Barry Gardiner
MP for Brent West · Labour · United Kingdom
“Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not.”
“The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public.”
“The Minister will know that the grant structure on which UKRI is based gives out grants for a maximum of three to five years. Very few are for five years—most are for three years or under—yet the sort of long-term scientific development that my hon.”
“My hon. Friend is making a superb case for the importance of funding for her deep earth facility. I had the privilege of going to the National Oceanography Centre’s deep oceans facility, and the innovative science there on carbon sequestration is superb.”
“The Prime Minister has spoken powerfully about the devolution of power and giving back control. Will he therefore ensure that the proposals for commonhold and leasehold reform, for which 5 million leaseholders in this country are waiting with bated breath, do give that power and control back to those people, through the right to enfranchi…”
“We know how much land there is in the UK, and we know the extent of our inland waters and seas, so we can know how much we have to do to protect them, as we are required to do by target 3 of the global biodiversity framework.”
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“TDL enjoy a good reputation and it is understandable that they would wish to protect this. However, in light of the requirements to put patients first and the duty of openness, transparency and candour, as recommended by Francis, it is felt that all involved could have been more open throughout the process.” This issue of transparency and openness will remain a serious challenge for as long as private companies compete for contracts on the basis of cost. Too many medical professionals are having to discover to the detriment of their patients that, for all their clinical expertise, they were never trained in the dark arts of commercial contract law, contract specification, negotiation and monitoring. It is the dogma of this Government that has put competition at the heart of our national health service, where patients should rightly be.”
“It is not. The awarding of the contract to Revisecatch Ltd shows that the clinical advice was ignored on the basis of cost, despite the clear implications for patient safety. The irony is that the subsequent change in contract specification almost always results in much higher costs, to the benefit of the private provider. Patient care and patient safety can only be prioritised in a system where transparency thrives. Only in such a system can mistakes be learned from and become the basis of better future practice, but it is not in the interest of private companies to disclose any aspect of failing service. The root cause analysis report notes: “The report provided by TDL on 08 March, was light on detail in parts and so it was difficult to identify lessons learned.”
“In fact, one GP has written to me noting: “It perhaps raises an interesting learning point for the future; that being if GPs are going to commission services and deal with private providers, what mechanisms are in place to stop patients being harmed by” our “negotiating a less than water tight contract? We are GPs not lawyers.” Certainly with respect to the takeover of the pathology laboratory by TDL, no risk assessment was carried out to predict the potential problems that might arise from a change in both system and process, and no suitable performance measures were implemented, nor was a structure of monitoring put in place to ensure that a good quality of service was maintained. The Health Secretary has been keen to argue that privatising these services is on the basis of improvements to patient welfare and sound clinical evidence.”
“Secondly, how will doctors who present a risk to the public be remediated and returned to safe and effective practice, given that the proposal specifically does not replace the key post with the clinical capacity to carry that out? The problems and failings I have outlined this evening are not a series of unfortunate but unrelated events, but the logical consequence of a restructured NHS that has put competition and cost, rather than patient care and patient safety, at the heart of the health service. There has been a failure to ensure quality commissioning of the services being provided.”
“The advertisement for a replacement for the senior assessment adviser specifies that the person concerned must be someone on secondment, and for one year only. The restructuring proposals dispense with the post of the director responsible for the “back on track” service, but no one else in the service has the clinical capacity to perform the role. For some 50% of those who come for assessment, previously unidentified patient safety issues are revealed, often involving the cognitive impairment of the clinician himself or herself. I believe that before the proposed changes are allowed to proceed, the Minister must provide satisfactory answers to two questions. First, how will those patient safety concerns be discovered under the new model?”
“Its budget was cut by 20%, and it was told that it would have to become self-funding by 2013. In 2012, Deloitte was asked to conduct a review of the service, but it is due to publish its report only on 14 November, 10 days from now. In April this year, NCAS was joined to the NHS Litigation Authority, which has since consulted on a new structure prior to publication of the Deloitte report. I understand that senior clinicians in NCAS are deeply worried that the head of the NHSLA has simply dismissed the very serious concerns that senior and experienced practitioners fed into the consultation about the proposals and the impact they might have on patient safety. NCAS is now haemorrhaging junior staff, whom it is allowed to replace only with agency people.”
