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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“Perhaps the Minister will say a little about how she will tackle that particular problem, because we know it is going to arise.”
“I expect that the things we will learn about over the weekend and into next week will confirm for us all that very small companies—essentially corporate shells—that are perhaps registered as data controllers and might have committed offences under the 1998 Act or under the Bill, once it has received Royal Assent, might be controlled by directors who are domiciled elsewhere. If the Bill is to be worth anything and if it is to change anything in the real world in which we happen to live, there is a real question about how offences committed under it by people here will be limited by the corporate realities, which mean that shell companies are data controllers, but actually the wealth, assets and operating mind of a company are somewhere else.”
“This is where we get into some of the whys and wherefores of the territorial application of the Bill. We can see in clause 200(1) that the Bill essentially bites on a data controller who is domiciled here in the United Kingdom. A question of public concern—it should also concern us in this Committee—is whether the bite and sanctions of the Bill will touch on people who are registered here, but not necessarily on directors of holding companies who are domiciled elsewhere.”
“I think we would all benefit from a little bit of explanation about how this clause will work in practice. For those who have not read clause 202 in detail, it basically explains how this Bill will operate when it comes to the Crown. That is obviously important, because within Her Majesty’s estates there are particular estates such as the Duchy of Lancaster and indeed the Duchy of Cornwall, which are often quite big businesses. I remember from my own time as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster that there are some quite significant property holdings in that Duchy, and they make a not insignificant contribution to the funds that Her Majesty uses to work with, day to day. How will this clause be put into practice and are there any relevant exemptions that we should know about?”
“There are now 3,000 Government e-services and 5,000 private sector e-services that sit on top of that platform. When I met the former Prime Minister of Estonia, he said that the key to winning the argument was that financial institutions such as banks were so confident in the public infrastructure that had been created that they were prepared to go out to the public in Estonia and say, “The public option for an electronic ID is the right option.””
“Anyone in this country who has tried to file their taxes online, as I did early in January, will know that the Government gateway here is nowhere near that level. Once I had been issued with my fifth online ID, I frankly gave up and rang the MPs’ hotline, and the person there said, “Yeah, we’ve had lots of problems like this. You can just file your tax return on paper like everybody else.” We are sadly lacking the kind of digital infrastructure that many other countries enjoy. The point about the public option for electronic ID is that there is a country that has decided that the right to a secure ID is a fundamental right, and on that fundamental right has flourished a digital economy that has helped to create the world’s leading digital society.”
“We need to be betting on digital in the way we bet on steam a couple of centuries ago. Two things are absolutely key to the digital environment in Estonia. One is a platform called X-Road, which allows Government data from distributed databases to come together to answer particular kinds of problems, but absolutely fundamental is the public option of an e-ID scheme. That involves two-factor authentication and it comes with important features such as the ability for people to look online at who has been using their data, who has been accessing it, and what they have been using it for. In fact, doctors and police officers have gone to jail because they have misused their ability to access online records—medical records, for instance.”
“Edelman recently produced a survey that said that one quarter of the UK population trusts social media and 61% trust traditional media, so there are huge imbalances in what people trust today. I have been interested in this question for a while, and I have been interested in seeing what we can learn from some of the world’s digital leaders. On a recent visit to Estonia, which is by some agreement the world’s leading digital society, the thing that really struck me was the fact that digital trust is supremely high. The Government of Estonia took the big decision, when they left that north-west corner of the USSR, that they would have to take a big gamble on the future. As we leave the north-west corner of Europe, we need to be taking a similar big bet on the future.”
“The figures that I have dug out are for the time before the scandals that we have learned about over the last couple of weeks, which will not have put trust levels up. Online fraud is now growing very quickly. In fact, Action Fraud says that 70% of all fraud is now cyber-enabled. That is not simply a commercial problem; it is also a public sector problem. Public services such as the NHS hold vast quantities of public data. The NHS has been hit very badly by malware in a way that has provoked real questions about the UK’s digital resilience. The National Audit Office said that the NHS and the then Department of Health must “get their act together” or suffer far worse than the chaos of 2017.”
