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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“We have been waiting ever since for concrete plans to be put on the table. When I was Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 2010, negotiating spending reductions across Government, it was particularly impressive that Lord Adonis at the Department for Transport was prepared to make the trade-offs necessary in the DFT budget to present a plan that was not simply a bit of blue-sky thinking, but had an enormous amount of detail behind it and a financial package to go with it. He had thought an awful lot of things through that would be needed to turn ideas into reality. At that stage, however, he was obviously operating at 20,000 feet, so to speak. It was impossible back then to foresee and anticipate every design detail that would be needed in the final plans. At that stage, no doubt, some imperfect decisions crept into the blueprints.”
“We believe that High Speed 2 could be of huge importance to our country and to our home city of Birmingham, and it is particularly appropriate that the birthplace of the steam engine, Birmingham, is the first place that High Speed 2 will connect to London. I have been a supporter of High Speed 2 ever since Lord Adonis first presented the plans to Cabinet in around 2009 or 2010. He made his case not only with his customary force and clarity, but with a very keen sense of history; in that first presentation to Cabinet, he reminded us that it was not a new idea, but that it had been around for some time. In fact, I think it was Churchill who anticipated the need for extra capacity and high speed after the second world war, as part of our country’s plans for reconstruction.”
“It is a great privilege to speak in this debate, and I am even more pleased that I am not speaking and advancing my case alone. I am enormously grateful for the support of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood), and my neighbour in Birmingham, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). I am glad that hopefully, a bit later this morning, we will be joined by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), and with your permission, Mr Robertson, I also have a few short remarks to make for the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), who is recovering from surgery but very much wanted to be here to support the case that I will put to the Minister. Together, we are a powerful team, and the argument that we want to advance is that all of us are great supporters of High Speed 2.”
“If he is not able to bring forward such a whole-of-Government assessment of costs today, will he undertake to do so in due course?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way with characteristic generosity. He outlined the criteria that were used to conclude that Washwood Heath was the right site. I know that he cares about the interests of the taxpayer, as I do. I could not help but notice that he did not include on that list any assessment of the extra business rates that could be developed and delivered through alternative use of this site, and he did not flag up any savings to the unemployment bill, although savings of £74 million a year could be achieved through alternative development of the site. Therefore, I am concerned, as I know he will be, that there should be a holistic, whole-of-Government, whole-of-taxpayer analysis of whether the site is the right one and not simply an analysis based on the narrow and particular concerns of HS2 Ltd.”
“Therefore, the prospect of a closure in the short term without clarity about the long term is not only a matter for Cemex and the 300 or 400 people whom it employs but a matter of strategic criticality to the Minister’s plans and ambitions for railway construction.”
“The Minister says that Cemex has a bright future and he was absolutely right to say so. I was therefore highly alarmed to read the letter to me from Cemex, which said that, given the strategic importance of Cemex to the reconstruction of our railway system, the company is incredibly frustrated that no specific detailed plans have come forward from HS2 Ltd to address what is now a pressing need to develop relocation strategies. Cemex also makes the point that securing planning permission for a new site for its business will take about two years; that is how long it takes to get planning permission for that kind of business.”
“The great River Tame runs alongside the north of the site, so taking 8 hectares of balancing pond out of the equation would be a good idea. I hope that, as the Minister develops the jobs and growth plan, we can agree that there should be a defined level of ambition for east Birmingham and we should not simply be talking about the residual land. We should be looking to minimise the land take during the construction period, because, of course, that is the here and now.”
“I thank the Minister for giving way to me a third time. I should welcome his views on whether the way through is to agree that, given the opportunity cost of developing the site in the way that he proposes and given the clear risk of economic damage, the jobs and growth plan that he has undertaken to publish by the end of the year should include a defined level of ambition for creating jobs in east Birmingham. That would be the least he could do. As part of that, there should not simply be a plan for the residual land, because as he knows that land does not become available until the 2020s. He will be as concerned as I am with the blueprints, which he will have seen, to put 8 hectares of balancing pond on this land. I love a good lake as much as the Minister, but in east Birmingham we need jobs, not lakes.”