“NCAS was established to undertake performance assessments of GPs and clinicians when primary care or hospital trusts had expressed concern that their clinical results or statistics appeared to have been outside normal parameters. There are more than 1,000 referrals a year, and in the vast majority of cases NCAS will assist simply by advising the trust in order to return the clinicians to safe and effective practice. However, in 50 or 60 cases each year an extraordinarily detailed and intensive process of assessment and remediation is required. Only about 60% of those who undergo that process make it back into safe and effective practice, while 40% never return to work in the NHS. NCAS is therefore one of the key guardians of patient safety. In 2010, it became clear that NCAS would be restructured as part of the reconfiguration of the NHS.”
“I asked, “how many calls have not been (a) answered, (b) referred to a clinician or trained nurse within the appropriate timescale or (c) in receipt of a call-back from an appropriate clinician within 10 minutes”. I received the following response: “Local commissioners are responsible for performance management of NHS 111 services, and set their own performance targets for services…Data…is not available in the format requested.” —[ Official Report , 23 October 2013; Vol. 569, c. 213-4W.] In other words, the only people responsible for policing such conflicts of interest are the very people who have stood to gain from them. The final issue I wish to raise with the Minister is that of the National Clinical Assessment Service. In many respects, this could merit an Adjournment debate all of its own.”
“The urgent care centre at Central Middlesex hospital happens to be owned by Care UK, the company that also now owns Harmoni. Let me make clear that I am not accusing Care UK of encouraging its NHS 111 staff to make referrals to Central Middlesex in the knowledge that they will benefit from the treatment of any patients at the urgent treatment centre there, because I have no information to suggest that that is the case. Nevertheless, it is clear that there is a serious conflict of interest that any contract must monitor and guard against. The interests of Care UK are clear, but its performance is not. I wrote to the Secretary of State for Health asking how the service in Brent had performed relative to the service specification.”
“Reference has been made to patients’ calls being answered by medically illiterate staff and to failure to meet targets to transfer calls to a clinician or nurse within 60 seconds or return them within 10 minutes, and there have been stories of patients simply being referred to A and E departments because call centre staff do not know what alternative facilities are available. I do not wish simply to add to that catalogue of failings. My concern is more specific. In Brent and Harrow, we have an NHS 111 service that was awarded to Harmoni. That in itself was cause for some concern, as the company’s shareholders included the majority of the Harrow clinical commissioning group board that had decided to award it the contract. However, that is not the potential conflict of interest on which I wish to focus.”
“What started off as a way of saving money and freeing consultants to focus on clear cases of need becomes a bureaucratic process that puts patient outcomes at risk and costs more money as a result of duplication and delay. I should like to know from the Minister whether it is still the case that a patient has a statutory right to see a consultant, and whether a patient can insist on a direct referral from his or her GP without the interposition of additional diagnostic tests. However, it is not just those diagnostic support services that are being privatised; front-line diagnostic services are being outsourced as well. I am, of course, referring to the NHS 111 service. The service was designed to ease pressures on accident and emergency departments by providing telephone-based triage, but many criticisms have already been made of it.”
“I am told that the problem is compounded because the scans received from InHealth are often themselves delayed, and are frequently found to be of such poor quality that the patient must be referred to a specialist consultant in any event. My office has also been given anecdotal evidence that staff at diagnostic centres do not possess the necessary skills or understanding to handle complex diagnostic services. General practitioners are not specialists. They are not consultants, and they are seeing scans which they cannot decipher or which are in a format that they cannot use. The patients are sent for another scan, or often are simply referred to the consultant whom they would have seen under the old system, who then usually orders a further scan at his or her own site.”
