Graham Stuart
MP for Beverley and Holderness · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I hope and expect that we can move forward in the right way and get the balance right between being overly prescriptive to the banking industry and setting a clear sense of direction to make sure that no one is left behind, as so many Members have set out.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) on securing this debate.”
“Is my hon. Friend as astonished as I am that the Minister—I know she is new to her post—has come here to propose a six-month extension of the movement of costs from bills to the Exchequer and cannot tell the Committee how much money that will cost?”
“The Minister is being most generous again. I did not ask her about protecting consumers from energy price shocks; I asked about a clear, unequivocal manifesto pledge to reduce household energy bills by £300. She, like her predecessors, refuses to address it directly. It was a clear promise.”
“Banking hubs themselves came out of an industry response from the NatWest executive. Does the Minister agree that we must present the information from the Lloyd review to the banking groups, be clear about what we want, and give them the opportunity to respond and provide a solution, as they did with banking hubs, so that we can perhaps a…”
“I am pleased to say that Lloyds listened and, as of this morning, people can deposit cheques at those places. These issues being raised by Members across the House today are important. I trust that given the timing of the Richard Lloyd report, the Minister in her seat will make sure that they are be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.”
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“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. When making decisions about education, one question matters above all others: how will this affect the quality of teaching? That is the prism through which every educational decision should be viewed. A great teacher can make the difference between a child muddling through, struggling or aiming high. Research by Professor Eric Hanushek of Stanford university shows that during one year with a very effective maths teacher, pupils gained 40% more than they would have with a poor performer. The effects of high quality teaching are especially significant for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.”
“I agree with my hon. Friend. The shadow Secretary of State has come into post at exactly the same time as his party has lurched to the left, and he has inherited this policy. I put it to him, as someone who has taught in schools as a non-QTS teacher, who benefited from non-QTS teachers as a pupil and who has suggested in recent days that he might send his children to schools that have inspiring non-QTS teachers in place, that his heart really is not in this.”
“He should not deny the consequences of his policy: it will lead to the removal of outstanding teachers from state school classrooms. It will almost certainly see them turning up in independent schools, where they are needed least, rather than most. That is the central flaw in his argument, and I think that he sees it. It is early days in the hon. Gentleman’s new post. I suggest that he has inherited a dreadful policy that is entirely against what he and I believe, which is that we should be transforming education for everyone in this country, and most of all for those from poorer homes who too often have been left behind.”
“Gentleman’s argument if he could show me, on any kind of evidence base, that widespread numbers of non-QTS teachers are letting down our kids. I put it to him, who has been in post for a matter of days, that there is no such evidence base. On the contrary, the evidence base shows that non-QTS teachers in state schools in some of our toughest neighbourhoods are inspirational. There are often teachers who have left the independent sector, where he went, where I went and where my children go, in order to try to make a contribution in state schools in challenging circumstances. Under the Opposition’s policy, if those people do not put themselves through the many hours required to pass QTS, they will be sacked. That is absolutely wrong.”
“The hon. Gentleman would not answer questions about the teacher who taught and inspired him, but he was more than just a visiting lecturer. My children attend an independent school and have non-QTS teachers. I want to ensure that every school can access people who can inspire pupils within a system of accountability. If the shadow Secretary of State told me, “We’ve carried out an assessment and got the evidence, which shows that some head teachers are taking on unqualified teachers just to save money and sticking them in classrooms with low-ability children, which is letting them down”, I would be the first to congratulate him. I would say, “Yes, let’s look at the right policy response, but let’s not sack top teachers who happen to be non-QTS teachers if we can possibly help it.” I would even accept the hon.”
“The right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), the former Labour Secretary of State for Education and Skills, said recently: “If you find someone who is a great musician but they can’t spend three years getting the proper teaching qualifications, I think you should use them.” Does my hon. Friend agree?”
