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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“What would happen if a newspaper failed to enact a decision appropriately—for example, if it printed an apology on page 32, instead of page 1? Who would quantify, and how would they quantify, that failure, and what would be the redress? Who would actually enforce the contract?”
“A number of recent papers—the Searchinger paper, the Hudiburg paper and the Schulze paper—have noted the problems of life-cycle biomass. The Minister is right to have taken steps to address that in forest regrowth and the sustainability standards, but he has not yet addressed the impoverishment of soils and how the resulting increase in the use of fertiliser will lead to an increase in emissions. Will he publish the basis on which he amended his Department’s projections on biomass?”
“T7. What could be more topical than a challenge to the recently announced infallibility of the Minister of State, the hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes). Indeed, there has been such a challenge—from Mitsubishi, Vestas, Alstom, Areva, Doosan and Gamesa. The Minister maintains that there should be no decarbonisation target until 2016; they have said that postponing the 2030 target decision until 2016 creates entirely avoidable political risks and slow growth in the low-carbon sector, handicaps the UK supply chain, reduces UK research and development and produces fewer jobs.”
“Contrary to the settled view of the House, the Minister has read the responses to the consultation. Will he remind the House which health organisations have responded and what they have said about the cost to the national health service of cheap alcohol?”
“Can the Minister find it within himself to praise the General, Municipal and Boilermakers Union for its initiative with British Gas? Will he acknowledge that it is precisely the green skills apprenticeships that they are piloting together that will be the engine of growth?”
“I am following my hon. Friend closely and she makes a powerful case. Does she agree that many of our constituents feel that the Liberal Democrats are not so much ameliorating the Conservative Government as facilitating it?”
“3. What steps he is taking to prepare and adapt homes, businesses, agricultural practices and infrastructure against the threat of flooding and water scarcity resulting from the increased frequency of extreme weather.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for his response. He will know that last year in the UK flooding was experienced on one in every five days, while on one in every four days there was drought subject to a hosepipe ban. One in seven houses and 10% of the country’s critical infrastructure are now exposed to flood risk, yet by 2014-15 some 23% less will be spent on these matters. Will the Minister consider the exhortation from the chairman of the Environment Agency to take urgent action now to avoid the coming problems?”
“The announcement earlier today about the permanent closure of Daw Mill colliery will have far-reaching consequences not only for the 650 people working there, E.ON, Ratcliffe power station and the 1.5 million tonnes of coal the colliery generated each year, but for the whole future of UK Coal, the British coal industry and the country’s energy supply. Why has the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change not seen fit to come to the House today to make a statement on the matter?”
“I welcome every word of the Secretary of State’s statement, but I want to dispute one letter. She spoke of setting up an expert advisory group on girls and women. Will she also ensure that it is an expert advisory group of girls and women? Perhaps it could include people such as my constituent Samira Khalil, a young woman from an Afghani family who was educated in Brent North and is now studying at Cambridge, or Faisa Mohamoud, who works for the Help Somalia Foundation and who could tell the right hon. Lady a thing or two about female genital mutilation and how it affects that community. Let us make sure that it is a women-led group with women’s experience at the heart of it.”
“I am sure the Minister will share my disappointment that libraries have become a political football between national and local government. Does he agree that perhaps the best way of safeguarding our libraries is to define more clearly what constitutes a statutory comprehensive library service?”
“Does the Minister share my astonishment that Tim Smith, who was chief executive of the FSA until only last year and who is now the technical director in charge of food standards at Tesco, is not only still in his job, but still on the FSA board? Some would say that is not just switching horses, but trying to ride both at the same time.”
“The Leader of the House will have heard the Chair of the Health Select Committee on the “Today” programme earlier today talking about gagging orders and the way in which they have been used in the health service. Will the right hon. Gentleman make time for a debate so that we can discuss making it a criminal offence to put a gagging order into a contract that is guaranteed to be against public safety?”