“Another privatised diagnostic service, the London NHS Diagnostic Service, is provided by InHealth. It is designed to enable London GPs to make direct referrals for their patients so that they have already had tests before being referred to specialist consultants. The tests might include ultrasound, echocardiography, audiology, cardiac physiology, magnetic resonance imaging, X-ray, endoscopy or phlebotomy scans. The intention was to reduce the CCG’s consultant costs by referring only patients who really needed their attention. In other words, GPs would filter patients to avoid unnecessary and costly referrals. GPs have objected that that practice has simply introduced a middleman to the process, and that delaying a diagnosis from a specialist consultant may put patients in danger.”
“However, the terms of the contract failed to specify that, and the eventual service that was commissioned did not provide for temperature control. I have also received complaints about delays in delivery, as well as allegations that damage to samples in transit has made it difficult to record and analyse them properly. Indeed, the NHS Brent CCG noted in a report to the Brent health overview and scrutiny committee that issues of transportation quality and service delays on the part of the courier service, Revisecatch Ltd —trading as Courier Systems— “appear to play a seasonal role in the variation of potassium levels; in that they add to the instability of the samples due to fluctuation in temperature during storage at the GP practice and/or during transportation to the laboratory in both summer and winter”.”
“Owing to this transition, GPs and consultants were effectively left blind about the difficulties they might experience with pathology reports. Of course, the quality of any test results will always depend on the quality of the samples received. Just as in the world of computing, “garbage in leads to garbage out”. One would imagine that when the decision was taken to outsource the pathology courier service that delivers samples to the pathology laboratory, clear and appropriate clinical advice was sought about precisely how this contract should be specified—and it was. In fact, GPs suggested that a courier service carrying samples for potassium tests must be refrigerated in order to avoid the impact of temperature change on the quality of the sample.”
“There was also a problem with one of the lines in the calcium analyser as a result of which samples were transferred to another laboratory, and a number of issues were attributed to human error.” Compounding the confusion, when the service was transferred, TDL used different reference value ranges to assess and analyse results in order to fit in with its own IT systems. Unfortunately, it failed to communicate this change to the GPs or consultants who were now expected to interpret results that they did not understand, based on reference ranges with which they were not familiar. TDL was found to have not followed its own procedures, which required it to flag up to its service users when systems were changing.”
“The question then arises how any competent company of qualified health professionals could come to make such errors. After all, its website states that it is “providing quality accredited pathology services to the UK and worldwide”. I trust the Minister will be as surprised and as disappointed as I was to learn that, at the time the service was outsourced, TDL was “not currently registered with Clinical Pathology Accreditation (UK) but is working towards this”. The words “working towards this” should be accompanied by some degree of scepticism, given that the final report on the root causes of the problem identified that TDL was so incompetent that “There was an operational issue with the new robotic sorter which resulted in a number of samples being filed incorrectly as ‘analysis complete’ and subsequently discarded.”
“The interim deputy director of quality and safety for Brent, Ealing, Harrow and Hillingdon CCGs reported “many incidents of patients attending for repeat blood tests at both the practice and within the hospital and some patients…referred to A&E Department because of high potassium levels.” Many consultants began to experience similar problems with the service and were also having to carry out further unnecessary tests. One consultant, when pressed, scribbled a note setting out a variety of issues: “Immunology—assay results; Calcium results—change in calculations; Change in reference ranges; Potassium—delays in transfer and refrigeration”. I am sure the Minister will agree that such failings in service are wholly unacceptable.”
“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his intervention, and he is absolutely right that diabetes is a major problem in the Brent area. Given that many of the tests related to phlebotomy, I would assume that some of them might have related to diabetes, but I do not have that specific information to hand. I was explaining that GPs across the borough were receiving many more abnormal results than they would ordinarily expect, that the downward trend in the quality of the results had prompted an investigation and that the GPs had expressed their own concerns by exchanging information among themselves to ascertain the extent of the problem.”
