Mr Alistair Carmichael
MP for Orkney and Shetland · Liberal Democrat · United Kingdom
“I do not know whether this is something I still need to declare, Mr Speaker, but I visited the Falkland Islands in 2003 as a guest of the Falkland Islands Government. They have never invited me back.”
“I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and also that my wife is a practising veterinary surgeon. What is happening was predictable because it was predicted. The Government were warned by the National Audit Office in June last year that they were unprepared for outbreaks of this sort.”
“The Minister is surely aware that there is no route to net zero that does not go through oil and gas hydrocarbons, and that not exploiting resources on the UK continental shelf leaves us reliant on imports, which also has carbon consequences that must be taken into account.”
“The transition to clean energy could be an opportunity to build a different model that would, to use the First Secretary of State’s own words, end “overly centralised decision making and over-privatisation”.”
“I welcome what the Prime Minister just said about strengthening farming. If he is serious about this, one of the first things he can do is ensure that our farmers do not have to compete with imported food that is produced to lower standards than we expect.”
“Q4. Like others, I have always respected the Prime Minister as somebody who was in politics because he wanted to give service to his country, and he has earned our gratitude for that. In my constituency, those who volunteer as coastguard rescue officers also do so from a wish to give service to their community.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,707 lines we hold for Mr Alistair Carmichael, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 21 of 95.
“The Immigration Minister seems to be making a very good case for increased wage inflation. I wonder what his Treasury colleagues make of the overall impact of that on the economy. Sector after sector, whether agriculture, hospitality, fishing or care services, tell us that they all need access to more skilled staff, and they simply do not have that access at the moment. He stands at the Dispatch Box and talks about adding fishing to the shortage occupation list, but he completely ignores the fact that his and the Home Secretary’s refusal to lower the standard of English language skills required renders that absolutely meaningless for the fishing industry and, as a result of his decision, fishing boats in my constituency and right around the coast are tied up today. When will he start listening to business?”
“What impact will these changes have on the number of students from overseas coming to study in British universities, and what will be the financial consequences? Has the Home Office made that assessment?”
“My interest was really caught by one of the sub-postmasters in Shetland, Brian Smith, who runs the Freefield sub-post office in Lerwick, which is one of the bigger sub-post offices in Shetland. He came to me, showed me the figures and said quite simply, “How do I make a living from this?” I went back to see my constituent last week and he showed me his remuneration note. He is open for 51 hours per week, with two people serving. He pays above minimum wage, but at minimum wage that would be £1,071 per week, which would be £4,641 per calendar month for wages only—before even turning on a light switch or heater. His income from the post office in that month was £4,153.56. I can find no better illustration of the mismatch between what sub-postmasters need by way of remuneration and what they actually receive.”
“Figures provided by the Post Office recently in a conference call to postmasters and postmistresses show that it had a revenue and income last year of £915 million, while its total capital and spend on historic matters, which excludes compensation, was £85 million, and the compensation schemes cost £63 million. The Post Office employed 3,500 people, with a people cost—I assume that is a wages bill—of £180 million. A fairly crude arithmetic would suggest an average salary in the region of £48,000. I would contrast that with what I and, I suspect, many of us around the country hear when we speak to the sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses in our communities.”
“I have always worked very well with the National Federation of SubPostmasters over the years, but I increasingly hear concerns from sub-postmasters that the way in which the federation is constituted makes it difficult for it to represent sub-postmasters in the way they would want to be represented. I do not know the truth of that. It is not my job, or even the Minister’s, to reach a final decision on that at the moment, but I think we have to be aware and respectful of concerns when we hear them. There is clearly a job of work for Ministers and Post Office management to be done in that regard.”
