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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“A vote is imminent, so I shall be brief. I am not entirely convinced that the Minister has read the report. She did not say much about what she had learned or what she disagreed with; we heard a defence of everything in the Government’s platform. I do not think that the British public want an economic policy that is a nudge here and a nudge there. I think that they are looking for a much more radical transformation. The Government have an opportunity at the G20, which is focused on the future of work, to make good on the commitments that they made when signing up to the 2015 sustainable development goals and the communique at the 2016 Hangzhou G20 summit. Those commitments were to creating a much more inclusive economy than today.”
“A month ago my constituent was beaten within an inch of his life at HMP Birmingham not once but twice, and not in a dark corner but in the full glare of a video that was then posted on social media. The chaos over which G4S presided at HMP Birmingham was dark, dangerous and violent. It is very hard to square a future in which this prison is returned to G4S with the level of investment and staffing that is needed to ensure it is a safe prison. Will the Minister reflect again on what the shadow Secretary of State said about the need for an independent commission to stand as a gateway, a test, before any decision is made to put this prison back into the private sector that so desperately failed the people of Birmingham?”
“This House is the guardian of free and fair elections. It is now clear that this referendum result was corrupt because it was bought, quite possibly with Russian money. Which Minister will now ask the Director of Public Prosecutions to consider a joint enterprise prosecution so that it is not just the staff of these campaigns that are prosecuted but the governing minds as well?”
“Last week, a much loved grandmother, Riasat Bi, was murdered in her own home during a knife fight; she was 86. West Midlands police are doing everything they can to respond to the growing spiral of violence in east Birmingham, but they need help. The force is at its smallest size since 1974: it needs new investment and we need new investment in youth services. Will the Home Secretary listen to our experience in east Birmingham as he prepares his bid for the Budget later this year?”
“The Secretary of State will remember that back in 2013 I warned that this was not a benefit that was ready for wide-scale roll-out. In my Birmingham constituency, we have the DWP telling my constituents that they cannot apply for housing credit through universal credit. They get sent to Birmingham City Council, which then sends them back to the DWP. There is still a level of chaos on the frontline that meant that one of my constituents told me that not only could they not afford to eat, she could not afford to put socks on her children’s feet.”
“The Prime Minister should have sacked her Foreign Secretary some time ago, given that he is someone who put himself before his party. She now risks putting her party before her country. How can she possibly persuade us that she can negotiate with strength with Brussels when it is clear that she leads a divided House and is struggling to take back control of her Cabinet, never mind anything else?”
“That is surprising because, in relation to principle 3, paragraph 5.1 on page 7 in the first set of measures states explicitly: “Data can only be disclosed to processors…where expressly permitted, and must comply with the six conditions set out in the Act.” Those six conditions are pretty high level, and that is why the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation is so important. However, as the centre produces judgments, how will they be reflected in revisions of these orders? Will we have a Committee meeting such as this every six months as we seek to update the orders in the light of new judgments that come from the centre? The orders have our broad support, but the Minister must say more about how the architecture for revision of the orders will unfold, given the important institutional reforms that she seeks to introduce.”
“Will we begin to see the break-up of the risk pool because insurance companies are able to use the data to price the Minister’s health insurance in a different way from someone else’s? Who will make the information available to drugs companies, for example? How will that be done? The Minister, in our debates earlier this year, put some store by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation that the Government propose. We still do not know much about that. We do not know when it will be set up, its terms of reference, who will be in it, its scope or how people will be appointed. However, the Minister has said nothing about the inter-relationship between a Government centre for artificial intelligence ethics and the measures before us.”
“However, there will be ethical questions about the way in which the information is collected and interpreted and, crucially, who the information is made available to, whether that is accounting firms, for example, or businesses that rely on accurate market understandings in order to produce sales forecasts. There will be all kinds of uses for this kind of information, which is of tremendous benefit to all sorts of people, but the ethics of what is released and how things are released are incredibly important. In the area of health data, the information that we are talking about is even more important. Who will have access to patterns of health diagnosis information? Will it be the insurance companies?”
“The data and the provisions in these measures will be incredibly important in two particularly important fields of public policy. One is tax forecasting and the other is the use of health data. As the International Monetary Fund and Christine Lagarde said earlier this year, the advent of the digital economy creates the ability to start doing real-time tax forecasting, based on predictive models that are reasonably robust. That has an incredible impact on the Treasury’s ability to put together Budgets that bear some resemblance to the truth and the real world.”
