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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“Could the Minister say a bit more about how we absolutely guarantee in the notification that we maximise the chance of sub-postmasters claiming the maximum possible amount that they should be entitled to?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for clarifying these points as we go along. He will know that many sub-postmasters have not applied for the full extent of their potential claim because they are unsure about the case law involved, and I understand that the Department is using some guidance in making judgments—for example, the Dyson judgment, which is not publicly available, for perfectly good reasons. There is a bit of creativity going into how we solve this problem. The Post Office wrote to me last night to say that, on the Horizon scheme, it is recording the heads of loss and the averages of claims that are being agreed, which could be one of the ways in which sub-postmasters are given a sense of what the tariff is.”
“In a way, this is the core of the debate about where the four corners of the Bill should stretch to. The hon. and learned Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill) makes a very good point: at some point, there should be a sunset on such unprecedented legislation. At the moment, there are no limits to its expansiveness in terms of time, but the Minister has set a limit on its expansiveness in terms of the individuals involved, because he is ruling out those who have gone through the Court of Appeal. The Bill would benefit from further discussion, perhaps in the other place, about precisely where the four corners should be pinned down.”
“The objection and the goal of my amendments still stand. I will not press my amendments to a vote, because we are trying to maximise the spirit of collegiate working. I accept that my amendments, particularly on the issue of speed, may not yet be at the state of perfection that they would satisfy everyone in the Committee, especially those Members with more experience of working on these cases than I have. However, the problem is there: people are not being paid fast enough; they are not being supplied with the right amount of information up front at the beginning of their claim; and the scope of the Bill has been drawn too narrowly. I look forward to working with the other place to try to get amendments in place that can improve the Bill and commend the consent of Members from all parties.”
“The best evidence for that is the Chair of the Justice Committee’s excellent letter, in which he says: “The Bill is in effect treating cases where the CCRC had credible evidence that Horizon data might have been essential to the prosecution case less favourably than those that the CCRC considered had no credible evidence and therefore no basis upon which to refer to the Court of Appeal.” That is an extremely important point. I can see what the Minister is trying to do. He is conjuring here with very radical legal remedies, and that is not something we want to be expansive, but the risk we are running is that we leave an injustice that takes years and years to work through. He has addressed some of the points the Chair of the Justice Committee made in his letter, but he has not addressed that one in writing.”
“If there are issues in people needing extra help before the claim form is put in, please let us make sure that that help is available right at the beginning of the stage and not simply made available once the claim is in and a contest is under way about what should be paid. My final point is about scope, which we have already got into. There is a case for the Government to think again about the cases that have already gone to the Court of Appeal and were refused or were not given leave to appeal.”
“I know that a lot of thought is going on in the Department about the way to do this, and I welcome the letter from the Post Office publishing average offers around the heads of loss that have been set out. Obviously, there will be bandings that are more appropriate, and perhaps that is a way to publish these things. Obviously, there is a judgment the Department is relying on—the Dyson judgment—and the neutral evaluation, which is not publicly available, for good reason. However, my plea to the Minister is this: let us try to make much clearer to claimants the full measure of redress that they should have available.”
“Many people, such as Christopher Head, are going out of their way to provide pro bono assistance to people in putting claims together, but often it will take hours and hours of work to get a claim form in and many people simply will not be up for that, as they do not have the patience and they want to put this behind them. They certainly will not have the legal assistance available to them. That is why I hope the Department will consider publishing some kind of tariff to help people ensure that they are claiming for the full amount. The Minister may well say that there is a risk that people will then under-claim, but I checked that with some of the lawyers this morning. Their response was expressed in rather unparliamentary language, I am afraid, Dame Rosie, but the upshot was that such an objection was utter nonsense.”
“However, new issues were emerging; I am told that the time taken to table a second offer when the first is rejected is, frankly, not fast enough. There have been delays of up to three months or more in offering dates through remediation hearings, so the process is still running too slow. If I have failed to persuade the Committee today, I appeal to the other place to help us to find some legal mechanisms to ensure that there is stiffer timetable to which the Department must adhere. My second point is about the stress that many people will face when putting claims in. Many people will not put claims in because legal assistance is not available before the claim is submitted.”