“As I have dealt with constituency cases relating to Horizon and seen some of the more recent advents, such as the bonus payment paid to Nick Read, the chief executive of the Post Office—in an act of utter tone-deafness—my concern is that the culture remains unchanged. If it has changed, it has not changed to the extent or at the speed that we would like. A recent poll on the question of confidence in the board of the Post Office on the Facebook group Voice of the Postmaster attracted no fewer than 367 votes, and it was a 100% vote for no confidence. I mention Voice of the Postmaster because that is, as it were, the provisional wing of the organisation representing sub-postmasters.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered remuneration for Post Office sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Twigg. The House has spent a fair amount of time in recent months considering the question of the Post Office and dealings with postmasters and postmistresses, but most of that has been in relation to the very long tail of the Horizon scandal. I make absolutely no complaint about that. I have had debates in here and in the main Chamber where I have said that, in my view, the basic reason that whole scandal was allowed to happen was the culture that existed within the senior management of the Post Office. Basically, the people at the top just did not trust those at the sharp end of the businesses.”
“The quality of what we can get in that shop now is phenomenal, but he tells me it costs him to have a sub-post office counter in the business. It should not be costing somebody like that. That should be something that adds value, but we are seeing the determination and commitment of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses around the country being taken advantage of.”
“I absolutely agree. I see this process happening and it has not happened suddenly; it has been happening for years. People retire, give up or for whatever reason decide they do not want to continue and nobody comes forward, so the post office remains nominally open, but in fact there is no service in the community—there might be some from another branch or wherever, but frankly the core of what the sub-post office is about is lost. I think of the example of the post office in the village where I live. It is in the village shop. It was bought recently by somebody who had given up a career—of 51 years, he tells me—in IT, so he was not doing this to increase his income. He has transformed the shop. He has taken what was a good Orkney country shop and brought in a whole range of different fresh foods—Orkney fish, Orkney beef, everything.”
“The post office is therefore getting 35 hours from me in the summer and 15 hours a week in the winter. For this I get paid £390.90 per month…slightly above the current minimum wage if I opened for 8 hours per week.””
“This information could be pre populated…The Post Office do not provide all the items that may be required to meet their standards—for example, a shredder.” The list of things that are done for communities by people running sub-post offices was shared by my constituent Juliet Bellis, who runs the sub-post office in Fetlar, an island community in Shetland with 68 residents. She makes the point that elderly and infirm residents there rely on the post office to charge up their electricity keys. She says: “I am contracted to open for 8 hours per week but I have trained up everyone who works in the shop so that, if the shop is open, the post office is available. That means in the summer you can get access to the post office 7 days a week, from 11am to 4pm; in the winter, we only open for five days a week—from 11am to 2pm.”
“She told me: “A lot of mail and packages are left with us for collection. Every item has to be accounted for, processed in and processed out. We are quite often having to produce a proof of postage for mail that is paid for online. This takes some time checking that the correct postage has been paid. The changes to customs requirements have added on much more time to the process than what they claim” —that is the Post Office— “This is particularly true for Drop and Go accounts where we have to input the senders details for every package.”
“Absolutely. With your indulgence, Mr Twigg, I took those interventions together because we had three different communities all telling us the same story. It is a story of commitment from sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses that is not being met through their remuneration. The point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine) should be emphasised, because isolation is not something that affects only those in rural communities. There are people who live in isolation in cities and towns. For them, a post office and access to a post office is an important service, and they stand to lose out as a consequence of the constant salami slicing that we see. Another postmistress in my constituency from Orkney spoke about the different changes that she has to work with.”
“At present, 6 million DVLA transactions, worth something in the region of £3.2 million, are made through post offices every year. I am told by the Post Office that the likeliest outcome is that it will get a 12-month extension to the agreement, which would take it to 31 March 2024, but that the DVLA is not committing beyond that point.”