“Ultimately, a handshake will always be as important as a contract, and a handshake relies on an environment of trust. When countries do not have environments of trust, they lack economic institutions that allow their economies to flourish. The challenge in this country today is that we are not making quite as much progress with the digital economy as perhaps we could be. Indeed, in most international indexes, where we should be at the top, we are normally batting at about fifth and sixth. That is not terrible, but most of us would like it to be better. We are the home of the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution. We should be at the top of the table, not fifth and sixth. That provokes us to ask what is the state of online trust and digital trust in this country.”
“If we go back to the debates here in the 1630s and 1640s, we see that the rights of new entrepreneurs to defend the wealth that they had created through trading, particularly in the Atlantic colonies—examples include the Virginia Company and, later, the East India Company—and the rights that we sought to enshrine and protect against arbitrary taxation, were absolutely fundamental in laying the foundation for the industrial revolution that really began to take off in the years after the Bill of Rights was enshrined by William III in 1689. The argument that I want to make this morning is that the sweeping changes of the digital age mean that it would be wise of us to consider a similarly ambitious set of rights for the digital age. Anyone who has an interest in economic history will know that, ultimately, we can never contract for anything.”
“We then made a much more sweeping and important statement that received Royal Assent on 16 December 1689. We had a couple of centuries off and in more recent years we went rights crazy and started signing universal declarations in the years after the second world war with much greater speed. We had the universal declaration of human rights, in which British civil servants took a leading role; the UN convention on the rights of the child; the charter of fundamental rights, which we helped shape; and the incorporation of those regimes of rights, which we wrote for our neighbours, into British law through the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Equality Act 2010. Over the years, the regime of rights that we have pioneered in this country has been absolutely fundamental to the progress that we have made as a nation.”
“We now come to the good stuff. Members of the Committee can look forward to an enormous amount of ground to cover in the debates ahead. We will try to speed through it as quickly as we can, but there is an awful lot of ground to cover. New clauses 5 and 6 and new schedule 1, tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friends, are an attempt to provoke the Government into being more ambitious in their strategy for the digital world. Every so often, as a great nation, we make important declarations of rights. Rights are important because they ensure that progress is democratised, but they also provide important new protections against new imbalances of power that arise. We really began to turn our minds to this about 803 years ago when we came up with Magna Carta.”
“It is because we have been that pioneer down the centuries that we are today the world’s fifth-biggest economy, but we are not the world’s leading digital society. It is an ambition of the Opposition that we should be, and we think that a bill of digital rights would help us to get there.”
“Who owns the copyright of data will become more important as the value of data grows exponentially. Article 7 talks about the right to fairness when it comes to automated decision making, which we will come to in the debate on algorithmic fairness. Algorithms are making more and more decisions in our lives. People have a right not to be treated unfairly as a result of those decisions. In the phrase used by my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge, we cannot have a world in which yesterday’s injustice is hard-coded into tomorrow’s injustice. We think that ensuring a right to algorithmic fairness in our bill of data rights is important. The rights to participation, protection and removal are important too. We have a long tradition of rights in this country; we are the world’s pioneers of them.”
“It is important to specify, set out and declare that we see equality of access to the digital environment as important. Article 5 sets out the right to privacy, which, again, is scattered throughout the Bill, although we would like to consolidate and crystallise it and bring it together. Article 6 covers ownership and control, which will only grow in importance. This is not the place to get into the vexed debate about who owns the copyright to the data that someone might have and the new data that might be created by joining that data with someone else’s. However, the question of who owns the copyright, and therefore who owns the value of data that is personal in origin, is only going to grow. That debate is almost the 21st century equivalent to that on the enclosure of the commons, frankly.”
“The principle of equality of treatment is written throughout every clause of the Bill. The point is that it is written through 200 clauses, so we think a basic statement of equality of treatment is a good place to start. Article 2 covers the right to security, which is the subject of the Bill. Again, let us set that out in terms. Article 3 covers the right to free expression, which is something we have signed up to in articles of the European convention on human rights. It is something that we should set within the context of a bill of data rights. Article 4 covers the right of equality of access. Giving equal access to the digital environment is extremely important. The digital environment creates a network, and network effects mean that the more people joined to it, the greater the value of the network.”