“I pay tribute to the hon. Lady for the way in which she courteously and expeditiously steered the Committee to the report. Does she share my astonishment that companies such as Tesco, which conducts minute product checks on our farmers’ fruit and vegetables, often causing them huge financial loss for misshapen produce, seem to have failed to do any checks on processed meat products? Might that be because they believed such checks could reveal some very inconvenient truths?”
“There is a rumour that the Deputy Prime Minister let slip to the Liaison Committee last week his support for having a 2030 decarbonisation target in the Energy Bill. Will he therefore be so kind as to encourage his party to support the cross-party amendments tabled by the hon. Member for South Suffolk (Mr Yeo) and myself to ensure that precisely what he wants is put in place as quickly as possible?”
“I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is aware, but we ran the UK bushmeat campaign almost a decade ago. When I took precisely that issue—bushmeat coming in through British airports and into Dalston market—to Tim Smith, the then chief executive of the FSA, he positively refused to do anything about it.”
“Is my hon. Friend aware that the Government have just concluded a consultation on the EU food information for consumers regulation, under which they are asking for a derogation so that they do not have to reveal that information on the label to the public in Britain? Mince, which is not allowed to be sold with 35% and 15% respectively of fat and collagen in it, will not be allowed to be sold on the continent, but it will be sold in Britain under that derogation.”
“Interestingly, this information came not from our UK Secretary of State, but from France’s consumer affairs Minister, Benoît Hamon. In France, many people eat horse, of course, but just like we Rosbifs, they do not want to eat horse when they are paying for, and think that they are eating, beef. More than 25 abattoirs in Romania are properly licensed to butcher and export horsemeat, but it must be properly labelled as horse. The key question in this fraud is at what point in the complex food chain did someone wilfully take off a label saying “horse” and replace it with a label saying “beef.” Today’s motion rightly calls on the Government to ensure that police and fraud specialists investigate that criminality.”
“What Tesco sought to dismiss as just one bad day at the abattoir has now infected almost every major retailer not only in the UK, but across the continent: Tesco, Iceland. Aldi, Co-op and Lidl are joined by Carrefour, Casino, Auchan and Monoprix. The supply chain for processed meat products was ripe for criminal activity. Findus in the UK was supplied by Comigel in France, which supplies retailers in 16 countries. The contaminated Findus products came from the Comigel factory in Luxembourg, but the meat came from south-west France, from a company called Spanghero, whose parent company is Poujol, which acquired the meat from Cypriot traders, who in turn had subcontracted the sourcing of the meat to a trader in the Netherlands. We are told this trader had sourced meat from an abattoir and butcher in Romania.”
“Let us be clear: this scandal has involved the most extraordinary degree of corporate blindness. Tim Smith is the former chief executive of the FSA and is now head of food security at Tesco. He had the affront to tell the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on 30 January that he thought this was a rogue event and that FSA Ireland chanced to do DNA testing on precisely the day when a rogue consignment of horsemeat just happened to be present. What is most extraordinary is not his pathetic naivety, but the fact that he is still in his job at Tesco two weeks later. We know that excuses that begin with the words “Just one rogue trader” or “Just one rogue reporter” have an unhappy history.”
“I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes). As a former Minister for the horse, I remember the early days of horse passports. I always had my doubts that they would be able to do the job in relation to bute, and the hon. Lady has ably illustrated that they could not. Perhaps there has been no better time at which to be a food criminal. This is a time of deep economic recession across Europe. The food supply chain is extraordinarily complex, too, with swift transit of goods and products across international borders and multiple regulatory frameworks on composition, safety and labelling, and in Romania there was the sudden enforcement of a recent law to remove horses and carts from the country’s roads.”
“The FSA must also receive, as of right, all results from the tests that retailers carry out, whether under instruction from the FSA or on their own account. I want to say one positive thing about what the Government are doing. We have heard in the past week that children will be taught at school how to cook. That is positive. They will no longer just put processed food in a microwave; they will be able to cook things from fresh produce for themselves. That will be a real advantage.”