“Ironically, the Post Office instant saver account has a limit of £1,000 per day or £10,000 per year, as does the Post Office reward saver. Brian Smith told me just last week that when people hand over their takings and pay money into bank accounts through the post office, it does not know whether that person is anywhere near the account cap. If the post office staff spend time counting out the money, only to find that they cannot take it because the customer has exceeded the cap, that is a source of enormous and legitimate frustration for them. Mr Twigg, you may think that I have just about vented my spleen and exhausted everything that I have to say, but today it has been brought to my attention that negotiations between the Post Office and the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency are reaching a crisis point.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and I do not think we are going to have much contention in this debate. The same point was made to me by Valerie Johnson, who is the sub-postmistress at Baltasound, Unst. She pointed out that holiday pay is contracted to cover roughly £5 per hour, but there has been no update since 2016. That is probably the sort of thing that produces the outcome to which the hon. Gentleman just referred. The final point I want to deal with relates to bank charges. As we know, we are pushing more and more banks into using the Post Office, and the figures that have been put to me show massive disparities between the amounts that can be paid in on a daily or annual basis. For Barclays, the limit is £3,000 per transaction but only £10,000 per year. For Danske Bank, it is £1,000 per day and £5,000 every 180 days.”
“We have heard a small part of it service represented here today, and if I take nothing else from this debate, it is that we need to find another opportunity to go over this ground in more detail. That army, like all armies, needs leadership, and that is where we are losing the opportunity at the moment. They need leadership; they need respect for the work they do; and above all else they need fair pay for the work that they do for our communities.”
“The concern that we might now be reaching the point of losing the contract has to be taken seriously. It is clear that the Post Office is taking it seriously, and it is incumbent upon those carrying out the negotiation to understand that they are the people negotiating on behalf of post offices and those who issue licences. They are behaving as if they are in some hardball negotiation between Gordon Gekko and The Wolf of Wall Street. They are losing sight of the fact that they are there for a specific purpose, and they should focus on that. We have an army of public servants, the length and breadth of this country, who provide a tremendous service for our communities.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to her work as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on post offices. The point that really stands to be made about the Post Office and the DVLA is that these are two public bodies. Negotiating a deal between two public bodies is about access to a public service. I confess that I was always sceptical about post offices being the “front office of Government”, because it is difficult for a Government to say that they use the Post Office as their “front office”, when at the same time they are telling everybody else that everything is digital by default. There is a somewhat mixed message between those two options, and we will have to decide which it will be, because if we try to do both, we will never succeed in either regard.”
“The Minister is absolutely right. We cannot dictate to people how they do things. But surely with the example of the cash limits on bank deposits, that is exactly what we are doing. If we say, “You’ve had your limit; you can’t pay in any more money here,” then we have taken away the option for them to use the post office. Let us not forget that they are probably using that option as a sop to the Government here, because they were making all sorts of promises about it being the last bank in town.”
“9. What recent assessment he has made of the potential role of North sea oil and gas infrastructure in developing carbon capture and underground storage capacity.”
“The Greensand project in Denmark has proven the concept of carbon capture, usage and storage, but we know that the supply chain in this country is fragile. Indeed, if others go ahead and develop CCUS, that is where they will go. Companies such as EnQuest in Shetland, which operates the Sullom Voe oil terminal, are keen to do exactly what the Secretary of State is talking about. Would he or the Energy Minister agree to meet me and the operators of EnQuest to hear what it needs to get that exciting project across the line for a final investment decision?”
“T4. Directors at Ofgem are on the record as saying they are already doing everything that needs to be done to meet the country’s net zero targets. I do not know anyone outside Ofgem who sees that as anything other than dangerously complacent. Is it not now time for the Minister to give a direct mandate to Ofgem to include meeting net zero as part of its remit?”
“What are the Government doing to ensure that the genomics data of British businesses held by British genomics companies that then trade or do deals with Chinese companies, such as BGI Genomics, is protected? Is it not somewhat naive, given the terms of the national security law, to think that GDPR alone is sufficient protection?”
“The volume and nature of the interventions on the Secretary of State show the difficulty of this area of law. While the changes to parole are welcome, is there not a danger that they will increase further the treatment of those who are currently in the system and those who are still in the prison system—somewhere in the region of 3,000 people—more than 10 years after we abolished sentences of imprisonment for public protection? The Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who I see in his place, has called for a review. Sir John Major did the same recently. Would this Bill not be an opportunity to deal with that?”
