; in other cases it took something like five years. If we face such an elongated timetable before we get such an agreement in place, there will be a very meaningful impact on UK services exports extremely quickly. Will the Minister let us know her views on two or three important questions? First and foremost, do the institutions that will acquire this new power actually have the capability to implement the new regulations? We are transferring supervisory responsibilities from agencies in the European Union to domestic authorities.”
“Services are getting on to about half our exports and are data-enabled, and yet under the new regime we will be treated as a third country. I think the Minister is trying to ensure a degree of regulatory harmonisation with the EU on telecoms. That is important in itself, but frankly it will mean very little unless it contributes meaningfully to ensuring that we have an adequacy agreement in place, especially in the event of no deal. As the Minister will know, the Irish data protection authority issued guidance just before Christmas underlining that the UK will be treated as a third country, and that there is no guarantee that an adequacy agreement will fall into place.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie, and a very happy new year to you and the Committee. I was grateful to the Minister for providing such a long and detailed explanation of the regulations, but nevertheless I was quite surprised that she did not explain to the Committee just how the regulations have a bearing on the big game in town: whether we are going to secure an adequacy agreement on data transfer between the UK and the EU in the event of no deal, or indeed at the end of the transition period. The absolutely critical nature of this adequacy agreement was well discussed during the passage of the Data Protection Act 2018. Over 40% of European tech companies are based in this country, and 75% of our cross-border data flows are with other countries in the European Union.”
“I want to make sure I have understood this correctly. Is the Minister saying to the Committee that, in the event of no deal, it is harder to predict whether an adequacy agreement will come into force?”
“If the Secretary of State wants some empirical evidence, let me give her some: 55,410 people are on universal credit in Birmingham and food bank demand has increased by two thirds. Birmingham MPs, drawing upon our surgery experiences, have highlighted 13 different problems with the process. The Birmingham Mail has highlighted benefit delays of months on end. Unemployment in the inner city is not going down; it is actually going up. Rather than consider any further roll-out of managed migration, let us stop and fix the problems first before more families are plunged into poverty, homelessness and hunger.”
“Three weeks ago I joined the census that shames us, counting rough sleepers in Birmingham. There, beneath the Christmas lights, we found a man without legs sleeping next to his wheelchair in doorways. We found wounded veterans sleeping in arcades. We met a man in the grounds of the cathedral who had had his benefits stopped. We met people fresh out of prison. We met people self-medicating for trauma with drugs and alcohol. These are our neighbours, and some will not survive the winter. Today, coroners do not record homelessness in full on death certificates. That has to change, because we in this House need to know the whole truth about the depths of this scandal. Perhaps then we can shame this Government into dramatically speeding up their timetable to end rough sleeping for good.”
“Why do we not use the hundreds of millions of pounds of new investment to create a space enabling us to take the objects out of the warehouse—artefacts going back to the days of Boulton and Watt—and build a facility that means that anyone who arrives on the high-speed train in Birmingham knows they are arriving at the home of the industrial revolution? The director general of the Science Museum and others from our home city will lobby the Minister about that in the coming months. However, some positive vibrations from the Minister about the notion would be welcome this afternoon.”
“Many of the objects are now languishing in a warehouse in Nechells that has a leaky roof and is prone to floods. Why on earth are we allowing High Speed 2 to develop, in the middle of our city, something that looks like a shed, with limited design and cultural potential? Why are we not using that massive-scale investment in a brand new High Speed 2 station, at the heart of the industrial revolution, to create the greatest science museum in the country? Why do we not designate the area around Curzon Street a heritage action zone?”
“It has been well backed by the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers and its general secretary Paddy Lillis, and it has developed a common-sense manifesto of ideas, such as free bus travel for young people, free wi-fi, good bus routes, a register of landlords for empty shops, and regular reviews of business rates. Those are good ideas, which the Department should champion if it wants to advance the agenda set out by the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South. I want, finally, to make a point about Birmingham. As the Minister will know, the second biggest civic collection outside London is in Birmingham. The civic collection of art and historic artefacts is worth something like £2 billion—there are about £1 billion-worth of paintings, and about £1 billion-worth of objects.”