“The Minister rightly says that clinicians are best placed to make clinical judgments about their patients’ needs, and there is no dispute between us on that. My concern is that in a case such as that of TDL the clinicians understood the clinical need but clearly did not have the expertise to ensure that the contract was properly engaged in; that it was risk-assessed in the first place; that it was properly monitored; and that it was executed in a manner that was going to ensure the proper relationship between the practitioner and the tests that were being done. Similarly, on the courier service, they had the clinical evidence right, saying that refrigeration was needed, but when it came to putting the contract in place there was no such refrigeration.”
“The Minister will have been aware of the report on TDL in north-west London and in no sense could it have been said that a satisfactory service was being delivered. So why did the CQC not intervene in a timely fashion? Why, when the initial report by the GP was made about a serious incident, was it not taken seriously? Why did it take so long to make sure that these services were being provided properly and that my constituents were being kept safe?”
“This decision is devastating for my constituents. The Secretary of State will know that in the last winter period, Northwick Park hospital and Central Middlesex hospital, which comprise the North West London Hospitals Trust, were the worst-performing hospitals when it came to meeting A and E targets not only in London, but in the country. The trust scored 81.03%. That is an appalling record. What he has done today, by announcing the almost immediate closure of Central Middlesex, can only make that much worse. The College of Emergency Medicine has said that his reconfigured hospitals should have at least 16 consultants in their emergency departments, but his decision will give them 10—and that is not for major trauma centres. Will he elaborate on what he will do to bring the number of consultants up to the level required by the college?”
“The most recent migration statistics quarterly report by the Office for National Statistics was published in August 2013 and it noted that the net flow of long-term migrants was 176,000, compared with 235,000 in June 2010, when the right hon. Lady’s Government came to power. That suggests that the figure of 25% cited by my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Simon Danczuk) when he intervened earlier is right and that the right hon. Lady’s figure of 33% is wrong. Will she confirm that those are the latest statistics and that the reduction was by 25%?”
“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene, because Brent was one area where the van came round. On the occasions when it did so, the division and hurt that it caused in the community was extraordinary. Does she agree that the policy could not have been introduced because the Home Secretary genuinely thought it was likely to inspire anyone to leave the country, and that instead it was a calculated political propaganda move? As such, her party should pay back to the taxpayer the cost of those vans.”
“In the light of the proposed reforms to judicial review funding and challenges to legal aid, including the proposed adoption of a residence test, judicial review will not be practically accessible for a number of cases, leaving individuals without any form of redress and the Home Office with no imperative to improve its processes.”
“The Home Office states that the immigration appeals framework is overtly complex, slow and expensive, but reducing the number of appeals will cause the number of applications for judicial review to soar. That will be more expensive, slower and less effective, but it will be the only lawful option left for many cases. The High Court is likely to become the first port of call for those opposing deportation decisions. Again, immigration officials in the Home Office know that. They know that they are taking a bottleneck from one part of the system and putting it in another part where it will be more costly to the public purse.”
“Many of our constituents do not receive notification from their lawyers until several weeks after even a positive response has been received from the Home Office. The very idea that such a review could be made within 10 days is quite simply incredible. Those officials who have told, written to and persuaded Ministers that this can be done know only too well that that is false. Under clause 11, where there is right of appeal to the first tier tribunal, refusal decisions made on erroneous grounds or without reference to highly relevant information simply cannot be challenged. The option to raise challenges to unlawful decision making before the High Court in judicial review proceedings will remain, but that means that the time of the High Court judges will be used in pointing out basic errors in Home Office decision making.”
“The Home Office believes that the appeals framework is flawed, but part of the problem with that framework is the poor quality of its initial decisions, which then clog up the appeals process. How can the Home Office believe that an administrative review process will properly go to the heart of the problem? It will not. As the Bill stands, refused applicants will be required to apply for administrative review within 10 days of receiving the decision. All of us who have extensive correspondence with the Home Office know that most of the decisions come back to lawyers. So lawyers will be required to make that administrative review application within 10 days, but the Home Office must know full well that that simply will not happen. It is not happening at the moment.”