“11. What recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology on the potential merits of designating UK genomics databases as critical national infrastructure.”
“I recommend that the Minister reads the speech that Secretary of State Blinken made on Tuesday, in which he outlined the threat that the abuse of genomics databases poses not just to security, but to democracy as a whole. Contrast that with the situation in this country, where we now have a Chinese genomics giant opening a new lab. When are the Government going to wake up to the threat here?”
“It is surely apparent that the culture within the Post Office that allowed people at the top to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to pursue an indefensible case has not changed. Although, of course, those who were victims of Horizon will be angry, so, too, will the thousands of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses across the country whose remuneration package is wholly inadequate. So here is an idea: why not set a cap on the maximum gap between the money paid to the sub-postmaster or sub-postmistress delivering the service on which our public rely and that paid to the chief executive?”
“I am a little surprised that the Minister apparently accepts, without question, the proposition that the Metropolitan police now apologises to people who have been lawfully arrested. Even by his standards, that is something of a novel departure. The Public Order Act has given police officers broad and sweeping powers, which in turn require the police to exercise discretion and judgment with no context or guidelines. If there is no change to this legislation, such things will keep happening. There should have been better pre-legislative scrutiny of the Act, but there was not. Will he now commit to allowing post-legislative scrutiny?”
“CCUS is very important to me and to my constituency. EnQuest, the operator at the Sullom Voe terminal, sees the next generation of the use of that terminal involving CCUS, but does that not reinforce the point made by the right hon. Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma), in relation to Ofgem’s remit? Does it not sit very nicely with the recommendations that the Secretary of State has received from Tim Pick, his offshore wind champion, who has also made the point that Ofgem’s mandate must be reshaped to bring it into the appropriate framework for net zero challenges? That remit has not been touched since 2010.”
“They would be able to found, run and grow businesses or maintain businesses that had been run by their family for generations, keeping children in the schools and keeping money going through local contractors into post offices, shops and all the rest of it. For the bigger economic development projects, getting products from the outer isles to the market will always require at least one ferry service, but there is no reason it should need two. I think of businesses such as Cooke Aquaculture, which has a processing station in Mid Yell: it has to construct an entire staff rota on the availability of ferry services to get its product from Mid Yell down to Lerwick before it catches the ongoing ferry. That is how the infrastructure provided has a very direct impact on one of the most important food-producing businesses in my constituency.”
“If he went fishing for the day and someone had an accident, they had to wait until he came back from his fishing trip. In the 21st century, thankfully, that is not how the NHS works. We need a wider range of clinical practitioners, and people expect different standards from those practitioners. Maintaining public services of that sort in such communities becomes ever more difficult and challenging for us. At every meeting we heard the same story. Overwhelmingly, the view was that young people wanted to stay in the outer isles in Shetland, but were forced to leave by the nature of the opportunities for employment, health and education for their family and were desperate to return. If these people stayed in our island communities, they would contribute to their economic growth.”
“In an age in which we are always told that people are uninterested in politics and will not turn out for a public meeting, about 250 people from these small communities came out over the course of a week to offer their views on what fixed links could do for their communities. A tiny number of people demurred, but the overwhelming consensus was that in our communities the construction of fixed links could be absolutely transformative for the design and delivery of public services. Keeping GPs based in an island community of a few hundred people is a big ask, for example. Then there is the creation and ongoing maintenance of schools in those communities, which are constantly shifting. I was born and brought up in Islay; I grew up there in the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s. In those days, one GP served our end of the island.”
“We look with some envy at what our Nordic cousins in the Faroe Islands have done by linking their islands together and at the west of Norway, where parts of the mainland are linked by tunnel, as indeed are some of the smaller islands. As a consequence of those discussions, which have been happening in the community for some time, my colleague Beatrice Wishart MSP and I set up a series of town hall meetings in the summer of last year. Obviously there are no towns, so they were not in town halls; they were in community halls and church halls in Fetlar, Unst, Yell, Whalsay, Out Skerries and Bressay.”