“There is an omission in the figures presented to us, too: we know the number of tests and the number of positives, but we do not know the number of prosecutions. If there were nine positive tests, why were there not nine positive prosecutions? The FSA today announced its new system of positive release. The move away from a desk-based system of audit is welcome. In future, no horse carcase will be released for the food chain until it has been tested negative for bute. The FSA must have further powers, too, however. It must have the task of making risk-based assessments of the supply chain and of instructing supermarkets and retailers about the number of physical product checks that they must do on the basis of the volume they shift and the length and complexity of their supply chain.”
“I have not always in the past quoted with total approval from Countryside Alliance press releases, but on this matter it is entirely right. It says: “The lack of mandatory country of origin food labelling continues to place British farmers at a disadvantage when much of their competition comes from producers in countries, which are not subject to such robust animal welfare legislation and standards and the associated costs.” On phenylbutazone or bute, the point is simply this: 156 tests were done last year, nine of which found the presence of bute, but 9,000 horses went through British abattoirs. On that ratio, some 520 carcases may well have been contaminated with bute—and, as the hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North said, the tests might not have picked up all the horses with bute.”
“Tesco and its ilk simply cared more that the pears they sold were the right conical shape than that the processed meat we bought was contaminated and of a different species than advertised. Over the last decade, our UK farmers have done a magnificent job in improving animal welfare and food hygiene. The introduction of pride marks such as the red tractor scheme gives the public confidence that the food they are eating has a short supply chain and comes from local farmers who operate to the highest standards. Responsibility for food labelling policy lies with DEFRA. Its Ministers must now decide that food labels must clearly identify the country of origin. The lack of mandatory country of origin food labelling places British farmers at a disadvantage. British people want to buy British farm produce with confidence.”
“I entirely agree, and that is why I am very pleased that the shadow Secretary of State has called on the Serious Fraud Office to look at this matter, as it has the remit and ability to address such complex cases. How is it that all these supermarkets across Europe so singularly failed to identify the risk of substitution and contamination of their processed meat products? After all, these are the very supermarkets that drive our farmers to despair when they reject whole consignments of perfectly good fruit and vegetables because they are misshapen or blemished in some way. The point is not simply that supermarkets are unjust in their treatment of our farmers; they have the means and the will to do detailed and minute checks on their products when it is in their own interests to do so.”
“I welcome aspects of the Secretary of State’s statement. Does he agree that the security in old age that he is seeking to put in place will not be effective for as long as companies such as Phoenix Life are able to offer people like my constituent, Mr Gerard Burton, £221 a month for the rest of his life, at the age of 84, in return for half his house? Will the Secretary of State speak to his colleagues in the Treasury to ensure that there is great scrutiny of precisely what financial products are being offered in this domain?”
“Will the Secretary of State explain why companies such as Tesco can consistently reject entire consignments of our farmers’ fruit and veg for being misshapen—at the cost of the farmer—yet have not focused the same attention on processed meat in their own lines, because it is not at the front of the freezer and does not affect the appearance? Will he ensure that in future the FSA has in perpetuity statutory powers to instruct retailers to carry out tests on their entire product lines consistent with the volume of product being shifted over the year?”
“The Minister is right to say that the deal must be in our interests, but that cannot be known until after the fact of the agreement on the strike price. The key problem with the strike price is a perverse incentive to overestimate the construction costs on which it will be based. If it is subsequently found that those costs are lower than the estimate, the consumer will be paying more for the strike price that the Department has agreed. Why did the Minister and his colleagues on the Government Benches vote against our amendments to the Energy Bill, which would have made transparency essential to the entire process?”