“Our LEP around the Humber is supporting and wants investment by Siemens in Hull. Further to the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington South (David Mowat), will the Department do everything possible to talk to the EU about changing the rules that restrict the ability of the Green Investment Bank to invest in great projects such as that with Siemens, which are so important to our area?”
“I echo the praise from the right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw) for my hon. Friend. Does he have sympathy, as I do, for companies with more than 50 employees that are not financially sophisticated and which were mis-sold these products, often as a condition of loans to do business, but which now find themselves described as the sort of people who should have been able to see through the sophistry and misrepresentation of the salesmen of these products?”
“By using it, we are, in effect, eating into our capital reserves, and it is right that we should acknowledge that when compiling our national accounts. A private company is judged by both its income and its balance sheet, but most countries compile only an income statement showing their GDP and know very little about their national balance sheet on which it all depends. Even the income measure itself—GDP—fails properly to represent natural capital. Forestry provides a good example of this. Timber resources are counted in national accounts, but the other services forests provide, such as carbon retention and air filtration, are simply ignored. This all matters deeply.”
“The report provides a framework—and a call to arms—for the Government to place a value on natural capital. Natural capital is the stock of resources derived from the environment in addition to geological resources such as fossil fuels and mineral deposits. These goods and services include material and non-material benefits such as crops, timber, water, climate regulation, natural hazard protection, soil function, mental health benefits from contact with nature, and biodiversity. Without an economic price, too often natural capital has been treated as if it is of no value, yet it is a fundamental component of every country’s portfolio of wealth. For example, the UK has treated North sea oil purely as an income flow, with no allowance made for the fact that its use today depletes a national asset that cannot be replaced.”
“Thanks are also due to the sponsors of the motion, representing all three main parties, including the former Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman). I pay tribute to her and my hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) for the role they played in steering the White Paper through Government. I am pleased to see that the shadow Minister with responsibility for the natural environment, the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), will be responding on behalf of the Opposition. Only a few weeks ago, it was he who persuaded the Backbench Business Committee to grant this debate, so it is gratifying to see that his efforts have been rewarded with such a swift promotion. Today’s debate was inspired by the first report by the natural capital committee, chaired by Professor Dieter Helm.”
“I beg to move, That this House welcomes the Natural Capital Committee’s first annual State of Natural Capital report; and urges the Government to adopt the report’s recommendations and to take concerted action to embed the value of natural capital in the national accounts and policy-making processes as early as possible. I declare my interest as chairman of the GLOBE International board and refer the House to my declaration of interests. May I start by congratulating the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) on his appointment, which gives hope to the independent-minded everywhere? I also thank the Backbench Business Committee, chaired by the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel), for granting this debate.”
“If so, do they think that progress is being made quickly enough? Will they set up a risk register for natural capital, as is recommended in the NCC report, and if so, when? Will they give the Office for National Statistics the “greatest possible support” in its efforts to incorporate natural capital into the nation’s accounts, as recommended by the NCC? The valuation of natural capital goes to the heart of the biggest question facing humanity: can we adjust our behaviour so as to live within the constraints of living on one planet? Can we live in balance with the natural world, or will we insist on testing its limits?”
“I congratulate the Government on the letter sent by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the former Economic Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) in response to the report. I welcome its statement that “The measurement, valuation and good management of our natural capital is crucial if we are to achieve sustainable economic growth and enhanced wellbeing in future.” However, is that to be the only response from the Government, other than in this debate? My Select Committee insists on a formal Government response to each recommendation that is made in each of its reports. Surely these annual reports deserve just as serious and thorough a response. Do the Government agree that there is a need for a framework with which to define and measure natural capital?”
“It saw the publication of the first GLOBE natural capital legislation study, which reviewed the measures that eight countries, including the UK, are taking to integrate natural capital into policy and economic decision making. Unquestionably, there is a long way to go before natural capital is incorporated in national and corporate accounting across the world. However, the GLOBE study shows that the direction of travel is clear and that the eight countries covered, including the UK, are leading the way. Embedding the concept of natural capital could mark a milestone on the road towards a more nuanced and complete understanding of our nation’s resources and the impact of our management of them.”