“If the House believes that culture has a critical role to play, not just in equipping the country for the digital economy, but in making sure that we put the requisite level of investment into the ideas we have discussed this afternoon, it will not happen for free. Local authorities are not geared up to supply the funds that are needed. Therefore, it is important that a good strong culture bid goes to the Treasury from the Department next year. The second idea that I urge the Minister to look at is the Daily Mirror’s high street fightback campaign. The Daily Mirror has done a good job, zeroing in on a concern that is of huge interest around the country.”
“In conclusion, I want to make three points to the Minister—advice, perhaps, from the Opposition. I have two general points and one specific point. I will follow others in adding to his list of good ideas that need much closer attention. The first is that, given the economic pressure on high streets and the scale of cuts that have been made in local authorities, the Minister and those of his poor officials not currently engaged in no-deal planning in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport would do well to look at Labour’s idea for a £1 billion cultural capital fund to put in their bid to the comprehensive spending review next year.”
“It is not a marginal issue in the debates that we have about the future of our economy; it is of critical importance. The Heritage Lottery Fund, through its programme, “New ideas need old buildings”, made the point that our historic quarters are very often the crucibles of new ideas, new businesses, new jobs, new potential and new opportunities, which is something that we see in my home city of Birmingham. In the jewellery quarter, for example, ably represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood), we see a flourishing of small business that has helped to ensure our city is now the second biggest home for start-ups outside London. If we wander around the jewellery quarter, we see a lively amount of economic activity as new businesses begin to flourish.”
“Very often, such decisions are made these days because there are no planners left. In the great city of Birmingham, for example, very few people are left in the planning department. As for the number of architects now employed by local authorities, once upon a time I think half the country’s architects were employed by councils, but now there are very few left. I am afraid that that has implications for the quality of planning decisions and the urban environment that we will leave to the people who take our place. Equally, we have to be realistic about the economic pressure that now weighs heavily on our high streets. That is of enormous importance to this House. Our high streets contribute some £100 billion to our economy and employ some 21,000 people.”
“The history that we find in our town centres is often one of the big magnets—one of the big draws—and therefore one of the secrets to economic development in the years to come. My hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen wrote: “Industrial heritage has to be accessible: both physically, and to our modern, diverse communities.” That is a lesson that we are now seeing incorporated in some action zone plans. However, we have to be honest about the challenges. The scale of the fund, £55 million, comes nowhere near close to filling in the gap carved out by a 32% cut in council funding over the past few years. As the son of a planner, I feel quite strongly—this will echo some of the comments that we have heard this afternoon—about bad planning decisions scarring the urban landscape taking shape around us.”
“I hope the Minister will have the opportunity to spend some time there and draw out some of the lessons from that successful council’s leadership to inform others. I want to add a particular note about industrial heritage and its role in town centre action zones. I agreed very much with the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South when he underlined the importance of that particular aspect of town centre heritage. I commend the superb report written and presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), who chairs the all-party group on industrial heritage. He underlines the way in which industrial heritage can often be better protected and celebrated by ensuring that there are good development plans for town centres.”
“That is why heritage action zones are such a good idea and I, too, add my congratulations to Historic England and its partners in local authorities and elsewhere on introducing and developing the initiative. We can learn a great deal from it. Heritage action zones are particularly important for the Opposition, because we know now that culture is an important driver of modern economic development. We have seen it in towns and cities around the world. We saw it in spades in the extraordinary year of culture in Hull and we are now seeing it in the great city of Coventry, superbly led by my friend, the leader of Coventry Council, George Duggins. Many of us relish what will go on in Coventry.”
“He was a civic entrepreneur with a great interest in civil engineering, so his great push behind the Grand Union canal literally changed the economic geography of our country by providing the crucible of the industrial revolution in the west midlands, with new access to the ports, particularly the ports of Liverpool. This debate needs the inspiration of great forebears such as Wedgwood. That is a long way of saying that I think the starting point for this debate and the consensus on which I want to start is the idea that our heritage and history bring us together. A deepening understanding of the place around us helps us to develop a sense of our own place in the world around us.”