“These five firms have a market capitalisation, although it is slightly less than it was, of about $2.5 trillion, so the idea that a humble citizen can take on some of these giants is nonsensical. We would therefore like this bill of data rights to sit alongside a much more effective, open and democratic form of class action. I am really interested in the Minister’s observations on the rights we have set out. Article 1 of our proposed new schedule covers equality of treatment, which is enshrined in the GDPR. The GDPR is long—we have made incredible progress through it, article by article—and it is a miracle that we have arrived at page 123 of the Bill by Thursday afternoon, but that is a real testament to the skilful chairing of Mr Hanson and you, Mr Streeter.”
“Indeed, the Children’s Commissioner, when reflecting on that, said: “Children have absolutely no idea that they are giving away the right to privacy or the ownership of their data or the material they post online.” The Government have obviously sought to exercise their derogation under the GDPR and set the age of consent at 13, rather than 16, so the code of practice that the Minister has agreed to is really important. We would like this bill of data rights to go alongside more effective mechanisms to ensure that those rights are enforceable. That is why we tabled our amendments to clause 80(2). We think it is impossible in today’s economic environment for ordinary citizens to take effective action against the biggest firms on earth.”
“We have had quite a collection of evidence over the last year from people such as the Children’s Commissioner, who have ridden in behind and supported Baroness Kidron’s 5Rights movement. The Children’s Commissioner recently said: “The social media giants have simply not done enough to make children aware of what they are signing up to when they install an app or open an account.” The idea that children can look at these pages and pages of terms and conditions and just click and agree to them is obviously nonsensical.”
“Those technologies, techniques and tricks of the trade are based on exactly the same principles as casino slot machines, and it is quite telling that a number of social media leaders have, over the last six months, gone on the record to say that they will not let their children use the apps that millions of children around the world use. The right to informed and conscious use will be difficult for the Government to interpret, but it is none the less important. The right to digital literacy is perhaps the most important of all. It is something that our schools already do a terrific job of putting into practice, but what struck me in Estonia is the way that people see the right to internet access as basically a social right. That is surely something that we should debate and put in practice, too.”
“Much of what upsets young people online is not illegal. It is legal. Support is often quite sparse and fragmented. It is often pretty invisible to children and young people when they need it most. It will be challenging for the Government to turn the right to informed and conscious use into part of the code of practice, but that is incredibly important. It is simply unfortunate that social media firms spend quite so much money, effort and engineering talent on creating features that create a kind of addiction because of the rush of endorphins that they trigger in young people’s minds.”
“One is the right to remove: children should be able to remove content that they have uploaded. There are probably members of the Committee who have posted all kinds of unfortunate content in their lives, which they might not want to have there in the future. That is certainly true of many children I know. The right to remove is, I think, widely accepted, and is reflected as one of the ambitions of the Bill. The second right is the right to know. Children should be able to learn easily the who, what and why—and know for what purposes their data is being exchanged. That is important. The Minister herself has talked about the need to educate online users—to educate us all, so that we become better critical consumers of the content that we find online. That is doubly important for children. The third right is the right to safety and support.”
“As well as being a talented member of the creative industries, she has been one of the leading champions of the creation of strong digital rights for our children. As we have rehearsed in Committee previously, the issue is fundamental, not marginal. About a third of online users are children. The Government will have, in a way, to step in that direction. They will have to step towards new clauses 5 and 6, and new schedule 1, because they have committed to issuing an age-appropriate design code that will operationalise clause 124. I want to encourage the Government to think creatively about the way they will write the code of practice on age-appropriate design codes, with at least one eye on the broader bill of data and digital rights, which we want to propose. The 5Rights movement has a couple of important ideas.”