“Does he agree that 3,700 is the right ambition that we should be shooting for, as a job-creation target, and will he confirm that when introducing his plans during 2014?”
“The Minister will be familiar with the site, although possibly not as familiar as I am. I am sure that he recognises that the great River Tame runs alongside the north boundary of the site. He will have his work cut out justifying that 6 or 8 hectares of balancing pond are needed to manage the flood risk, when there is a mighty river to the north of the boundary. I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying the 3,700 figure and for confirming to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) that that is four times the number that will be created under current plans. I am grateful that the Minister has accepted that the jobs and growth plan could include a defined level of ambition for job creation in east Birmingham.”
“At times over the past month or two, I have thought that this day would never come. These reports have been kept under wraps, hidden in full from parents, while they have been leaked in part left, right and centre. Parents, who should have been the first to know, have been the last to know about the contents of these reports. I am sure that the Secretary of State will want to apologise to the House for the contempt with which parents have been treated in this debate. Secondly, he knows that I have been at the forefront in calling for this Ofsted process. I am glad that Sir Michael Wilshaw has today said that there is no evidence of an organised plot to radicalise our children or introduce extremism into schools, but four out of the six academies—”
“I am glad that the Secretary of State wants to keep an open mind about getting the final designs right. High Speed 2 will be of huge benefit to the city of Birmingham, but we must not leave east Birmingham behind. The current proposal to destroy a space the size of 105 football pitches, where we have plans to create 7,000 jobs in the worst unemployment hot spot in the whole United Kingdom, is not a good idea. Birmingham city council will oppose the proposal during the petitioning stage. Will the Secretary of State keep his mind open to the idea that there could be a better site for the rolling yard that would not destroy east Birmingham’s economic future?”
“It would be better all round if it did not need to do that, but so far the guarantees that are needed from High Speed 2 for early release of land, minimisation of the land-take and maximising the number of jobs have not been seen. I want those proposals on the table, otherwise we are in for an almighty fight over the months to come.”
“This site is at the junction of three of the most unemployed constituencies in the country; 17,773 people are unemployed in the constituencies of Hodge Hill, Ladywood and Erdington. That is nearly one half of all the people who are out of work in the city of Birmingham. Yet we are turning away businesses that want to create jobs on this site in the middle of this community today because of the High Speed 2 proposal. The Secretary of State says quite rightly that the marshalling yard has to go somewhere, and it should: it should go much closer to the airport or up in Crewe—or even, if my hon. Friends who represent Stoke get their way, closer to Stoke. Let us not put it in a place where we need the jobs. Birmingham city council is perfectly prepared to petition against this proposal during the months to come.”
“I propose a slight modification of this track, not to save a view but to save the prospects of east Birmingham. The proposal for a marshalling yard in the middle of the inner city takes out a space that is the size of 106 football pitches. It is a site, currently in the hands of three owners, that has come together like a great jigsaw puzzle for the first time in a century. It is a site on which we could put 7,000 jobs, not at some remote point in the future, but now, during the next four or five years. We have already turned away proposals for a million square feet of industrial use which could have brought hundreds of jobs to the inner city. There is nowhere more in need of these jobs than inner-city Birmingham.”
“That is why it is so important that in the debates that follow in the House and elsewhere we remove the crazy, idiotic, nonsensical idea of destroying one third of the available industrial land in Birmingham to lock up as a scrap yard for High Speed 2 between now and 2026, and then to minimise as a marshalling yard for the period of the railway’s operation over the subsequent years. The Secretary of State said that getting the path of the track right is difficult and important. Of course it is. I am glad that he started his story in 1832 when the railways were first proposed, because when it was first proposed that the railways would come to Birmingham, they had to take an interesting bend to avoid Aston hall, which was then in the hands of the descendants of the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt.”