“It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I do not intend to distract the House for very long because we have had a good and thorough debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent South (Jack Brereton) on securing it. We did not hear much about Wedgwood in his 23-minute speech, but it is entirely appropriate that a representative from Wedgwood’s hometown secured this debate. As we know, Wedgwood was one of the great pioneers and entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution, but his field of interest extended far wider than simply the business of pottery. He was a great civic entrepreneur. What he created in Etruria was a model not only of modern factories, but of modern communities.”
“The Prime Minister has said today that she is determined to frustrate another vote of the people, and she has done her level best to frustrate a vote in this Parliament. Does she understand why so many people here think that she is trying to confront and bully this House with a last-minute choice between her deal and no deal, even when she knows the catastrophic cost of no deal for swathes of our industry? May I ask the Prime Minister to clarify for the House this afternoon the simple fact that, when it comes to a meaningful vote in January, this House will indeed be able to rule out no deal and, if necessary, extend article 50?”
“Members on both sides of the House need to be candid and honest, and work together in identifying the shortcomings of the current approach, which was conceived and constructed in legislation that is a couple of years old. We need to be honest and open about its shortcomings so that we can put in place a better solution when we have the White Paper and, I hope, when the Secretary of State brings the Bill to the House.”
“That landscape is much too complicated, and those regulators do not have sufficient powers to implement the safeguards against online harm that we as legislators would like. I am not proposing that we reduce those 13 regulators to one this evening, but I am saying that 13 needs to come down to something closer to one. The House needs to ensure that that regulator has the right power to enforce proper duty of care regulation. The Minister spoke at great length and I am grateful that she took a wide variety of interventions. The orders are important and necessary, and an advance on where we are today, but if we are to get the future right, hon.”
“If I went to London tonight and built myself an arena and filled it with people, I would rightly be asked to observe all kinds of health and safety measures to ensure that that the people were safe and sound. If I build an online arena, I am under no such obligations and can pretty much do what I want. If I ensure that the arena is a social media platform, I will not be hampered in any way by the orders. The duty of care principle is a much better approach, but it needs a different kind of regulator. We currently have something like 13 different regulators overseeing different aspects of internet safety, internet regulation, content regulation and financial processing regulation online. That is far too many.”
“When we take those eight objections together, we see that the orders are half-measures. The reality is that, this year, we have learned about and debated a great many different approaches to clamping down on the harms that may hurt our children online. A much better approach to the problem would be to use a tried and tested concept in health and safety legislation: the duty of care principle, which has been around in English law since at least the early 1970s. That approach would require companies and organisations to take specific steps to understand the potential harms they are causing to their consumers, and then to take appropriate steps to ameliorate those harms.”
“I welcome the fact that the Minister says that the Secretary of State will come back to the House in 12 to 18 months with a progress report, but that is rather a long time in the future if the BBFC is found to be seriously failing in the execution of its duties at a much earlier stage. The seventh problem is that there is not an exhaustive list of age-verification solutions. The Minister will say that the technology moves on and that we need to preserve a degree of flexibility to allow the legislation to keep up to date but, none the less, the lack of specificity worries me. It worries me that the BBFC is not yet able to insist on minimal regulations and solutions for age-verification systems. The eighth problem is that the guidance on what is appropriate in systems is vague.”
“When the orders were passed to give the BBFC the role we are debating this evening, the Opposition raised significant concerns about whether, despite its extensive experience, the measures constitute mission creep for the BBFC. The Opposition and other hon. Members have serious doubts about whether it is resourced enough to do the job. This is a new departure in its business, and it does not have a track record. It does not have a royal charter, and it cannot de facto be assumed to be operating in the common good. The basic challenge hon. Members have is this: who will watch the watchmen? How will we ensure that that private organisation, which is blessed by us with statutory powers and statutory regulatory oversight, executes the task we give it effectively? We cannot rely on its mission.”