“The summit considered the international context of the forthcoming UN post-2015 sustainable development goals, and how natural capital accounting should be addressed as a specific goal as well as a cross-cutting theme that affects the delivery of all development goals. For those who are living on less than $2 a day, half of all GDP comes from the environment and its biodiversity. It was therefore encouraging that goal 9 of the recent report of the high-level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda, which was co-chaired by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, emphasised the importance of the sustainable management of natural resource assets to poverty eradication. The GLOBE summit in June called on Governments everywhere fully to incorporate the value of natural capital into national accounting frameworks by 2020.”
“The numbers say little of its reliance and impact on natural capital, factors that will increasingly influence competitiveness in a resource-scarce world.” The NCC report is therefore an important document at all levels of policy making: national, local and commercial. It was particularly welcome that the publication of the NCC report coincided with the launch earlier this year of the GLOBE International natural capital initiative. That is an international policy process driven by national parliamentarians, with the aim of incorporating the valuation of natural capital into policy and economic decision making. In June this year, legislators from 20 countries participated in the first GLOBE natural capital legislation summit in the Bundestag.”
“Pre-Victorian England was a low-carbon economy, but it did not deliver too much by way of prosperity. Rather, this is about demonstrating that better policy can result from integrating the value of natural capital into decision making, especially in a world whose population is rising inexorably. That applies to Government and the world of business. The NCC report calls on the Government to work with leading companies, accounting bodies, landowners and managers to develop and test guidance on best practice in corporate natural capital accounting. As the chief financial officer of Unilever, Jean-Marc Huët, has said: “The current financial reporting model only tells half the story about a business’s true performance and potential.”
“Measuring and accounting for changes in natural capital assets, and improving the valuation of those changes, would help to support better economic decision making. It would improve the delivery of major public policy goals, such as food and energy security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and public health and well-being. In saying that, it is crucial that natural capital accounting is explained as a way of providing detailed information for better management of the economy. That needs to be done in a way that is coherent internationally but that resonates at home with a public who are concerned about seeing the more immediate benefits of economic growth. This is not some doom-laden call for us to trade off economic growth for environmental protection.”
“That may involve alterations in agricultural outputs, which have market prices, but it may also lead to changes in other factors which do not, including outdoor recreation, carbon storage and water quality. The best way to compare changes in such vastly different goods and services is to compare them in common, monetary terms. Developing a system that can achieve that reliably will not be straightforward. There has been recent progress in this area. The Government’s 2011 natural environment White Paper made a welcome commitment fully to include natural capital in the UK environment accounts, with the first changes coming into effect this year. On the international stage, the adoption by the UN Statistical Commission of the system for environmental economic accounts has been a major step forward. The prize is considerable.”
“It found that the UK’s natural capital losses stood at just over 2% of national income, although that number is almost certainly incomplete. The NCC report concludes: “Until this is addressed, our national accounts will continue to provide erroneous signals about future economic prospects.” To that end, the NCC recommends that the work being undertaken by the Office for National Statistics to embed natural capital in the UK’s environmental accounts should be given the “greatest possible support” right across Government. The NCC’s report also recommends that the Government should initiate a programme to provide high-quality evidence on the economic value of changes in natural capital to inform cost-benefit analyses. Let us consider land use change.”