“Earlier in the sitting, I was pleased to welcome the announcement of funding of £26 million for a replacement Fair Isle ferry—a significant amount of money, but that money is critical to preserving one of the smallest and most economically fragile communities to be found anywhere in these islands. The geography of Shetland is such that, apart from Fair Isle, Foula and others, the islands are pretty close together on a map. To our mind, it makes perfect sense for those islands to be joined not by ferry services, which are subject to weather delays, breakdowns and all the rest of it, but by a series of short tunnels—fixed links. In recent years, the debate on the islands has very much headed in that direction.”
“When it is at its best, the Treasury is very good at doing the strategic, but often it becomes a bit hidebound by its own rules, and it lacks a little of the creativity that we require. For those of us in the northern isles, the most important infrastructure that we have is our transport infrastructure, in particular our ferries. We have the ferries that go between Orkney and Shetland and Scotland—or mainland Scotland, as some people like to call it—and the ferries that go between the different isles that make up Orkney and Shetland. What brings me to the Chamber today is the community discussion of those internal ferry services in recent years.”
“It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Sharma. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) on securing today’s very timely debate. It strikes at many of the issues that we face in politics at the moment—issues that must be dealt with over something longer than the current electoral cycle. One of the failings of politics and the frustrations with Government that we have all experienced over the years is that we are all focused on the next four or five-yearly electoral event. For some infrastructure projects—we have touched on HS2, and I will speak about some that are closer to home for me than that will ever be—we need a more strategic approach.”
“Absolutely. I am horrified that, having been a colleague of mine, my hon. Friend says she does not know much about ferry services—she has clearly not been listening! However, the point she makes is a good one. This is where Treasury rules and funding come into play. If we are looking at ferries, for example, we look for a pay-down over a 20-year or possibly 30-year period. A tunnel will be several times that, but Treasury rules constantly push people towards a like-for-like replacement. They seem to lack the flexibility and creativity necessary to provide the services that will maintain the economic and social viability of such communities in the longer term. There is also a continuing role for EU—sorry, for Treasury—funding.”
“What we are looking for at the moment is a bit of willingness from the Treasury to engage with our community and allow us the opportunity to make the contribution to the rest of the United Kingdom that we have always made and that we know we can continue to make. Might the Minister agree to meet me and a delegation from the Shetland communities and the Shetland Islands Council to hear their intentions and hear what they want to do to make this happen? A small amount of Treasury money at this stage, to establish the case with scientific and technical rigour in a way that as a community we may be unable to do for ourselves, could be transformative in future.”
“In the medium to long term, tunnels will always be much more carbon-efficient than ferries, with respect both to running costs and to ongoing replacements. The Treasury has a pot of money that is currently set aside as a consequence of the wish of the last Prime Minister but one, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), to build a bridge from south-west Scotland to Northern Ireland. I can promise the Minister that there are none of the problems with unexploded ordnance that befell that particular project. The money still sits there in a ringfenced pot, so if the Minister wants to stand up and give me a commitment to fund tunnels for Shetland, I will be delighted to take it.”
“I am happy to tell the House that the Unst and Yell tunnel action groups, working together, have already obtained pledges in the region of £100,000 towards the £200,000 that they think might be necessary to get the first stage of a feasibility study. The project will have not just local strategic importance, but national significance. Unst will probably be the earliest and most effective—possibly the only—spaceport in the United Kingdom that is capable of doing vertical as opposed to horizontal launches. The people behind the SaxaVord spaceport in Unst tell me every week that that will be critical to their ability to exploit to the maximum the potential of the project in which they are investing. There is also the question of the carbon cost.”
“Yes, I am always right the first time. There is a continuing role for the Treasury in relation to funding, because a significant proportion of the ferries that we are now looking to replace were purchased and commissioned in the first place with a proportion of EU funding. That funding now sits with the Treasury, so although transport as a whole is devolved, there is still an obvious and strong role for the Treasury. Following on from the Tunnel Vision roadshows that we ran in the summer of last year, as we suggested, communities set up tunnel action groups to decide how they could make the case. The case for a big infrastructure project like that, for a small community, is always that it should basically be designed by the community itself.”