“In some of the anonymised evidence the Minister provided to the Committee, we can see that 13% of claimants in the GLO scheme are waiting more than 40 days, with 2% waiting more than 100 days. If my amendments, as I have drafted them, are not right and still run risks, I appeal to the other place to work harder on this to ensure that there is some legally binding stricture on the Department that means that when, God forbid, the Minister is no longer in his position, and we do not have his emollience and tenacity to rely on, his successor, whoever that may be, is bound by some kind of timeframe that ensures we are not still having this debate in years to come. To check the point, I contacted a number of Select Committee witnesses this morning and found that there was some evidence that the speed of claims was improving.”
“Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who has more experience in this House than pretty much anybody else, and indeed the Minister, raised serious and wise concerns about the risks of putting a legally binding deadline on the entire timetable. I have listened to those concerns with care, which is why the way that my amendment on this has been drafted takes aim at one part of the process: the timeframe between a legitimate claim being submitted and a first offer being made. The Minister’s target is four weeks and we are getting close to that now, but the reality is that a significant number of people are still not being paid within that timeframe.”
“However, I remain concerned by what the Minister said today about the lack of any service level agreements for paying more out for the overturning convictions scheme. I would have expected a timetable for paying out that redress alongside this Bill today. We should be concerned about that because the track record of making payments is not good. For example, if we look at the claims in the Horizon shortfall scheme submitted by the original deadline in November 2020—three and a half years ago—we see that 362 people have still not been paid, which is a sixth of applicants. If we look at the late claims, all 667 of them, we see that three quarters of them have not been paid. That is why the Select Committee looked hard at how we could introduce some strictures to ensure that people were paid much faster. Since then, my right hon.”
“I hope the Select Committee will be able to bring options for the House to consider as soon as possible. I wish to touch on three points quickly: the speed of redress, the stress of redress, and the scope of this scheme. The point about speed is lit up by a single fact: the total budget for compensation is about £1.2 billion, but as of last Wednesday £196 million has been paid out. The implication of that is that 80% of the compensation budget has not been paid out, after all this time, and all the heartbreak, trauma and scandal. This Bill will correct that imbalance substantially; about £780 million of the budget is earmarked for overturning convictions and this Bill allows us to move that money much faster.”
“Thank you, Dame Rosie. It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship. I will be very brief, because some of my points have been covered through interventions. There has been good progress since the Bill was published, which is testament to the Minister’s leadership and his officials’ support. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) said, the more that we have heard in the inquiry and through the media since the Bill’s publication, the more horrified and more determined we have become to hold individuals, including the former chief executive of the Post Office, to account. It is pretty clear to many of us that the evidence she gave to the Select Committee on 3 February 2015 and 24 June 2020 has been flatly contradicted by the Channel 4 revelations that were published on 27 March.”
“The Chair of the Justice Committee is making a brilliant speech. The Minister characterised the decision and the conundrum here as a legal conundrum, but in a way it is in fact a political conundrum, because we are taking a political decision about the where the scope of the scheme should start and stop. Does the hon. and learned Gentleman have any insight into how long it might take those who are currently left out of the scheme to secure justice if we do not amend the Bill to improve the scope?”
“I am grateful for that reassurance. Does the Minister think that he will have the service-level agreements for the overturned convictions scheme on the table before the Bill is sent for Royal Assent?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for taking a final intervention. It is maybe a non-adversarial process, but it is none the less an intimidating one that involves a complicated 16-page form that takes several hours to fill in. That is the equivalent of several thousand pounds-worth of legal assistance. At the moment, such assistance is being provided pro bono by those with some experience, but I hope that the Minister will look at the matter again.”
“This is a matter of extreme interest to the House, and it is part of Ministers’ legal responsibility that they are politically accountable. Will the right hon. Lady advise me on what steps she can take next week to ensure that a Minister answers for the judgments the Government have made?”
“Will the Leader of the House advise me on how we can bring Ministers to the House to account for their decisions on arms export licences? As she knows, the Select Committee on Business and Trade assumed responsibility for the oversight of arms export licences in January. At the beginning of April, an important legal judgment was issued by the International Court of Justice. We therefore held our first hearing on licensing arms exports to Israel yesterday. We gave Ministers 20 days’ notice to attend, together with detailed questions in correspondence. I am grateful to the Deputy Foreign Secretary for his apology to me yesterday for the Foreign Office not fielding a Minister. I have had no such correspondence or contact from the Department for Business and Trade. This is not acceptable. Ministers are politically accountable to Parliament.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I seek your counsel? My Business and Trade Committee now has oversight of arms control, and is stepping up to its duty by holding tomorrow its first hearing on arms exports to Israel. Some 20 days ago, we requested that Ministers from the Department for Business and Trade and the Foreign Office come and give evidence. They did not reply; they had to be chased last week, and on Friday told us they were not prepared to attend. This is a topic of importance to the House, and it is also important that Ministers, in fulfilling their legal responsibility, are politically accountable. What advice can you give me, at this late stage, to try to ensure that we have Ministers in front of the Select Committee tomorrow morning?”