“In 2011, the first UK national ecosystem assessment found that one third of the UK’s ecosystem services were declining. It showed that if the UK’s ecosystems were protected and enhanced, they could add at least an extra £30 billion to the UK economy. By contrast, neglect and loss of ecosystem services may cost as much as £20 billion a year to the economy. As the NCC report says: “The risk is that rather than underpinning future growth and prosperity, degraded natural capital assets will act as a break on progress and development.” The situation is worse in many places overseas. The World Bank estimates that in 2008, the costs of natural capital loss could have been as high as 5% of national income in Brazil, 8% in India and 9% in China.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention and she is right to sound a warning note. This whole area is embryonic and it needs to be treated very carefully to make sure that we do not end up with the exact opposite outcomes to those we seek by introducing such thinking in the first place. In setting up the NCC, the Government said that their ambition was that this should be the first generation to leave behind a superior natural environment to the one it inherited. During the 20th century we placed unprecedented demands on global ecosystems. World population grew by a factor of four. Carbon and sulphur dioxide emissions increased by a factor of 10. Fish catch escalated by a multiple of 35. This has had serious consequences.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right to mention the lack of representation on the Treasury Bench by a Minister from the Treasury. My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman) identified correctly the importance of having the Chancellor at the head of this process, so it is essential that we have a Treasury Minister on the Front Bench, too.”
“The hon. Gentleman no doubt anticipates what I am about to say. He agrees that there should have been a Treasury Minister on the Front Bench tonight. It would also have been extremely helpful if Her Majesty’s Opposition had managed to get a shadow Treasury Minister, who are a great deal less busy than actual Treasury Ministers, to join us.”
“I wonder whether the Minister took note of my point about the Government response—the letter. He has just laid out how the Government are responding in a serious way, but will he undertake that when the next state of natural capital report is published in nearly a year, it will receive as full a response as that which we would expect for a Select Committee report?”
“I recognise that my hon. Friend is new to his post and that he is in a difficult position, but it really would be helpful if he could commit on the record to provide a full response to next year’s report. This debate was called not by the Government, but by the Backbench Business Committee, and we cannot rely on a debate such as this to ensure that the Government are held to account on something so important.”
“If we do not achieve that, in a few years, the same group of usual suspects will be discussing the topic without wider resonance.”
“She also referred to other Departments and asked whether the Minister is in touch with them. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) put his finger on one of the most important challenges that we face. For the most part, we are a group of the usual suspects, talking about natural capital late at night. In the Tea Room earlier, a colleague said, “In eight years in this place, I have never looked at the title of the debate and not known what it was about—until now. Well done, Graham, you’ve got a debate I don’t understand.” My hon. Friend correctly identified the importance not only of the Breconshire young farmers, but of communicating properly with them so they understand what on earth we are talking about.”
“Thank you, as ever, for your strictures, Mr Speaker. It has been a great pleasure to take part in the debate. We have heard high-quality speeches from hon. Members on both sides of the House. The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) followed my speech and showed a strong understanding of the key issues. My right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), in so many ways the architect of the current situation, spoke of offsetting and of the economic importance of humble bees and pollinators. The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) mentioned the green book—the Minister did not mention that, but perhaps we will hear more from him about it in due course—and the role of natural capital in the sustainable development goals.”
“Friend the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (Mr Hurd), who is the Minister for civil society there as he, too, has long taken an interest in natural capital. With that, I draw the debate to a close. Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House welcomes the Natural Capital Committee’s first annual State of Natural Capital report; and urges the Government to adopt the report’s recommendations and to take concerted action to embed the value of natural capital in the national accounts and policy-making processes as early as possible.”
“First, he said that we use nature because it is valuable, but abuse it because it is free, which goes to the heart of the debate. Secondly, in defence of that approach, he said that promoting the concept of natural capital was not to commoditise nature, but to ensure its protection. We heard an excellent speech from the Minister, who, as he said, has been interested in natural capital for a long time—he was at the launch of the White Paper a few years ago. He and the other Ministers in his Department have a great challenge, but there is a wider challenge across the Government. That is the central issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park made the point that, in future, we need Treasury Ministers and colleagues who do not habitually focus on this policy on the Treasury Bench in such debates. I am delighted to see my hon.”
“Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Sir Andrew Stunell), using his experience of Government machinery, focused laser-like on questioning whether the machinery is in place to ensure that natural capital debates are not a minority sport that take place late at night in the Chamber, and that they begin to influence Government policy in all Departments. Because of my history with the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), it hurts me to say that he made a barnstorming and powerful speech. He spoke of not only halting but reversing environmental loss. He spoke with both passion and knowledge and managed to convey them succinctly and effectively. He said that people in the Treasury could be reasonable as long as we speak to them in their language. He gave us two quotes.”