“I am thinking of, for example, the way in which we revise GDP forecasts, tax forecasts and annually managed expenditure forecasts. That leads to errors and mistakes by politicians such as the hon. Lady and, indeed, myself, in previous posts, so the power of these measures will be incredibly important in the years ahead. In traditional British civil service fashion, what we have is a set of measures designed to create some process integrity, and some order in the process, so that decisions are taken according to a process that is well understood, well articulated and set out on bits of paper. It was slightly surprising, though, that the Minister did not say anything about the ethics that would be involved in the decisions that were taken, the way in which data is collected and the way in which data is interpreted over the years to come.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Davies. These measures are incredibly important because they will become the foundation for most of the public service reform that lies ahead in the next 20 years, so I want to start with a word of praise for and thanks to Sir Andrew Dilnot for the way in which he pioneered this agenda when he was chair of the UK Statistics Authority. I think that the Minister has slightly undersold the fact that we are moving from a position whereby public policy decisions are made using official statistics to an increasing use of real-time official statistics. Anyone who has had to take big public decisions based on data that is available will know how frustrating it is to be relying on data that is basically looking in the rear-view mirror.”
“My hon. Friend might know that our noble Friend Lord Parry introduced proposals to amend the Data Protection Bill to ensure that the wealth that may arise from the investigation of health records, for example, was held in a sovereign data fund. These ideas of sovereign data funds will catch on over the next few years, but at the moment we do not have any provisions to capture what is socially produced wealth—data—and to recycle that wealth for the good of the nation.”
“I am grateful to learn that there is a seamless channel of communication between the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the UK Statistics Authority, but that was not the question I asked. I asked how the guidelines are going to be revised as the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation pronounces new judgments. It is not for the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and the UK Statistics Authority to sort something out between themselves; it is for this House to set out the principles by which both organisations act.”
“I urge the Minister to think more radically about how we assemble a proper electronic ID scheme in this country that connects the principal databases that hold information about each of us. Secondly, I would like an answer on whether this will help us to avoid some of the mistakes that we saw in the Windrush scandal. Thirdly, if she will give us some hope that the registration system for deaths may get better for important communities in our country, we would all be reassured.”
“It is partly about the underfunding of registration services up and down the country, but there is also a lack of information sharing between the national health service, the coroner’s office and the registration service. At the moment, that leads to delays. If, for example, someone dies at the weekend, the consultant who was on at that weekend may not be rostered back on duty for another few days, so the coroner cannot get in touch with the last medical professional to see the person before they died. It beggars belief that the national health service is unable to put in place systems that allow information sharing with civil registration officials and, where necessary, with coroners, so that bodies can be released within 24 hours and people can be buried in line with their religious beliefs.”
“That injustice, at its worst, led to the Windrush scandal in recent weeks. The second point on which I want to press the Minister relates to the very difficult situation that many families face upon the death of a loved one. As she will know, the courts have recently ruled that someone’s faith is a relevant issue in deciding whether to release a body quickly, so that where the diktats of someone’s religion require a burial within 24 hours, that wish can be accommodated. At the moment, in cities such as Birmingham—I know it is a problem in London as well—delays are far too great. That leads to incredible distress among families who cannot bury their loved ones within 24 hours, as they would like to in line with their religion.”
“There are two particular case studies on which I want to press the Minister for answers. The first relates to how the regulations will empower immigration officials in the UK Border Agency and the Home Office to quickly and readily get hold of basic information that they need to prove someone’s right to a British passport. I know that you, Mr Sharma, will have had such cases. I have had lots of cases where the Home Office either lost a passport or lost access to a passport, and where basic information is just not readily accessible or collectible in one place to allow a quick decision on, for example, nationality. Will the regulations make it easier for immigration officials to get hold of registration information that is often buried in the books and databases of registrars up and down the country, so we can stop this basic injustice?”
“I urge the Minister to go back to the drawing board in the months to come and think about how we can create a public option for eID. Most of us now have a plethora of private IDs, some of which are safer than others. In Estonia, they have found that creating a public option for electronic ID with good oversight allows them to unlock all kinds of new electronic services, which will be in both the public and private sector in the years to come. The proposals are basically good. They are important because most entitlements to public services in this country still require some kind of verification from the individual, such as their paper birth certificate, marriage certificate, civil partnership certificate or indeed death certificate. At the moment it is too difficult to share that information.”