“It is welcome because it cuts our journey time to London, but it also cuts our journey time to Canary Wharf to 65 minutes. That is very important to a financial and legal services community as big as Birmingham’s. It is important because it puts our airport within reach of the airports of the south, and it is important because it could create 50,000 to 60,000 jobs in our city and the region beyond. Those are the prizes on offer, and they need to stay within reach, not just to some but to everybody in our great city.”
“The year of infrastructure, which imaginatively brings together major projects in the middle of our city, is creating real momentum behind the delivery of Grand Central, the metrolink that is now going through the middle of our city, and the new New Street station, which I was so proud to help secure when I was the regional Minister. We are now the start-up capital of the country outside London. More new businesses opened their doors in Birmingham than anywhere else outside London last year, and we are now at the heart of the region that boasts the biggest export surplus anywhere in the country to the fast-growing market of China. If we are to restore ourselves to our rightful place as the workshop of the world, we need new infrastructure, and that is why High Speed 2 is so welcome.”
“I want to add my voice to those here tonight who support High Speed 2. I was a strong supporter of the proposal when it came to the last Labour Cabinet, and I am a strong supporter of the position taken by Labour Front Benchers. My right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) got it right when he said that it is welcome that those on both Front Benches have united in their agreement to support the proposal, whatever the outcome of the next election, when no doubt Labour will be returned to government. I am a supporter because I see the chance for High Speed 2 to add real booster rockets to a city that is now back on the move. Since the new Labour council took office in May 2012, we have had a city that is growing once more.”
“The whole House will want to join me in congratulating Toni Pearce on her re-election as president of the National Union of Students. Figures this morning from the Sutton Trust and the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that Toni’s generation will now be paying off their student loans into their 50s. Will the Minister get to the Dispatch Box and confess that this student debt system is now not only unsustainable, but unfair? Does the Conservative party have any plans to raise the £9,000 fee in the next Parliament?”
“National apprenticeship week provides an extraordinary opportunity to celebrate the amazing work of our apprentices, but it is a matter of concern to all Members that there are now 5,000 fewer young people studying in apprenticeships than there were at the time of the last election. That is why news of huge staff cuts at the National Apprenticeship Service is so worrying. The excellent Nick Linford of FE Week says that they may amount to 20%, and I hear from front-line staff in Birmingham that the figure may be 50%. The Minister refused to answer a written question on the subject, and he dodged a question about it in the House yesterday. Will he now tell us how many staff at the National Apprenticeship Service—which is part of the Skills Funding Agency—will lose their jobs in the next year?”
“When will we see plans to raise and support the quality of further education teaching? Where is the plan to use public procurement to raise apprenticeship numbers? Finally, given that the Minister has refused to tell me how big the head count cuts in the National Apprenticeship Service will be in the next year or two, will he tell the House this afternoon exactly how many people will go? There is a big plank of consensus between us in the House. We, too, believe that good skills are crucial if families are to earn their way to a better standard of living and escape the cost of living crisis in which the Government have trapped them. Frankly, we needed a bigger plan from the Minister this afternoon.”
“Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) to vote against Labour’s plans, which were debated in the Deregulation Bill Committee yesterday, to raise the quality of apprenticeships by 2020. The Secretary of State for Education has downgraded training requirements for further education teachers so that they no longer need English and maths even to a basic level. We have heard nothing today about licensing colleges as specialist centres of technical education. I am not saying that the Minister is a road block to reform, but I am increasingly concerned that he is a straw in the wind, powerless to deliver the change that the skills system needs. His hon. Friends know that he likes a good plot in Parliament; I am worried that he has lost the plot in his Department. When will we see plans to raise the quality standards for apprenticeships?”
“Most Opposition Members are scratching our heads and asking ourselves, “Is that it?” The Minister is presiding over a Department that is cutting skills spending by half a billion pounds over the next couple of years. We know that difficult decisions are needed, but that is why comprehensive reform should have been announced today, not just a bit of reform. We heard nothing about how to raise employer demand for apprenticeships, although 92% of firms in this country do not offer them. We heard not a word about how the Government plan to raise the quality of courses taught in further education or the quality of teachers. The Minister instructed the right hon.”