“In his response to my question earlier, the Minister of State was gracious enough to say that he wanted complete openness about the strike price. Will he therefore tell the House whether there will be a provision in the strike price negotiations for a claw-back, should the estimated construction costs exceed the real ones?”
“May we have an urgent debate on pathology services in north-west London? Since The Doctors Laboratory—TDL—took over those services last month, doctors have complained that bloods are not stored or transported safely. One general practitioner has reported that 300 results have gone missing, that an excessive number of potassium results are high and that INR results are unexpectedly low. As the Leader of the House well knows, that could lead to a misdiagnosis and, consequently, an increase in warfarin, which could be fatal. Those matters have now been reported to the Care Quality Commission, as have concerns of all the GPs in the area and the North West London Hospitals NHS Trust. The matter is urgent and I hope he will create time to debate it.”
“Will the Minister discuss with his colleagues in the Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions the effect of the combined changes that those Departments and the Treasury have made, which mean that a young child in my constituency—a British child whose mother has leave to remain and work in the UK but who is estranged from their British father as a result of his domestic violence—will now not be able to receive child benefit for at least 10 years?”
“The truth is that the Forestry Commission is in absolute chaos. A total of 530 posts have been lost, 60 of them—60!—in forest research. The Secretary of State has the gall to stand at that Dispatch Box and act as if the world is all right and what he is saying has put everything in order. That is not the case, and he needs to get a grip.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the biggest examples of that is the Youth Parliament debate that took place in this Chamber, which was absolutely exemplary?”
“My hon. Friend has set his remarks in an appropriate historical context. Would he care to recall to the House that wars have been fought over the principle of no taxation without representation?”
“I am glad that the hon. Lady has acknowledged the contribution of the UK Youth Parliament and its debates in this Chamber, and I wonder whether she would care to pay tribute to my constituent, Chante Joseph, who spoke in one of those debates and is in the Public Gallery today.”
“T2. At the global conference that the Foreign Secretary was good enough to host last week in the Locarno rooms, Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, made it clear that a settlement in 2015 would as much reflect national legislation as define it. What steps is his Department taking in bilateral arrangements with other countries to promote that national legislation?”
“People trust brands such as Tesco to have precisely sourced their supply. The Minister rightly said that it is not illegal to sell horsemeat in this country, but he also rightly said that it is illegal to sell horsemeat if it is not properly labelled as such. What steps have been taken to prosecute Tesco and others for their failure to label properly the food they were supplying to their customers?”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way and pay tribute to the work that she has done over many years in exposing what has been going on. Does she recall that, in a previous debate on the LLRC, the Minister said that the Government would see what action the LLRC took, and if it were not substantial they would take much stronger action and do precisely what the right hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow) said and review again the decision to hold the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Colombo later this year? I hope that we will see such a view reflected in the Minister’s response today.”
“Those Members on the Government Benches may or may not have gone to Sri Lanka, but if they have, they have not looked into the detail of what is happening in that land, because it is corruption and it must end. The Government of this country should not allow Her Majesty the Queen to set foot on Sri Lankan soil.”
“How is it that the President’s brother, Gotabaya, is Secretary of Defence? Another of his brothers, Basil, is Minister of Economic Development. Chamal, the third brother, is Speaker of the Parliament. They have carved up the country between them and there is absolutely no economic freedom. If we take the Commonwealth Heads of Government or the Commonwealth Business Council there, what will we be doing? We will be putting money into the pockets not of Sri Lankan people, but of one family: the Rajapaksas. Anybody who pretends to be part of this debate without acknowledging what is going on in that country currently is fooling themselves.”
“Friend, but I have been there. A decade or so ago, the then Foreign Office Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Neath (Mr Hain), asked me to become involved in the second tier of the negotiations that were going on at the time. I was partly responsible for Anton Balasingham coming here with his wife, Adele. I also went to Sri Lanka and met all the parties there. When I was a Minister in Northern Ireland, I invited Mahinda Rajapaksa to dinner there to discuss speaking to the communities in Northern Ireland to see exactly how reconciliation could be achieved and how a country could move on. At that stage, I hoped he would go back to his country to try to implement some of those ideals, but he did not: he went back and turned Sri Lanka into a kleptocracy, in which the Rajapaksa family controls absolutely everything.”