“I bridle slightly at the hon. Gentleman’s use of “remote”. I am always being told that I live in a remote community, which means that I have to define the place I call home in relation to somewhere else. Surely the point is not about the distance between Brussels and the place where the projects were delivered; it is about understanding that the European Union enabled communities to do something for themselves. That is a very different model from the one in Edinburgh and London these days. Viewed from Shetland, both those places are pretty remote.”
“What right do we have to criticise other countries—for example, Saudi Arabia for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia for its extraterritorial offences—if we authorise the conduct of our own Ministers, politicians and personnel in relation to such activities? This is about our moral authority. I would like to think that the Government will look kindly on the amendments, if not today, then perhaps when the Bill returns to the other place.”
“In its simplest form, the Bill would still undermine an important and long-standing legal prohibition in this country on torture and related abuses. We have a long and distinguished history in this area. Conservative Members will be aware of the landmark changes made under the Government of the late Baroness Thatcher to create a specific criminal offence of torture. If the Government seek to undermine Baroness Thatcher’s legacy, I am quite prepared, on this one limited occasion, to take up cudgels and defend it. The Bill also raises the question of our country’s moral authority.”
“Although we have never really seen a proper conclusion to those cases, such an operational defence would put that comprehensively beyond reach. The clause could also discourage the Crown Prosecution Service, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, and the Director of Public Prosecutions or the Lord Advocate from bringing cases. Where decisions are made about bringing prosecutions on individual cases, including those against Ministers and officials, the availability of a statutory defence for any conduct deemed “necessary” would likely discourage the prosecution authority from bringing a prosecution relating to criminal activities—or what would otherwise be criminal activities—that Ministers and officials assist or encourage others to do overseas.”
“In the Lords, that point was interrogated at length in Committee. The Minister in the Lords said that he would revert to Lord Pannick, but he never did. Instead, the Government chose to proceed in the way that is presented to the House today. Clause 31 almost appears designed to protect politicians and officials in the UK rather than British personnel operating overseas. The clause would provide a legal defence for encouraging or assisting crimes overseas, such as giving a tip-off that leads to someone’s torture, as opposed to the direct commission of the crime itself. This is not fanciful; we know what was done by Jack Straw and senior officials of the day in relation to the Belhaj and Boudchar cases.”
“I do not know if it is the Government’s wish and intention that the International Criminal Court be given jurisdiction in that way, but should that ultimately turn out to be the case, neither the Minister nor his successors will be able to say that they were not warned. Clause 31 could also give Ministers and officials a statutory defence for involvement in crimes such as targeted killing and torture. That could include sending information from the UK overseas to be used in a torture interrogation, assisting the offense of torture under section 134 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988. Under the clause, a statutory defence would be available if the action were deemed necessary for the proper exercise of a function of an intelligence service or for the proper exercise of a function of the armed forces.”
“One concern, on which I would be interested to hear the Minister’s view, is that the International Criminal Court has warned that clause 31 as it stands would open the jurisdiction of the court to look at the actions of UK personnel. To the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden, the ICC’s chief prosecutor wrote that cases could now be “potentially admissible before the ICC”— a fairly strong statement in these circumstances—citing the risk of creating gaps in the domestic prosecution mechanisms for war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome statute. The prosecutor said that the Bill would be clear if it clearly excluded serious human rights abuses from its remit.”
“It sits more logically with the structure of the Bill now, and it would avoid some of the unintended consequences. That is the disadvantage of starting a piece of legislation—a Bill of this nature should always have the maximum cross-party agreement and political consensus behind it—in a way that was, in the early days, quite divisive. The issues could perhaps have been better interrogated further upstream before the legislation came to the House. The points that I wish to pray in aid of the amendment relate to the way in which clause 31, as it stands, would have effect. There are a number of points, which I will cover as briefly as possible because I do not want to filibuster the opportunity to put my own amendment to a vote; I have seen that done too many times in the past.”