“It is inevitable, because the world will change in a way that requires it, and the citizens of this country will begin to demand it. What we are starting to debate today is what will come to pass at some point. I hope to be the Minister who drives it through in the next Labour Government, which is imminent. I hope, too, that we can debate that idea and help to perfect it. Where regimes of rights have been most effective, they have stood the test of time. For something to stand the test of time, it always helps if there is a little—not too much—cross-party consensus. The new schedule has a couple of ideas at its core, and we are lucky in having been able to draw on not only the rights literature, but the incredible work of Baroness Kidron.”
“We have had a useful debate, and will have an even longer one shortly, about the right to be treated fairly by algorithms. That is obviously incredibly important. The Government have given a nod in that direction, so the Minister will probably say a little about their digital charter. On the different sides of the House, there are different philosophies on rights. The Conservative party traditionally defends rights to do with negative freedoms, and my side often talks the language of positive freedoms—the power to do things, which we think is necessary for social justice. However, I hope that in the months ahead we can have a sensible conversation about what negative and positive freedoms we can crystallise and enshrine in a bill of digital rights. At some point in this century, we shall write that.”
“We do not need biometric information connected to that kind of service. The ID card system in India has gone down that route, and it has suffered pretty significant leaks of biometric data over the past year and a half. If people get their hands on that data, that will be far more dangerous. The Estonian system, in which people have an electronic ID and a password that sits in their head—a two-factor authentication—has proven much more successful. My broader point is that we should have a debate about the data rights that we, as citizens of this country, should have. Partly, that is about having rights to things that would make our lives better and would allow us to pursue new freedoms, such as the freedom not to have a million and one passwords, which we lose track of. It is also about having certain protections.”
“Member for Boston and Skegness says that the British public would not like Government databases to hold all that information, that happens to be the country they live in. The Passport Office and DVLA hold comprehensive data on most people, and people find that extremely useful. I was very careful about what I said. What I said was not that we should have compulsory e-ID, but that we should have a public option so people can choose to use it. That is obviously a different regime from Estonia’s, where ID cards have been compulsory since the country was invented about a century ago. Giving people a public option would be quite attractive. There are, however, important safeguards that we need to learn from. It would be a mistake to have biometric information connected to that kind of service.”
“I am very happy to. I am lucky enough to be able to draw on my extensive experience as the Minister for ID cards in the Labour Government. I will take the hon. Gentleman, in detail, through the architecture I proposed. Well, he asked for it. The challenge we confronted in about 2006 is that we originally proposed one big database for all the data, including biometric data. That was an error. The architecture I proposed in its stead was a way of connecting three different databases—one that would have basically held Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency data, a second that would have held the passport services data, and then a couple of identifiers that would have allowed those two records to be indexed and joined together. That brought the cost of the ID card system down by about two thirds. Although the hon.”
“Will my hon. Friend reflect on the idea that if someone is genuinely a popular capitalist and believes in the distribution of wealth as the basis of economic growth, then recognising and crystallising the value of personal data is actually pro-growth?”
“When the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), who is now the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, he launched a consultation about an English Bill of Rights, which was about not simply human rights but a much broader set of rights. I do not think there is a big difference in our approaches to rights. Actually, I think there is a shared approach, as has been recognised down the years.”
“They need to be something not that is set out in 250 pages of primary legislation but that can be set out on the back of a fag packet. In our bill of data rights, we set out a clear agenda that would make a difference and be easily understood and enforced. It would be an improvement and would take forward the rights and liberties of the citizens of this country.”
“I am glad that the Minister agrees with the sentiment behind the new clause, and I recognise that she perhaps does not see this Bill as the place to consolidate our brilliant ideas into the law of the land. I listened with interest to what she said about a rolling programme of ideas in the digital charter. There is a challenge with that approach: it will end up following the cones hotline model of public service reform. It will not live or sing; it will be bedevilled by voluntary codes, bureaucracy and operational procedures, and it will end up not really making a difference to the world. Our bill of data rights is clear. If rights are to be a reality, they need not to be a mystery but to be understood. They need to be something that people can talk about in a pub.”