“Member for Henley (John Howell) should say that when the Bill was published he received correspondence from his constituents who, of course, are the landlords, while the constituents who wrote to my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East and to me are the tenants. Each of us in this place is properly reflecting the views of our constituents, but, on behalf of those against whom the Bill will be so penal, I hope that hon. Members who do not share the same constituency issues and problems might take note of some of the speeches that have been given already. I want to focus on the heart of the Bill, which is that the Home Office argues that the immigration appeals framework is flawed. To whom will it give the work? An internal Home Office review estimated that approximately 60% of the volume of allowed appeals are due to casework errors.”
“I am proud to speak in today’s debate. The speeches of my hon. Friends the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) and for Lewisham East (Heidi Alexander) were quite magnificent. They dealt with this issue from their own experience, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, who always speaks so eloquently on these matters. I would even say—those who know me will know how much it costs me to do so—that the hon. Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) also made a very good speech. The quality of the speeches comes from the nature of Members’ constituencies. It was instructive that the hon.”
“They know where every one of the people targeted by the van lives, but they have not bothered to go and ensure that they are detained and deported, because they do not want the costs. The idea that the racist van was sent out to remind people that they could go home, when thousands of people are not being deported with the full knowledge of the Home Office, shows that that Department is the most dysfunctional in government.”
“During the pending period, what can a prospective landlord do? If they do not know their prospective tenant’s immigration status, they will not take them on. I have to respect your wish for others to be allowed to speak, Mr Deputy Speaker, although there are of course many cases that I would like to cite. I must finish, however, by talking about the racist van that affected my community so dreadfully this summer. The Government claim that the objective was for people to realise that they could get assistance in going home. However, every person whom the Government could deport has received a letter telling them that. Mr KN has been signing on every single month for 12 years, and on every one of those occasions an immigration officer could have detained him and taken him for deportation. They have not done so.”
“He lives at the property with his wife and three children. I understand that he is in great financial difficulties”— that is because his case has been in limbo with the Home Office for 15 years— “and I have accommodated this only because he has three very young children. However, I am unable to continue with this arrangement as I have a mortgage and other bills to pay. I would appreciate if his claim could be dealt with urgently so he is able to get help, as I am no longer able to let him stay at the property without paying his rent. I don’t wish to see him homeless, as he has three young children.” That is a landlord who is acting like a human being. The Bill asks that she instead act like an immigration officer. Tenants often have limited leave to remain in this country and apply for additional leave to remain.”
“It stated that it had received her application on 27 July 2012—a year previously— “and it is now still awaiting consideration…I am sorry to hear that” Ms RS “is experiencing problems with her employers. She may be interested to know that employers can check the eligibility of prospective employees to work in the UK by using the online Employer Checking Service”— which was precisely what her employer had done the previous December, when she had not been logged on it, and every week and month since. The Home Office has done nothing, and a woman has lost her job and livelihood. The Home Secretary holds that up as an example to show that the system is already working. I think not. Let us not be down on the landlords, though. I have a letter to the Home Office from a landlord, Mrs Patel, which states: “I can confirm that” Mr KA “is my tenant.”
“We advised you of this notification and requested that you provided us with further documentation…I am therefore writing to you to confirm that you are required to attend a formal disciplinary hearing”. That was on 21 December. I had become involved in the intervening period and written to the UKBA about the case. It confirmed to me on 19 December that the case had been logged on its computer system, and that from that date the employer should have got a positive response when phoning the employer checking service. I understand that a manager checked on 7 January, but again, the system showed a negative response. On 9 July, seven months later, I got a letter from the Home Office, which read: “Thank you for your letter of 18 June with enclosure on behalf of” RS.”