“It is nice that we have the chance to have this exchange during national apprenticeship week. It allows me to say how proud the Opposition are of our country’s apprentices, of the National Apprenticeship Service and of national apprenticeship week, which we are grateful this Government have continued. I am glad that the Minister is with us today to spell out how he plans to implement Nigel Whitehead’s excellent review, and I am grateful to Nigel Whitehead for briefing me on the plans yesterday. However, I have to be honest with the Minister and say that we are a little disappointed that today he has merely announced but a fraction of the change we need.”
“My constituent’s son, a boy she loved, died in police custody—a tragedy the pain of which I, as a father of three children, cannot possibly imagine—but this tragedy is deeper and darker for the alleged culpability of police officers who were paid by us on that night to keep my constituent’s son safe.”
“I am motivated tonight by their courage, because I believe our police are so important to our communities that they deserve to have the best team around them, but I am motivated too by an injustice that I want to bring to the attention of the Government. Because the police service is a human and not a divine organisation, sometimes there are shortcomings, but if we want the best police service, it is important that we do not stand by when there are shortcomings; it is important that we act. For three years now I have been seeking to help a constituent of mine to act. My constituent’s case is sub judice, but I can give the House the essence.”
“I am very sorry to have to rise in my place tonight to bring this debate to the Floor of the House of Commons. For nearly three years I have worked to avoid this debate, and I come here tonight because I have been left with no other choice. Let me say at the outset that there is no more determined campaigner for the police of my city than me. For 10 years as a Member of this House I have campaigned for bigger, stronger police teams. I have run half-marathons and triathlons to raise money for the West Midlands Police Benevolent Fund, and it has been my privilege on the Floor of the House to praise the bravery of officers such as PC Adam Koch and his colleague who literally risked their lives to save worshippers recently at a Ward End mosque.”
“The inquest is also important for our community, because it could provide critical insights that would help us to ensure that others need never suffer the same fate. Despite my representations and the arguments that we have put forward, the family have been told that they must pay to have questions put on their behalf during the proceedings. Like me, they are outraged. The original bill was going to be nearly £7,500. It is true that their costs have now been reduced, but our system has become perverse. The fact that the family are having to provide a smaller cut of their savings cannot be judged a great success.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker; I am also grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) for her intervention. In the months that followed the death of my constituent’s son, the family and I sought, together with the Independent Police Complaints Commission, to ensure that the police officers involved were judged. I am sorry to say that they were judged to have been so negligent, and to have fallen so far short of their sworn duty, that they were found guilty of gross misconduct. Now, the family are approaching the last trial of their strength: the inquest. It will be their final opportunity to find the truth of why and how their son died. Yes, it might bring grief, but I hope that it will also bring closure.”
“I want to know that, so that I can help to bring those changes forward. I do not want this House, this Government, or this Minister to be kept in the dark. I do not want the comfort of ignorance. I want to know why my constituent’s son died, and I want to know what we must do together in this House to ensure that none of our constituents ever has to face the same fate.”
“Our article 2 obligations demand a thorough investigation of state action and culpability in cases such as these. Like me, the Minister knows that, following the case of Main in 2007, a wider public interest test must be satisfied if legal aid is to be awarded. A death in state custody, especially when Crown servants have been found negligent, must surely satisfy that test. We in this House agreed to that principle when we passed the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Section 51 of that Act extended the principle of public funding for advocacy at inquests such as these. As a parliamentarian, I want to know what happened on that night. That is the wider public interest test that is being satisfied here. I want to know whether we need changes to the law, or to the organisation of the police service.”
“That is very welcome, and I hope that my right hon. Friend and his Committee will be able to draw the right conclusions and, perhaps, use some of the evidence from the case that I am raising here tonight. My point is very simple: when a family have lost their son while he was in the custody of the state, and when servants of the Crown have been judged guilty of gross misconduct, it is a gross injustice to tell that family that they must now help to pay their costs at the inquest into how their son lost his life. I know the objections to my arguments. There are few in the House who know the pressures on the legal aid budget as well as I do. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury, I too had to negotiate reductions to that fund. However, if we cannot fund an inquest into a death of which the state appears to be culpable, we have got it wrong.”