“Our proposed bill of data rights seeks not to redefine but to enshrine, so the rights reflected in the GDPR are no more than enshrined in it. The point is that it would go over and above the rights and obligations set out in this Bill. The right of equal access to the internet, the crystallisation of the right to expression and the advancement of the debate about the right to data ownership are important provisions whose time will come. At some point, due to the way the world is changing, our citizens and constituents will begin to demand both a democratisation of the privileges of this new age and of progress, and the right to effective defences and new protections.”
“No. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the clause. Clause, by leave, withdrawn . Ordered, That further consideration be now adjourned. — (Nigel Adams.)”
“Fourthly, there is a new duty for employers to undertake an algorithmic impact assessment, and fifthly, there are new, realistic ways for individuals to enforce those rights in an employment tribunal. It is quite a broad-ranging set of reforms to a number of different parts of legislation.”
“If we are to stop them, the law needs to change, and it needs to change now. This battery of new clauses sets out to do five basic things. First, they set out some enhancements and refinements to the Equality Act 2010, in a way that ensures that protection from discrimination is applied to new forms of decision making, especially when those decisions engage core rights, such as rights on recruitment, terms of work, or dismissal. Secondly, there is a new right to algorithmic fairness at work, to ensure equal treatment. Thirdly, there is the right to an explanation when a decision is taken in a way that affects core elements of work life, such as a decision to hire, fire or suspend someone.”
“The challenge is that when jobs are advertised in a targeted way, by definition they are not open to applicants from all walks of life, because lots of people just will not see the ads. Women and those over the age of 50 are now most likely to be prevented from seeing an advert. Some 32% of company executives say that they have discriminated against those who are over 50, and a quarter have discriminated in that way against women. Nearly two thirds of executives with access to a profiling tool have said that they use it to actively seek out people based on criteria as diverse as age, gender and race. If we are to deliver a truly meritocratic labour market, where the rights of us all to shoot for jobs and to develop our skills and capabilities are protected, some of those practices have to stop.”
“Quite apart from the ongoing debates about how we define a worker and how we define employment—the subject of a very excellent report by my old friend Matthew Taylor, now at the RSA—there are real questions about how we introduce new safeguards for workers in this country. I want to highlight the challenge with a couple of examples. Recent evidence has revealed how many recruiters use—surprise, surprise—Facebook to seek candidates in ways that routinely discriminate against older workers by targeting advertisements for jobs in a particular way. Slater and Gordon, which is a firm of excellent employment lawyers, showed that about one in five company executives admit to unlawful discrimination when advertising jobs online.”
“That kind of casualisation is now being reinvented in a digital era and is something that all of us ought to be incredibly concerned about. What happens with these algorithms is called, in the jargon, socio-technical—what results is a mixture of conventional software, human judgment and statistical models. The issue is that very often the decisions that are made are not transparent, and are certainly not open to challenge. They are now quite commonly used by employers and prospective employers, and their agents, who are able to analyse very large datasets and can then deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning to make inferences about a person.”
“They are guided around this gigantic warehouse by some kind of satnav technology on a mobile phone, but the device that guides them around the warehouse is also a device that tracks how long it takes them to put together a basket. That information is then arranged in a nice league table of employees of who is the fastest and who is slowest, and decisions are then taken about who gets an extension to their contracted hours each week and who does not. That is a pretty automated kind of decision. My hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) was describing to me the phenomenon of the butty man—the individual who decided who on a particular day got to work on the docks or on the construction site. In the pub at the end of the week, he divvied up the earnings and decided who got what, and who got work the following week.”
“I put on record my thanks to Helen Mountfield QC, an expert in equality law, and to Mike Osborne, professor of machine learning. Along with Ben Jaffey QC, a specialist in data law, they have been looking at some of the implications of automated decision making, which were discussed at length by the Future of Work commission. Central to the new clauses is a concern that unaccountable and highly sophisticated automated or semi-automated systems are now making decisions that bear on fundamental elements of people’s work, including recruitment, pay and discipline. Just today, I was hearing about the work practices at the large Amazon warehouse up in Dundee, I think, where there is in effect digital casualisation. Employees are not put on zero-hours contracts, but they are put on four-hour contracts.”