“I feared the hon. Lady would try to nail me personally on that—I spend my time chairing the Select Committee on Education resisting the forcible addition of financial education and a plethora of other subjects into the national curriculum—but I will bear her remarks in mind and see whether I can reconsider my almost-ideological response. My hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith) made a powerful speech. He said that reconciling the market with the environment is essential to our survival—one of a few memorable quotes from the debate. He also asked whether the Government as a whole are ready for the challenge, which neatly summed up a question included in many speeches. My right hon.”
“The leaked Ofsted report states that “the governors have failed the parents of this community who have placed their trust in them.” Will Ministers intervene to replace the current board of governors with an interim executive board? Looking to the future, what steps will the Minister take to ensure that the training available to the governors of free schools properly equips them for that important role?”
“This announcement is extremely welcome, as the best eight measure will be an educational breakthrough in improving the accountability of secondary schools by, as the Minister rightly said, ensuring a focus on improving the education of the lowest-achieving, as well as stretching those at the top. It is to the credit of the Secretary of State and the Minister for Schools that they have listened to the submissions, that they have been prepared to take their time and that they have got this right. How will the floor target work? It is rightly based on progression, but how will it ensure that progression is fairly measured between those who serve the more able and typically prosperous parts of the population and those in the most deprived areas?”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her support for the rural fair share campaign. One of the problems is that the Government are looking at local government finance, but they are freezing in, not just damping, the inequities that see people in rural areas, who earn less on average than people in urban areas, pay more in council tax and receive fewer services: 50% more goes per head to urban areas than to rural areas. That cannot be frozen and kept in place at a time of change; it must be unwound, and there must be other reforms.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on a passionate and well informed speech and on his becoming a chairman of the rural fair share campaign. Does he remember that beautiful summer of 2012, when the Government looked again at rural areas and decided that sparsity should get greater weighting, and then at the end of a year damped it all away and now propose to freeze that injustice, that inequity, all the way to 2020? It cannot be tolerated.”
“That social justice argument is hard to rebut, and Ministers in successive Governments have hidden behind an obfuscation of numbers and data. As he said, the simple truth is that people on lower incomes are paying a higher level of tax to get a much thinner—I liked that phrase—level of services.”
“It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. I apologise for my late appearance. I begin by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who secured it and, I know, led it off ably. I am delighted to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley), although I should say to him that I have not ceased my duties as a chairman of the rural fair share campaign but have been joined by another co-chair, along with the hon. Member for Workington (Sir Tony Cunningham). It is a full, cross-party campaign recognising the inequity in funding. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) put his finger on the core point in his passionate speech. The lowest incomes are found in rural areas, so there is a social justice argument along with the data that we rightly focus on.”
“My aim, along with my co-chairmen, is and always has been to try not to have a Labour-urban versus Tory/Lib Dem-rural battle—although that is difficult to avoid—but rather to say that we will get our arguments right. Perhaps that explains the modesty of our requests—too modest, perhaps—but our aim has always been to ensure that a fair-minded Labour Member of Parliament who does not represent a rural area would see the weight of the argument. Having come into politics, as we all do, to try to make a fairer and better society, people should see that we are not making a special, partial interest, but a case grounded in facts that will lead to a more just outcome.”
“They did not go all the way we had hoped, but there was a movement in the right direction after years of it being skewed the other way. Colleagues have said that it was damped away, but it was not damped away—it was stuck in a deep freeze. Damping is a transition mechanism. I would like the Minister to justify the fact that a transition mechanism has been used to shove an inequity that the Government recognise into the deep freeze.”