“I put on the record my thanks to and commendations for the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), for the way in which he has approached the groundwork for the Bill. Among those excluded from the scope of the Bill are those who went to the Court of Appeal and lost their case, or were not given leave to appeal to the Court. What we now know would have been quite useful in many of those cases. Should we enlarge the scope of the Bill to include those who lost their case at the Court of Appeal or were not given leave to appeal in the first place, as many of them may well be truly innocent?”
“Could I put that question in a slightly different way? The Minister for postal affairs has set out an ambitious timetable for the passage of this law, the overturning of convictions and the dispensation of compensation, with it all possibly being done and dusted—with hope, and a following wind—by the end of July. Could the Secretary of State commit to a similar timetable when it comes to the cases that have been raised in Northern Ireland?”
“The Secretary of State is being characteristically generous in giving way again. The evidence the Select Committee heard was that many people seeking compensation for the injustice they have suffered found it very complicated and very confusing to understand the range of case law required to put in particular kinds of claim—for example, for loss of reputation. When she triggers the notification provisions, would she reflect on something she could add, which is a tariff to help people put in claims for the right kind of compensation? What none of us would want to do, having overturned the convictions, is to let people get short-changed on the compensation. Providing a standardised tariff could cut through so much of the complexity and help people get what they are due.”
“The shadow Secretary of State is making a brilliant speech. Does he agree that we might want to reflect on measures to de-risk the speed of paying compensation? It is important that we overturn convictions, but it is also right that we accelerate compensation. Just because the Department is running the scheme is not necessarily a guarantee that payments will flow quickly. This morning, the Business and Trade Committee crunched the data on the GLO scheme, and unfortunately it would appear that 14% of offers have taken more than 14 days, 4% have taken more than 80 days, and 2% have taken more than 100 days. We obviously need to get the measures right, and there are lots of issues at play, but de-risking the speed of compensation sounds like something we should reflect on.”
“Given the right hon. Gentleman’s argument, will he reflect on whether we should include in the scope of the Bill those who went to the Court of Appeal initially but lost, or those who were not given leave to appeal, on the basis that we simply did not know then what we know now? Should we provide for that handful of cases—perhaps under 40—in the Bill rather than exclude them?”
“The Minister has laid great weight this afternoon on the legal and coded process that governs the export of arms, but a new international humanitarian law compliance assessment process cell has been created in his Department. Will he publish every assessment that that cell has made of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law, and will he tell the House whether the threshold has now been reached to review or cancel any extant open general export licence for arms sales?”
“I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and for this new clause. Was he as surprised as I was that when we asked the Secretary of State whether she would block China’s accession to CPTPP she was unable to give us an unequivocal answer?”
“They could not find all four that the Minister referred to. We have to accept that there is no shortage of controversy in the Bill, not least because the Secretary of State herself resiled from the figures that describe the benefits of the treaty to the country.”
“Members will have seen the report in the Financial Times last week, which said that the working day in this Chamber “has been shorter on average this parliamentary session than in any other in the past quarter century”. Are we seriously saying that we have not been able to find time for a debate, which it is the Government’s policy to support, on one of the only free trade agreements that His Majesty’s Government have been able to bring forward since we left the European Union? On Twitter, the Minister—I am a keen follower of the Minister on Twitter, he will be pleased to hear—said last week that there have been four parliamentary debates on the treaty, but I wonder if he is sure about that. When I asked the Clerks on the Select Committee to check that, they were left scratching their heads a little bit.”
“The Leader of the House confirmed that in writing to me last week in a letter in which she said: “it has not been possible to find time for a debate in Government time.” The House of Lords is having a debate on the treaty today on the recommendation of the International Agreements Committee, so why can’t we? Are we second-class representatives in this House? Are we unqualified to have a debate on all 30 chapters of the treaty? Are we not qualified to speak, on behalf of the people we came into public life to represent, about how the treaty will affect their future? I think we are. I think we should have a debate on the full treaty. And I cannot believe that we are out of time.”