“Initially, the commission made absolutely no mention of war crimes; subsequently, under pressure, the Sri Lankan Government made further moves to switch the international community’s focus. When the Minister sums up, I would ask him to be true to his words in our previous debate: we should judge the Sri Lankan Government by their actions. On any international standard, they have failed. I said I had come with a speech that I had prepared. What I was not prepared for, however, was the schoolboy nonsense from the Government side—“Oh well, have you ever been to Sri Lanka?”—and the sniggering when my hon. Friend said that, no, of course she had not been there. Does that in any way reduce the value and the quality of her research? Absolutely not. I wish I had not been to Sri Lanka, because I could have stood with my hon.”
“Although it was a courageous report, however, it now needs to be followed up. It highlighted many of the actions that took place at the time, but the international community must now see whether the reconciliation that we all wish for has actually taken place. My hon. Friend spoke of the LLRC. At the time, many of us said it was a smokescreen intended to avoid having the independent international review that was being called for. However, the Minister said, “Let’s give it space. Let’s see what it comes up with. Let’s see whether it actually delivers. If it does, we should judge it on that basis.” Well, it has now produced its report, but it has not delivered. The international community, from the UN right through to Amnesty International, has acknowledged and documented the LLRC’s failings.”
“I thank you for calling me to speak in this important debate, Mr Hollobone. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). She knows more and has researched more than anybody in the House, and she has done more to keep this issue at the forefront of its debates and of the Government’s mind, as they consider their obligations to the international community. I arrived here this morning with a speech that detailed many of the things in the UN internal report and the way in which the UN had looked at its own failure. It is important to understand that it was extraordinarily courageous of Ban Ki-moon to establish a report looking at the UN’s failure properly to protect people and to intervene at the right time in the war in Sri Lanka.”
“In the light of what he has just said, will the Minister comment on paragraph 15 of the internal report? It says that there was “concern that the moment that humanitarian organizations leave, the Government will begin bombing Killinochchi town and that the physical security of the civilian population will be at increased risk”. It is implicit that there is safety by the UN organisation’s very presence and that there is supervision.”
“My right hon. Friend will know that the fire brigade in London has requested that the Mayor review the strategy to see how quickly fire appliances can get to fires. It believes that, at present, the strategy is inadequate, but the process has been put back by a couple of months, so the public are not able to review it. Is my right hon. Friend as concerned as I am about the ability of appliances to reach fires in time?”
“May I take this opportunity, Mr Deputy Speaker, to wish you and, indeed, all the officers and servants of this House the season’s greetings and the very best for Christmas and the new year? It has been a privilege this year to attend the 25th anniversary of the Brent pensioners forum in my constituency. The forum has been led and championed by Vi Steele.”
“The Government argue that the legally binding targets for 2050 are still in place, but few of us in Parliament or business will be in our current positions in 2050. Business needs not just a 40-year aspiration, but clear staging points and standards in 2020, 2030 and beyond, to ensure that our energy infrastructure is invested in and properly structured so that it can deliver our emissions reduction targets by 2050.”
“Even the gas stations that already have consent will not come on stream quickly enough to meet that potential shortfall. A possible solution is to make the capacity mechanism available to coal-fired power stations in the short term and use them to provide the load that we need. That might also help to stop the loss of jobs and the closure of pits, and avoid the building of numerous new gas-fired power stations that will lock us into much higher levels of fossil fuel emissions in the long term, while making us feel virtuous in the short term as coal emissions fall. The recommendation by the Committee on Climate Change to include carbon targets in the Bill is important because this is about the long-term certainty and stability that business and investors need.”