“It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. The Minister will be delighted to hear that we are not planning to divide the Committee this afternoon, but none the less hon. Members will want some assurances about the change that the legislation will effect in the world. At the moment, it feels to me that the Government are being forced to take incremental steps forward. We lack a holistic plan for electronic identity in this country. A country such as Estonia has 10 basic databases that contain all the information that anyone entitled to public services might need to draw on, and it is well connected. Here, we are relying on the Minister’s introducing “bits and pieces” statutory instruments, which allow this official and that official to share information.”
“Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions will take to ensure that frontline managers in the DWP understand the new legal latitude available to them to join together to deliver what public services are left in this country? The final point that the Minister might just say a word about is a problem that was raised before the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee in the other place, which I do not think we have had a particularly good answer to: why, under these regulations, can data be exchanged about the whole household even if only one individual in the household meets the criteria she has set out? These are sensible regulations and they should have been put in place a long time ago, but there are a number of assurances that I know the Committee will want to hear this afternoon.”
“Secondly, the reality is that not a lot of public services are delivered proactively any more, because not many public services are left in many of our communities. None the less, where there are opportunities for local councils to join up with the Department for Work and Pensions, that is a good thing. It has been a real problem for many years that sometimes it is easier for an officer in a local authority to join a temping agency and get a temp job with the DWP in order to get hold of information from the Department. Will the Minister lay out with some clarity this afternoon that local councils will now be able to share information with the DWP and the DWP will share information with local authorities, and will she tell us what steps her right hon.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hosie. I have been writing about the need for Government to join themselves up a bit better for 22 years and so the Minister will be delighted to hear that we can give these measures—they are humble measures but none the less a step forward—our full support this afternoon. There are, though, three questions on which the Minister could helpfully brief the Committee. First, she is seeking much broader powers for various Departments, and it is a well established principle in the House that where broader powers are given to the Executive, greater powers of oversight and scrutiny should be applied to those agencies, so we would be grateful if she said a little more about what additional oversight comes as a result of these regulations falling into place.”
“Will the Minister confirm what latitude she is giving councils and the DWP to share information? I think that that is the principle clarification that we were looking for.”
“I did not mean to intervene again, but my constituency has the highest youth unemployment in Britain and down the years we have been bedevilled by a lack of co-operation between the DWP and the city council. The city council often wants to target young people who need local authority-run job and employment creation schemes. It is unable to run outreach schemes that target individuals effectively, because it cannot get the information from the DWP, so it has to resort to the rather inefficient approach of targeting whole postcodes. That is the sort of thing I am driving at.”
“I respect the position in which the right hon. Gentleman finds himself. Birmingham airport could take 17 million extra flights now on the existing infrastructure, and that capacity could be unlocked if we built the high-speed loop that was originally proposed. The cost of that loop would be about half that proposed for the new runway at Heathrow. Should we not look again at using high-speed rail to unlock capacity we already have rather than bring forward a proposal that will drain 43,000 flights from our airport?”
“If we are to be a world leader in AI, we will need more computer scientists. This week, Roehampton University reported on the total collapse in the number of students studying ICT at GSCE level. Will the Minister set out her target for the number of students studying technology over the next year, and say what she will do to ensure that more girls in particular study ICT, because that is where the collapse is worst?”
“I will leave the Minister with this thought: there is a basic injustice in a marketplace where, over the course of a single morning, James Bloodworth can earn £29 working in an Amazon warehouse but the wealth of Jeff Bezos goes up by $1.4 billion. We had a long tradition in this country of entrepreneurs, such as George Cadbury, William Lever and John Spedan Lewis, who not only built great businesses, but changed society for the better. We need the Government to ensure that the entrepreneurs of today are doing a damn sight better job on that front.”
“It beggars belief that some of the biggest firms on the planet, such as Amazon, are being caught not paying the national minimum wage. Where is the inspectorate? Where are the prosecutions? Where are the court cases? Is the Minister prepared to tell us what he is doing to ensure that justice is done? We have had a useful debate this afternoon about the shortcomings of the Taylor review. The economy will inevitably grow in the years to come, so we have to try to equalise definitions of workers. We have to do away with the nonsense of the Swedish derogation and put in place the kind of action plan that the TUC has carefully and thoughtfully developed.”
“Automation alone is likely to destroy five times more working-class jobs than the shutdowns of the coal and steel industries put together. We know that trend is coming; we know what happened when coal and steel were lost to communities across the country in the 1980s. What grew back were the kinds of insecure jobs we are debating now. Let us not make that mistake again. Let us put in place now a regime for good jobs in the years to come. Secondly, we have to look again at why it is that basic laws, such as the right to trade union organising or the right to the national minimum wage, are not being enforced today. I commend James Bloodworth’s book on the scandals we have heard about. I had the honour of meeting him this afternoon.”