“Let me deal with a point directly. The family did not choose to be in this position; the Coroners Act 1988 demands an inquest. We in this House are the people who insist on the position my constituents are now in, and we do so for a very good reason: we want to know what happened. Our predecessors in this Parliament felt so strongly about the unchecked actions of an arbitrary state that they deposed the monarch and fought a war to insist on the liberty of the individual and a measure of their protection—we want to know what happened.”
“When I asked my constituent what she wanted from tonight’s debate, her answer was as generous as she is compassionate. “Hopefully,” she said, “we can change this for other people so that they will not have to suffer what we have suffered.” When all is said and done, the question at the heart of this debate is simple. It is the story of a mother’s loss, a mother’s love and a mother’s search for justice. Will we, in this House, stand on a mother’s side, or will we stand against her? When we begin work in this House each day, we pray for strength and wisdom to make the right decisions. I hope that we can now call on that strength and wisdom and make the right decisions in the case of my constituent and her lost son.”
“Thirdly, will the Minister confirm that it is ministerial policy, and not simply administrative discretion, to seek a contribution from the family in inquests where a death in state custody has occurred? Fourthly, will the Minister tonight agree to a review of the way families are offered support and funding for inquest costs, not least because there is now evidence that the process is out of control, with the most invasive questions being asked of families in order for them to prove they do not have the resources to help contest these cases? Finally, will the Minister tell us how many families have been asked to make a contribution since 2010? What is the total bill that families in this country are now paying for cases such as this?”
“The case clearly meets the threshold of having “wider public interest'” set out in section 2.4 of the Legal Services Commission’s funding code criteria, which refers to the “potential” of the proceedings “to produce real benefits for individuals other than the client”. Secondly, when will the Lord Chancellor bring into effect section 51 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, which will extend advocacy support to those who died in custody? No stand part debate was held on that measure and, to the best of my knowledge, the Minister was not in the House to vote on the Bill on Third Reading. I do not believe the Conservative party or the Liberal Democrats opposed this legislation when it was brought to the House, so will the Government give us a date for bringing in section 51 as soon as possible?”
“Many in this House will have seen the tragic case confronting Alex Kelly’s family, which was highlighted in The Observer on Sunday, and INQUEST, an organisation I wish to praise to high heaven, has brought to me a number of other cases where bad decisions are being made in our name. In the short time remaining to me, I want to put five questions to the Minister. I appreciate that he will not be able to answer all of them tonight, so I hope that he will follow up in writing and that the House will be able to return to this subject, perhaps in the light of the report by my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) later in the year. First, will the Minister meet me to discuss the legal aid decision in my constituent’s case?”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Some will say, “We should not get too worked up about this. The inquest process is inquisitorial not adversarial. It is just a gentle canter around the facts.” But when we are dealing with death in custody, it is different. How can we tell? It is because the public servants represented at the inquests will not just have one lawyer; they will have teams of lawyers, paid for by the taxpayer, on their side. We have to ask ourselves: how can we allow such a profound inequality of arms in the inquest room? How can we pretend to ourselves that that is even remotely equal, fair or right? There is now growing evidence, not just in my home city of Birmingham, but across the country, that wrongful legal aid decisions are being made in cases such as this.”
“The Minister is replying in a courteous and thoughtful manner. He has given us a number of helpful words about the broad principles of the means-testing regime, but I hope he will not elide over the point that when we passed the 2009 Act we decided to include section 51, which accepted that there were wider public interests at play in inquests that delved into deaths in state custody and explicitly provided for full legal aid costs to be provided to families in such cases. The Lord Chancellor has not implemented section 51. The arguments about it have already been rehearsed and the House has passed it. When will it be implemented?”