“However, I want to underline the point about the lack of scrutiny. Of course, it was the Government themselves, in the Grimstone rule, who said that no new free trade agreements would be ratified by His Majesty’s Government without a full debate on whether we should agree to them. When I asked the Secretary of State on 23 January whether she would agree to a debate under the terms of the CRaG process, she said she would be “happy to support” such a debate. Her officials then wrote to the Clerks on the Select Committee to say that such a debate had been requested, only to be told by the Leader of the House that no time was available.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). I will speak in support of new clause 1, which he tabled, as well as the new clauses tabled in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends. I welcome this debate and the new clauses and amendments that have been tabled, but I lament the fact that we have not been permitted a full debate on the treaty—something the right hon. Gentleman argued for very eloquently. We needed a debate today not merely on the three chapters of the CPTPP covered by the Bill, but on the full 30 chapters of the treaty, with all the associated annexes and bits of analysis and argument. I do not want to detain the House for very long, because the Business and Trade Committee went to the length of writing and publishing a report earlier this year.”
“Canada is home to some of the biggest pension fund investors on the planet and we know that those funds are especially litigious. Although the Minister was right, when he answered these questions in earlier conversations, to say we have never lost an ISDS case, the reality is that many fear there will be a chilling effect on the regulations we bring forward because of a fear of the peril of ISDS procedures.”
“That is why the amendments on the future pathway of the treaty are so important and why I hope we will have a vote on some aspect of that today, even if it is not on the new clause tabled by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green. I will talk briefly about new clause 3, which relates to ISDS. It is important, because His Majesty’s Government have agreed side letters with a number of countries to take us out of the ISDS process. That is not an exemption or safeguard that we saw when it came to agreeing to the treaty, yet the treaty includes countries such as Canada—I think we are just about on fraternal terms with Canada at the moment; we may have failed to agree an FTA with it, but quite why is a matter of some dispute between the Canadian Government and the Secretary of State.”
“Of course, what was often missing from those eloquent descriptions was a recognition that the countries in the CPTPP represent only about a fifth, at best, of the Indo-Pacific region. We are surely right to worry that there could well be a Government drive to expand the orbit of the treaty to a much wider group of nations. If the Government really want to take aim at the biggest economies on Earth, they may well encourage China to join. However, when I asked the Secretary of State whether it was her policy to agree to or block China’s accession, she said that that was not something we could discuss on the Floor of the House or in the Select Committee. That is why safeguards are needed. We might even be so bold as to merely ask for a little bit of clarity on the Government’s future strategy.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and I commend his contribution both to the Committee and to the report that we published on the CPTPP earlier this year. There are a number of important new clauses and amendments not only about the future expansion plans of the CPTPP and what our policy on those might look like, but also, in the names of my right hon. and hon. Friends, about investor-state dispute settlement. This is important because in all the fanfare, arguments and passionate bits of literature and speeches offered by the Government about the virtues of the treaty, it was always positioned as a gateway to the fastest-growing economy on Earth that will represent a significant fraction of economic growth in the future.”
“We like markets to decide, but security always requires state action. We know that we need to work proactively to shape the long term, but democracies frequently entail a short-term change of Government, and too often our politics is reactive.”
“Once upon a time, when the Berlin wall came down, we promised ourselves that we could look forward to a new world of free trade, and we hoped that that free trade could bring political progress and a democratic process—Wandel durch Handel, as the Germans liked to say. However, that reality is now smashed; that era ended with the second invasion of Ukraine. We are now in new times, when we have to debate not just military security but economic security, and economic security questions are always freighted with dilemmas. We are a small nation and our adversaries are big, so we must always act with our allies, but not all our allies are good, and many of our friends would prefer not to pick a side. Our adversaries plan for self-sufficiency, but we cannot. We prefer open, free trade, but global supply chains are risky.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Perhaps it is because we did not want to overly annoy the Canadians, but the truth is that the talks with the Canadians have broken down—at a cost, by the way, to the UK automotive industry. In fact, UK cars will be hit on average by a £3,000 tariff in about a month or two, because of the breakdown of those talks. It is important for us to have a vote on why we do not have those procedures, why we do not have those safeguards and why we do not have those side letters. Finally, I want to underline the point made by the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green. As a House, we must become far more skilled, far more ready and far more adroit at debating the kinds of treaties we will be asked to sign.”