“I add my thanks and congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Stephanie Peacock) on securing the debate. I will just make three broad points. First, it is extraordinary that the Government have not got a grip on the debate. It are not a marginal issue. One in five workers in this country are now self-employed—a bigger proportion than public service workers. If public service workers in this country were confronting the kinds of conditions and suffering the kinds of stories we heard this afternoon, there would be a national scandal. Why are we not getting to grips with this challenge for the country’s self-employed? If the present day is not bad enough, hon. Members should think about what is to come. Over the next 10 years this economy will be fundamentally transformed by automation, Brexit and the rise of China.”
“Birmingham has some of the worst health outcomes in the country. It is not a surprise, as A&E waits of over four hours are up by more than 127% in recent years, and waits of more than 18 weeks for treatment are up by 65%. Yet, according to freedom of information request responses I have received, our trusts in Birmingham have to make savings of £155 million this year. What are the Government going to do to save the health system in Birmingham, which is currently in a state of collapse?”
“The overwhelming majority of people in this House will welcome the overwhelming majority in the G7 agreeing not to let Russia back to the top table, but Russia is now seeking to exert its influence through the back door, and we learnt about the scale of that over the weekend. The Prime Minister says that it is an Electoral Commission inquiry, but the Electoral Commission does not have the legal power to summon the information that it needs. If she can set up a rapid action taskforce abroad, why can we not have a rapid action taskforce here at home? Why can we not put the Electoral Commission on it along with the Metropolitan police, because that is the only way we will find out whether Arron Banks’ millions were in fact Moscow gold?”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is the Minister, and I think the Committee would like to know what the Government are doing to ensure that fans are not being scammed.”
“At the moment, they are making enormous profits from the Government’s rather hands-off, slipshod and laissez-faire approach. We think that that should change, and that Professor Waterson’s recommendation is important. We would like to hear the Minister’s conclusion, having considered the matter now that she has been in position for some time. The third question is about the secondary ticketing market through companies such as Ticketbis and Viagogo, which continue to leave fans open to large-scale fraud. I understand that tickets for World cup and premier league games are on sale on Ticketbis without the relevant information required by the Consumer Rights Act. This will shock you, Mr Evans, but some tickets for the World cup final are coming in at more than £20,000.”
“We said clearly that we would like to go beyond the recommendations that Professor Waterson proposed, which were good, but which we thought could be strengthened still further. With that in mind, I shall ask the Minister a few questions. First, has she considered the recommendation by Professor Waterson that large-scale sellers on secondary platforms should be reclassified as traders? If someone is classified as a trader, a number of protections kick in under the Consumer Rights Act. At the moment, those protections are not available in the case of secondary platforms. It is therefore a very important question, and the Committee will want to hear the answer from the Minister. Secondly, has the Minister considered Professor Waterson’s recommendation that such organisations should have to attain a licence to sell a large number of tickets?”
“It is a great pleasure and privilege to serve under your chairmanship this evening, Mr Evans. May I offer begrudging congratulations to the Minister on implementing yet another measure from the Labour manifesto, where we set out with a clarity that was perhaps lacking in the Conservative manifesto that we would implement anti-bot legislation to stop professional ticket touts ripping off thousands of fans in this country? The Minister did not put on the record her thanks to Professor Waterson, but let me put on the record our own thanks to him for his excellent review. We shall not divide the Committee on the draft regulations, because the measure was such a clear and popular one in our manifesto, but we encourage the Minister to go a little further and to look at what else we promised in our manifesto.”
“At the moment, the Premier League is describing organisations such as Ticketbis and other platforms as unauthorised sellers of tickets for games, yet they continue to operate with extraordinary impunity and in a way that completely flouts the protections that this House put in place in the Consumer Rights Act. We would like to hear what the Minister will do to bring order to this chaos.”
“I can scarcely believe what my hon. Friend has told the Committee. It is a very good example of the profit margins being made by unscrupulous traders, who are being allowed to get away scot-free by this careless Government. My fourth question is about an important health and safety matter. As the Minister knows, at the moment secondary ticketing websites allow tickets in the away end of football stadiums to be acquired by home fans. That undermines safety regulations that have been in force in stadiums for decades. I did not hear what the Government propose to do about that.”