“I too wish to ask the Secretary of State about the engineers of the future. The mismanaged free-for-all that gave private students unfettered access to the student loan system has now cost his Department so dear that big cuts are being discussed. On top of the huge cuts for educating 18-year-olds in college, we now hear rumours that the student opportunity fund that helps poorer future engineers will be completely axed. Will the Secretary of State take this opportunity to promise the House that he will not sacrifice social mobility to pay for the chaos in his Department’s budget?”
“As you know, Mr Speaker, while the Minister was batting for Britain in Kazakhstan last week, the National Audit Office was battering his handling of the student loans system. We look forward to the hearings at the Public Accounts Committee, but in the meantime would he mind telling the House how late he discovered that students at private higher education institutions were soaking up public subsidies at such a rate that there was an overspend of hundreds of millions of pounds? How did he lose control so spectacularly?”
“I know that the Minister will be as concerned as I am that unemployment among young adults is still more than 1 million, and that the number of apprenticeships among adults under the age of 19 is now below the level in 2010. Can he assure the House that in the next set of figures the number of apprentices under the age of 19 will increase? While he is at it, will he explain why he voted against Labour’s plans to use the power of public procurement to increase precisely those vitally needed apprenticeships?”
“(Urgent Question): Will the Secretary of State confirm that the facts in the National Audit Office report about universal credit, set out this morning, are true?”
“To hit his deadline at the end of 2017, he must now move more than 200,000 people a month on to the new system—the population of a city the size of Derby. The Public Accounts Committee will no doubt consider next week the changed timetable, the IT shambles and the write-offs, the lack of counter-fraud measures, the shambolic financial control and the ineffective oversight. What I want to say to the Secretary of State, however, is this: he has let this House form a picture of universal credit, which the nation’s auditors say is wrong. The most charitable explanation is that he has lost control of the programme and lost control of the Department. He must now correct the record. He must now apologise to the House and convene cross-party talks to get this project back on track. The quiet man must not become the cover-up man.”
“It is inconceivable that the Secretary of State did not know about that, because the reset programme was organised by the man he personally brought into the Department. Furthermore, in a letter to me last month, the Secretary of State told me: “I closely monitor the progress of this ground-breaking programme”. The NAO must agree its facts with the Department. Paragraph 13 of the NAO’s report states: “The Department is now reconsidering the timing of full rollout”, and that plans have changed three times in four months. This morning, the National Audit Office told me that the NAO and the permanent secretary have agreed that statement, yet it flatly contradicts what the Secretary of State has said to this House.”
“Our bible, “Erskine May”, states clearly on page 201 that Ministers must give accurate and truthful information to the House, “correcting any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”. On 5 March this year, the Secretary of State told my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) that “the implementation of universal credit…is proceeding exactly in accordance with plans.” —[ Official Report , 5 March 2013; Vol. 559, c. 827.] We now learn from the National Audit Office that the month before that statement was made, the Department began a 13-week reset programme. Four weeks earlier, the Department reduced case-load forecasts for next April by 80%. Five months before, the Department had largely stopped developing systems for national roll-out.”
“Members on both sides of the House to support us and make sure that the message is heard, not just in the Department for Work and Pensions but in Her Majesty’s Treasury, as clearly as possible. The Opposition believe that how the Government have systematically ignored and tried to disguise and bury the impact of their reforms on disabled people is a national scandal. Reform that should have been approached with care and finesse has been approached with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop. When people have cried about the combined pain of the changes, the Government’s response has been that of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Frankly, we demand better of Her Majesty’s Government.”
“I beg to move, That this House believes that the Government should publish, by October 2013, a cumulative impact assessment of the changes made by the Government that affect disabled people. Five of my right hon. Friends and I have tabled the words of today’s motion, but the words in our argument were inspired by others and are supported by tens of thousands of people up and down this country. This afternoon, I pay tribute to Pat Onions and her fellow campaigners, to the authors of the WOW petition and to the thousands of people up and down the country who have supported their campaign and will follow this debate closely. They want to send a message to the Government—the message that we have incorporated in our motion. Today we ask hon.”