“My hon. Friend, who is making an excellent speech, is right to underline the point about ILO obligations. In the 2022 Queen’s Speech we were promised an updating of the Modern Slavery Act 2015 that would have required much stronger action and transparency on supply chains in order to eliminate forced labour. That measure seems to have disappeared, so we must insist on more robust action in our trade agreements if we are to wipe out the scandal of modern slavery.”
“The Minister is being characteristically generous in giving way. We obviously sought a debate under CRaG for this treaty. The Secretary of State, who is now in her place, told our Committee that she supported that, but the Leader of the House then refused to make Government time available for that debate. What further assurances can the Minister give us that there would indeed be a debate if the treaty was changed in the way that he described?”
“Not quite. I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the full history, but will he accept that the Secretary of State believed that we should have had a debate, under the CRaG principles, on the full treaty? This Bill covers only three of 30 treaties. It is a matter of disappointment to many of us in the House that even though the Secretary of State no doubt argued vigorously and passionately for the debate, the Leader of the House was unable to grant us time. That is not necessarily the precedent that we want to establish for further trade treaty scrutiny.”
“Will the Leader of the House join me in urging the Department to provide that explanatory memorandum quickly and, if not, may we have a debate in Government time to get to the bottom of what on earth is going on?”
“The greater the scandal, the greater obligation on us to act with speed and clarity to provide remedies. Notwithstanding yesterday’s welcome news on the Horizon scandal Bill, we have not acted fast enough, and now we are not acting with enough clarity, because the Department for Business and Trade is more than a fortnight late in providing the explanatory memorandum for its supplementary estimate. No other Department has missed the deadline; only the Department for Business and Trade. We cannot see where the budget might lie for remedies and redress for the GLO—group litigation order—litigants, whose heroic tenacity actually allowed us to overturn the convictions that the Bill proposes.”
“I leave the Minister with the words of Jo Hamilton, who messaged me last night to highlight the plight of the GLO litigants, in particular, and the way in which they “have to justify every last penny even if some of their claim is for actual monies stolen from them by the Post Office… Why can’t the Government do the right thing before even more victims die?” Those words need to ring in our ears as we seek to perfect this Bill.”
“For those who seek to contest their claim, the Minister says there will be no legally binding timeframe between the submission of a claim and an initial offer being made by his Department, which is a problem. There is no standard tariff proposed for compensation under key heads of terms, such as loss of reputation. That, too, is a problem. The Bill is far more than a half measure, that is true, but it is not yet a full solution.”
“I welcome the Minister’s statement and thank him for the collegiate way in which he is working across the House to try to secure justice for those who have suffered. This is a welcome step forward. I am glad to see the Minister taking on board some of the recommendations made in the Business and Trade Committee’s report last week, setting out how we can deliver fair, fast and independent redress. The Government have today proposed how they will overturn convictions. They have taken the Post Office out of some, but not all, claim processing and, crucially, they have increased the number of people who can apply for fixed-term remuneration. However, the Post Office is still handling the claims of at least 100 people with overturned convictions when it is patently not fit for purpose.”
“The Secretary of State will have seen the recommendations that our Committee set out this morning for ending the circus of the Post Office administration of the redress schemes for victims of the Horizon scandal. I know that she takes this incredibly seriously and so I know that she will study our cross-party recommendations for the new legislation that she is about to bring before the House. The question for today is this: if we put all the ongoing investigations to one side, on the basis of the facts as they are known today, does she still have full confidence in Nick Read as the chief executive of the Post Office to run the redress schemes currently under way?”
“Most worryingly, we heard that the Post Office chief executive had not had regularly meetings with the Secretary of State or received a clear written instruction to accelerate every one of the three schemes; there were no deadlines and no targets, and there are no incentives to get the redress schemes done and dusted. That is not good enough. Will the Minister again reflect, when he brings his Bill before the House, on the need to eliminate the Post Office from this process to the maximum possible extent and ensure that there are a legally binding set of timescales under which claims are given the information they need and processed, with offers made and offers settled? I say that, because we cannot go on like this.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for joining us for most of the five hours of hearings yesterday, but he will know as well as I do that what we saw yesterday was complete chaos at the top of the Post Office, when what we needed was a clarity of purpose about paying redress fast and fairly. Not a single witness yesterday said that they were satisfied with the speed of any one of the three processes. In fact, the lawyers for the claimants said that it may now take one to two years in order to complete the payment of redress, and we heard evidence of offers being made that were, frankly, insultingly low. That is true across each of the three schemes.”