“Is it time for a general debate on the defence of parliamentary privilege? I understand that Mr Christopher Chandler has threatened six Select Committee Chairs with proceedings in the European Court of Human Rights if they dare to probe his links with President Putin. I happen to believe that if a New Zealander who is based in Dubai with acquired Maltese citizenship and a think-tank in Mayfair has suspect links, we should raise questions. Is it time to send a message from this House that we will not be bullied or intimidated by anyone, no matter what their wealth?”
“The Minister says that recognising the state of Palestine will not change the facts on the ground, but he must accept that the facts on the ground are changing now because hope is bleeding to death. He says he is waiting for the right moment. If he goes ahead with the appalling President Trump’s ill-advised visit to this country, that is the moment at which we should say to the President and to the world: we recognise the state of Palestine.”
“She knew that this business is a contact sport and that many of us are perfectly capable of self-inflicted wounds sometimes. She was never one to judge. She was always the one—the first—to ring you, to hug you, and to tell you reassuringly that it is always darkest before dawn. Above all, though, it was her political style that many of us will remember. I was taught at the beginning of my political career that there are two kinds of politicians: those who try to divide us and those who try to make change happen by bringing us together. With the Olympics, as with so much in her life, she brought the whole world together to make progress. Sometimes we on this side of the House ask ourselves how futures are really built. Tessa Jowell provided the example, not just with her words but with her deeds.”
“Tessa Jowell was one of the greatest entrepreneurs in public life that we have seen in this country for decades. She was such a brilliant idealist not because she could talk with people late into the night about the newest ideas or the latest trends in thinking, but because she thought that the best thing to do with ideas is turn them into action. She was a practical idealist unlike any that we have seen for many years. She was tremendously persistent, but with that persistence came the wisdom to know that sometimes progress did not always happen in a straight line. She had one of the best political sat-navs in the business. She knew that if you hit a roadblock, that was not the end of the story. You just had to figure how you went on round it. She had tremendous passion, but she matched that with her compassion.”
“Will the Secretary of State confirm to the House that the BBC, Channel 4 and every other broadcaster operates under much more stringent rules, and yet nothing seems to have got in the way of their powers of interrogation and investigation? Does he think that they are operating second-class investigations today?”
“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for giving way just before he moves off the subject of IPSO. He has set out arguments in IPSO’s defence. It is not just MailOnline that is outside the arbitration scheme; that is also true of Newsquest and Archant, so a significant chunk of the press is outside it. Brian Leveson said that the regulator needed to have independent board members, independence of operation, fair remedy for complaints, the ability to carry out investigations, the ability to issue fines, and universal arbitration. None of those conditions is put in place by IPSO, so which of those principles does the Secretary of State think should be retired?”
“This is probably a good point for the Secretary of State to remind the House about Brian Leveson’s view of the future of the inquiry. Will he set that out for us?”
“It is right that it should go ahead, and that is fully our intention.” —[ Official Report , 29 November 2012; Vol. 554, c. 458.] The then Prime Minister was not speaking simply on his own behalf; he was speaking on behalf of Government Members, including members of today’s Government Front Bench such as the Chief Whip, the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Julian Smith), who wrote not too long ago to one of his constituents: “The Government has been clear all along that the status quo is not an option and I, personally, am determined to see Lord Justice Leveson’s principles implemented.” Where has that commitment gone this afternoon?”
“There were too many cases coming to court at the time; there was too much evidence still under wraps; and there was too much that had to be left in the dark. As the Father of the House so rightly pointed out, it was never a question of opening a new inquiry; this is about letting the existing inquiry actually finish its work. When the previous Prime Minister, Mr Cameron, having spoken to victims, made a statement, the point he wanted to impress on Members on both sides of the House was the need for Leveson to finish the job: “One of the things that the victims have been most concerned about is that part 2 of the investigation should go ahead—because of the concerns about that first police investigation and about improper relationships between journalists and police officers.”
“I rise to support in particular new clause 18, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), and indeed our new clause 20 and the consequential amendments. The background to this is fairly well rehearsed, but it is worth remembering the level of shock we all felt when the revelations about phone hacking first became public. It is worth remembering the shock we felt when we heard that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked. It does not often happen in this House that Members on both sides unite to try to construct a shared way forward through an extremely difficult problem, yet that is exactly what we managed to do with the Leveson inquiry. That was very difficult, but it was always going to be a game of two halves.”
“He goes on to say that “having spent 15 years in the business, it is no surprise…that I still know people in the illegal data theft industry, and specifically,”— this is the nub of the argument— “that I know individuals who are still engaged in these activities on behalf of newspapers.” The idea that magically this bad behaviour suddenly stopped and is not ongoing is argument one that has been knocked down.”