“New clauses 7 and 8 to 11 touch on the question of how we ensure a degree of justice when it comes to decisions that are taken about us automatically. The growth in decisions that are made through automated decision making has been exponential, and there are risks to that. We need to ensure that the law is modernised to provide new protections and safeguards for our constituents in this new world. I should say at the outset that this group of new clauses is rooted in the excellent work of the Future of Work commission, which produced a long, thought-provoking report. The Committee will be frustrated to hear that I am not going to read through that this afternoon, but, none the less, I want to tease out a couple of points. The basket of new clauses that we have proposed are well thought through and have been carefully crafted.”
“There is not an argument about the rights that are already in place, because they are enshrined in the Equality Act, with which Members on both sides of the House agree. The challenge is that the law as it stands is deficient and cannot be applied readily or easily to automated decision making.”
“Injustices in the labour market are multiplying, and there is a cross-party consensus for a stronger defence of workers. In fact, the Member of Parliament for the town where I grew up, the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), has led the argument in favour of the Conservative party rechristening itself the Workers’ party, and the Labour party was founded on a defence of labour rights, so I do not think this is an especially contentious matter. There is cross-party consensus about the need to stand up for workers’ rights, particularly when wages are stagnating so dramatically. We are therefore not divided on a point of principle, but the Opposition have an ambition to do something about this growing problem. The Bill could be corrected in a way that made a significant difference.”
“Because Mr A is not in the particular age bracket being targeted, he never sees the ad, as it will never pop up on his news feed, or on digital advertising aimed at him. He therefore does not apply for the role and does not know he is being excluded from applying for the role, all as a consequence of him being the wrong age. Since he is excluded from opportunities because of his age, he finds it much harder to find a role. The Equality Act, which was passed with cross-party consensus, prohibits less favourable treatment because of age—direct discrimination—including in relation to recruitment practices, and protects individuals based on their age. The Act sets out a number of remedies for individuals who have been discriminated against in that way, but it is not clear how the Bill proposes to correct that sin.”
“What we have is not quite a cut-and-paste job—I will not describe it in that way—but neither is it the sophisticated exercise in public law making that my hon. Friend describes as more virtuous. I want to give the Committee a couple of examples of why this is so serious, as sometimes a scenario or two can help. Let us take an individual whom we will call “Mr A”. He is a 56-year-old man applying for website development roles. Typically, if someone is applying for jobs in a particular sector, those jobs will be advertised online. In fact, many such roles are advertised only online, and they target users only in the age profile 26 to 35, through digital advertising or social media networks, whether that is Facebook, LinkedIn, or others.”
“Exactly. My hon. Friend makes such a good point. The challenge with the way that Her Majesty’s Government have approached the Bill is that they have taken a particular problem—that we are heading for the exit door of Europe, so we had better ensure that we get a data-sharing agreement in place, or it will be curtains for Britain’s services exports—and said, “We’d better find a way of incorporating the GDPR into British law as quickly as possible.” They should have thought imaginatively and creatively about how we strengthen our digital economy, and how we protect freedoms, liberties and protections in this new world, going back to first principles and thinking through the consequences.”
“If digital blacklisting or casualisation were to spread throughout the labour market in the sectors that happen to be creating jobs, there would be no increase in productivity and the Government would be embarked on a self-defeating economic policy. Although these new clauses may sound technical, they have a bearing on a much more important plank of the Government’s economic development strategy. Our arguments are based on principles that have widespread support on both sides of the House and they are economically wise. The consequences of the new clauses will be more than outweighed by the benefits they will deliver. I commend them to the Minister and I hope she will take them on board.”
“Countries around the world recently signed up to the UN sustainable development goals. Goal 8 commits the Government to reducing inequality, and SDG 10 commits them to reducing regional inequality. However, when I asked the Prime Minister what she was doing about that, my question was referred to Her Majesty’s Treasury and the answer that came back from the Chancellor was, “We believe in raising productivity and growth.” The way to raise productivity and growth is to ensure that there are good practices in the labour market, because it is poor labour market productivity that is holding us back as a country.”