“Just as significant is another challenge. Because of the same use of definitions, it is not possible to prohibit violent pornography that is illegal under the Video Recordings Act 1984. I understand that Baroness Howe has a Bill in the other place to step on and do away with these problems, and perhaps at some point we might learn whether the Minister is minded to support that legislation. I am not sure whether the Minister gets a chance to wind up under the rules of tonight’s debate, but she might want to intervene if a box note is forthcoming. The sixth problem is that the orders give power to what is essentially a private company.”
“The Government have changed what the BBFC can ask internet service providers to block from so-called “prohibited material” to the much narrower definition of “extreme pornography”. In so doing, they exclude the power to ask ISPs to block non-photographic, animated child abuse images. Those are illegal to possess under section 62 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 but, at the moment, they are outwith the protections of the orders. If those images are located outside the UK, they are not within the remit of the Internet Watch Foundation. Given the number of such images that we know are available, that is a serious shortcoming in the orders. It is a great concern to the House that neither the Internet Watch Foundation nor the BBFC has the power to deal with those images. That brings us to the fifth issue.”
“The orders and the explanatory notes are not terribly clear about the sins that will be allowed through the net because of that odd definition. The third problem, which was debated in the other place, is the challenge of what definition of “obscene material” to use. At least a couple of definitions are knocking around different bits of legislation and it is not clear that the orders are all-encompassing in the definitions used. That brings us to the fourth issue, which was championed by Baroness Howe in the other place. The definitions that have been used create a couple of important new gaps. I am grateful for the briefing circulated by Christian Action Research and Education, which has set out the challenge in important ways.”
“As the House will know, the reason why this is such a problem is that when we took the Data Protection Bill through this place, we exercised a derogation under European law that allowed us to deem that children were basically unfettered on social media platforms from the age of 14, not 16 as other European countries insist. Debating the right protections for our children on social media platforms is extremely important, and hon. Members are absolutely right to clock that the orders do not touch on that important arena. The second problem is the odd definition of “commercial basis” that is used as the trigger for requiring age-verification systems. We have had a useful exchange about business models that entice users by offering free content—the money is made either by advertising or through premium content.”
“I appreciate that the Minister has to start from somewhere, but there are obvious flaws in this plan, not least providers simply filling their sites with virtuous content in order to get around the regulations. It strikes me we can fully anticipate that even at this stage of the legislation. As has been highlighted by a number of hon. Members, some of whom are not now in their place, these regulations do not bite on social media firms. This is lunacy. This is surely one of the most dangerous areas in which our children are exposed to these kinds of online harms, so bringing forward a set of measures without explicit reference to their non-applicability to social media firms seems to me to be a shortcoming.”
“They are the age-appropriate design code, which was promised under the Data Protection Bill, and the internet safety strategy, which I know the Secretary of State is hoping to bring forward as soon as he can get his civil servants back from no-deal planning and get them back on to the Department’s important business. I hope the Minister is able to set out for us how long she expects this stopgap to last, and I want to flag up to her the 10 obvious deficiencies that leap out from the measures and the explanatory notes to them. I will rattle through them fairly quickly, in the interests of time. The first problem is the very strange conclusion in the regulations of a de minimis of content at which the regulator will deem it necessary to trigger a safety wall of age-verification software. It is really not clear why a third was chosen.”
“As the Minister has been candid enough to admit in her really quite helpful explanatory remarks this evening, these regulations may touch on the problem, but they absolutely do not solve it. We need a very different regulatory approach to the online harms we are seeking to police. In debating the shortcomings of these regulations, I hope we are able to help the Minister and the Secretary of State, who is good enough to be on the Front Bench tonight, to get two crucial reforms right. We asked for these reforms in the Data Protection Bill.”
“If those duties bite on us, as legislators and indeed as parents, those duties should also bite on companies and indeed on social media companies. These measures go a little distance towards imposing some of those duties on commercial providers. They do not go far enough, and I will explain why there are shortcomings. However, they come so late and are needed so urgently that we will not oppose them or divide the House this evening. These measures are a stopgap. I hope the Minister will at some point during these proceedings explain just how long this stopgap is expected to last. At the moment, we have the situation, as the Information Commissioner has put it, that the internet has become something of a “wild west”.”