“However, I make no apology for repeating that, on average, rural residents earn less than those in cities, and they pay council tax that is £70 or £80 higher per head—if we add up the people in each household who pay council tax, it is significantly more, yet urban areas receive Government grants that are 50% higher than those in the countryside. Last year I led a delegation of rural MPs to meet the Prime Minister. We spoke to him and were delighted. There was no transformation, but perhaps hon. Members remember the summer—the beautiful summer of 2012 with the Olympics, good will; London Underground staff were nice. It was an astonishing and remarkable period. The capital was covered in magic dust. It was lovely. At that time, the Government suggested that they recognised rural sparsity.”
“If we look at the cost of emptying the bins, supporting domiciliary care for the elderly population and so on, current differences between services that are comparatively well funded in Hull and less so in my patch cannot be justified. However, the point is to avoid a battle or denial of the genuine issues that the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) faces in his constituency, and to seek to move to a more needs-based system, grounded on people’s real lives, rather than an argument based on a high ideological point. I have probably already spoken for half the time I am allowed, and I shall seek not to be like some hon. Members who ignore strictures from the Chair and carry on regardless. I know that the person in the Chair will not allow such a thing to happen.”
“In no way do I seek to suggest there are not serious social problems in east Hull, or that such problems could be of a different character to those faced by people in Beverley and Holderness. My hon. Friend the Member for North Devon thinks we were too modest in our request, but we are saying that the rural penalty of 50% more per head going to urban areas than goes to an older population with lower incomes in areas where services are more expensive to deliver is just not right. I have always said that if someone showed me the evidence base that such a system is just, I would not, on behalf of my constituents, love it, but I would hear the case. However, no one, including Ministers in this Government and the previous one, has ever sought to do that because there is no justification for it.”
“Average earnings in rural areas are lower, not higher. It is a myth; there is no rural idyll. In truth, the areas around Withernsea, Patrington and other villages contain people on similarly low incomes to those in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency in east Hull, but who spend a much higher percentage of their income on transport. They are suffering too, and local government funding starts from a much lower base. Is the population more or less resilient? In my constituency, the population in rural areas—in marked contrast to the hon. Gentleman’s constituency—is much older. There are vulnerable elderly people on low incomes who are remote and without access, and who have a council with massively less funding to deliver services.”
“Members, whichever constituency we represent, whether it is Kingston upon Hull East or Beverley and Holderness, want a just settlement that ensures we have decent local services and that supports people, not least those with least.”
“I would like to ensure that, whatever the Government decide, we are at least technically on the same page and can agree on where the money goes, as in the percentage that goes here or there and the amount per head, using whatever classification he wants, as long as it is on a rural/urban split. So far, we have heard the Government say, “We don’t split it like that. We don’t recognise your figures.” We ask, “Are you saying that our numbers are not true?”, and the Government say, “We don’t split it like that,” which is nonsense. We now have such experienced and first-class Ministers in the Department that we can expect action. I want to ensure that we are on the same page technically, then we can have the political argument on the right thing to do. All hon.”
“We cannot allow the freezing of that injustice and inequity until 2020. Having a slow unwinding of a situation that the Government have recognised is wrong will not undermine the move to business rates retention. I therefore hope he does not repeat the suggestion that it will. I have one final request of the Minister before the end of my speech—I have not quite had my 10 minutes. Will he produce an analysis of the rural/urban funding split? The Rural Services Network, which we work with, has worked hard attending meeting after meeting. The Minister has been in meetings in which he has asked civil servants to produce such an analysis, but for some unknown reason it never quite comes out.”
“There is no need to nudge such fine people, but if a nudge were required, I can tell my hon. Friend that, as far as my office knows, 115 constituencies have parliamentary petitions calling for a 20% reduction in the rural penalty from 50% to 40%. Many colleagues have spoken today, but many who are not in the Chamber are strongly onside with that campaign. No nudges whatever are necessary to Ministers such as this one. However, I say to him that the patience, even of the most trusting and loyal people such as the hon. Members to whom I am referring, can know a limit. We do not want it tested. We want the Government to do what they said they would do last summer, when the magic dust reigned. Can we return to that? The Minister smiles, and I trust in him to do the right thing.”