“We do, and I will read a letter of 14 December last year from an employer to an employee, whom I will call RS. It states: “I am writing to advise you that we have received notification from the UK Border Agency regarding your entitlement to work in the UK and would like to invite you to an investigation meeting to discuss this and other aspects of your right to work in the UK…I must advise you that you are currently suspended (no payment) pending further investigation as we have liaised with you and unfortunately you have not provided us with the necessary documents to confirm your eligibility status within the UK.” A week later, the employer wrote to RS again, stating: “I am writing further to the investigatory meeting held on Tuesday 18th December 2012…We have received notification from the UKBA to advise us that they cannot confirm your status to work within the UK.”
“The Department has included in its impact assessment a summary of the ongoing costs and benefits of the changes to appeals. It has come up with a figure of £261 of benefits through a decrease in appeal costs. Interestingly, however, it has not included administrative review costs in the cost side of the analysis. It acknowledges that those costs will exist, but it has put in that column the word “unknown”. They are unknown, but the Home Office could have estimated them and did not, because that figure would have made the cost-benefit analysis come out in a way that the Minister did not wish. That is shameful. In response to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) made about the problem of landlords having to check people’s status, the Home Secretary said that we already had such a system for employers.”
“Yet the Government’s response to this high margin of error is not to seek to improve the quality of their decision making, but rather to reduce the opportunities for challenge. Instead of improving the bad administration and inefficiency at the heart of the Department, the Government are shifting the responsibility and attacking due process. The administrative review process already exists for overseas applications, but my own experience of entry clearance manager reviews is that they are slow and of little better quality than entry clearance officers’ decision making. It is difficult to believe Ministers’ estimation that an administrative review would be processed within 10 working days of an application given the historic backlogs that already exist in the Home Office.”
“In one moment. I listened carefully to the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Nicholas Soames), who made the interesting point that without the speed cameras we cannot see things going wrong. On the same principle, if we take off the monitoring, the Home Office will not improve its processes. The light that judges can currently shine on what is going on in the Home Office to show where it is incompetent, where it is taking arbitrary and flawed decisions, will no longer be there. According to the Home Office’s own statistics, 32% of deportation cases and 50% of entry clearance applications were successfully appealed last year. That means that the initial decision was wrong. We need the judges to be able to keep that focus on those wrong initial decisions.”
“How much of the £16 billion of construction costs will the developers of Hinkley Point C be able to offset in tax reliefs and capital allowances? Does the Secretary of State consider it ironic that EDF has insisted on an insurance clause against his own party’s future policy by stipulating that the strike price will rise to reflect any future tax on or shutdown of the industry? While he is at it, will he explain why the strike price for the Flamanville sister plant in France is only £64—some 30% of the £92.50 he has negotiated?”
“A nation’s GDP certainly increases every time money changes hands, but a growing GDP does not always create wealth. Many economic activities actually deplete wealth. The irony is that nations count that depletion as income, whereas they should see it as liquidation of capital. In fact, the TEEB—The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity—report, edited by Pavan Sukhdev, has already shown that at current rates of decline the cumulative loss of ecosystem services from 2000 until 2050 will be equivalent to losing 7% of global GDP. Here is the challenge: how do we explain to those focused on GDP growth that they would make better economic decisions if they properly accounted for the very real value of natural capital?”
“We fail to factor their actual economic value into our policies and decision making, but because most of the other services that they provide are not bought or sold in markets, they are not normally taken into account, so the forests, reefs and rivers are lost or degraded. Another important consideration is that those wider benefits, although immensely valuable, do not accrue to an individual property owner. The benefits are experienced by the community at large. They are regarded as free goods by the wider community and the wider economy. In classical economics such free goods are called externalities, and because they are not directly captured by the landowner they do not feature directly in the landowner’s decision of how and whether to dispose of them. We use nature because it is valuable, but we abuse it because it is free.”
“Classical economics simply adds the sale price of the timber that can be harvested and the alternative use to which the land may be put and says that this is the value of the forest. What utter nonsense. The true value of a forest lies in far more than that. Forests stop soil erosion. They prevent flooding by absorbing moisture and they control climate, often regulating local as well as global weather patterns. They are a source of medicines and food and they have recreational and aesthetic value, and all that is before we even begin to consider sequestration. In the millennium ecosystem assessment, 1,360 of the world’s top scientists showed that classical economics captured only one third of the actual value of the services that forests provide. The same is true for rivers, reefs, salt marshes, mangroves and all other natural ecosystems.”
“I of course told the Treasury officials that I would be happy to cut the £6 million, but I asked them if they were aware that it would cost them £194 million a year. I explained that a recent National Audit Office report had pointed out that diseases in the honey bee population had reduced the pollination services that bees were able to carry out. This had reduced the yield from our arable crops, which in turn had reduced the revenue paid to the Exchequer by £200 million a year. The Treasury gave us the £6 million. The thing about Treasury officials is that they are simple beasts. They do not want to know about the environment or ecosystem services, but show them a way to save money and they become entirely reasonable. Classical economics values things in a very simple way. Take forests, for example.”
“Virtually every other form of capital is derived in some way from natural capital and we can define it as the benefits that accrue to human society from the different species of life that inhabit the natural world. The right hon. Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), to whom I pay tribute, spoke about pollination services. I remember that in 2006, when I was Minister with responsibility for biodiversity, I put £6 million into the Department’s budget submission for research into diseases in honey bees. When it came to agreeing DEFRA’s budget, the Treasury was not impressed. It insisted that times were hard and that with my £6 million it could create a new community hospital for people’s diseases, rather than worrying about bee diseases.”
“One of the great advances in these two centuries is the progress we have made in classical economics. When Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations” or even when Karl Marx wrote “Das Kapital”, they understood capital to mean simply plant, machinery and money. But we have come to understand that there is such a thing as human, social and intellectual capital. We have come to realise that a well-functioning judicial system or an excellent education system are just as much a part of the wealth of a nation as its roads, its ports or its factories. The irony is that economists and economies have not yet caught up with the most important capital of all—natural capital.”
“It is one of the imperative responsibilities of Government to be good stewards of the present and even better guardians of the future, yet the facts show how far we are from being good stewards. In the UK our native flora and fauna have been in decline for over 50 years. Agricultural intensification in the 1970s is often pointed to as a key turning point, but the truth is that for more than 200 years, as we chopped down our forests and used coal to drive the world’s first industrial revolution, we moved from a pastoral agrarian society to an advanced city-based economy that has failed to value biodiversity. In that time hundreds of species of plant and animal have been lost from our country. We need a radically different approach not just to halt, but to reverse that decline.”
“The only thing that sets us apart from our natural environment is our ability to reflect on our own place within it, but for all our cleverness we remain dependent on the extraordinary bounty that nature provides. The food and water that sustain us, the air that we breathe, the raw materials that we use as fuel and clothing or to construct our homes are only the most obvious of nature’s benefits. Equally important are the processes and services that purify our water, break down our waste, pollinate our crops and provide us with recreation and aesthetic or spiritual fulfilment. We have the right to use and enjoy the benefits of that natural capital, but that right gives us no licence to prevent our children from exercising a similar and equal use and enjoyment in the future.”
“I refer Members to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I would normally congratulate the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) on securing the debate, but of course he spilled the beans and said that I was the one, when I was on the Back Benches, who went before the Backbench Business Committee. I congratulate him instead on his excellent speech. I also want to take this opportunity, which is the first I have had, to welcome the Minister to his new role and to pay tribute to his predecessor, the hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon), who was not only unfailingly courteous but totally committed to this agenda. Every society is defined by two things: what it creates and what it refuses to destroy.”
“She also established that the committee should report to the economic sub-committee of the Cabinet. Her officials had put to her that it should report to her as Secretary of State, but she decided that it should report elsewhere, knowing full well that a Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs was perhaps less powerful than the Chancellor of the Exchequer. She played a significant role in ensuring that the natural capital committee had the prospect of real success and traction. My hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) was entirely right to say that we should also have had a Treasury Minister on the Front Bench this evening.”