Dame Meg Hillier
MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have huge respect for the Minister, but she has said that she will not take any interventions. She is a very good Minister, and I trust that she will answer in detail the points that have been raised in the House today; having discussions with her and the Government after the debate is too late…”
“My hon. Friend talks about who makes our laws, and she has talked in articles that she has written about the primacy of this place. If the Bill goes forward, is she willing to accept amendments?”
“I welcome my right hon. Friend to her place and thank her for that response, which demonstrates the complications of these schemes. I asked the National Audit Office to look into this, and yesterday the Public Accounts Committee published its report on compensation schemes, suggesting that a central body be established.”
“I am pleased by my right hon. Friend’s answer, but she is in a unique position across Government to ensure that we are protecting not only women, but those who are blind or have visual impairments, who really value this technology.”
“I welcome the Chancellor’s clampdown on speculation and leaks ahead of the Budget; it is certainly an important step he has taken. On the issue of certainty, the National Wealth Fund is a critical investor in crowding in private investment around the UK. I noted that he has changed the remit.”
“Further to the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes), it is important that we talk here and that we have diplomacy, but what practical actions are the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence taking to ensure that there is a review of physical defence and security, so that we send a clear message to t…”
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“I want to say something about the Home Office’s recent review of police officer dismissals, in particular its recommendation that misconduct hearing panels should be chaired by senior police officers supported by a legally qualified panel member and an independent member. Previously the panel would have been chaired by the legally qualified panel member, supported by the other two members, in order to ensure, rightly, that those chairing misconduct hearings had the appropriate knowledge and skills and were removed from any actual or perceived conflict of interest in the case. I fear that the change in the make-up of the panel threatens public confidence in the transparency and independence of the proceedings.”
“Before Wayne Couzens was convicted of rape and murder, six incidents of indecent exposure were linked to him, and in a previous job he was known as “the rapist” because of how he made women feel. David Carrick’s offences spanned a 17-year period—almost as long as I have been in the House—with reports to the Met first made in 2000. Here we are in 2023, more than 20 years after the tragedies in Soham, and that picture building and intelligence gathering across police forces has still not been happening. There is a great deal to be done to build trust between the public and the police, and it is clear that immediate progress needs to be made on the issues that I have mentioned.”
“But that picture building also plays a much wider role. I know, having dealt with it in such detail at the time, that if it is used and shared properly, it can prevent opportunities for more serious crimes to be committed. It is a tragedy and an irony that that type of intelligence gathering, which is now well established in many professions, including education and healthcare, had clearly not been happening in policing. The vetting system alone was different. Someone could be vetted and passed to become a police officer in one area, but in another area the vetting would disbar him or her from that force. Actions could be registered on people’s files and records as employees in one force, and in another force—or, indeed, in the same force—the accumulation of those actions did not lead to those people losing their jobs.”
“The importance of recording and aggregating inappropriate and concerning incidents and behaviours carried out by people in professional roles, or indeed anyone, was not being managed well. Someone could commit a crime in one area—or not even commit a crime, but come to the attention of the police force in that area—and then move to a different area and repeat the same actions, and there would not be an overall picture of what that person had done. As the Minister responsible for the then vetting and barring scheme, since subsumed, alongside the Criminal Records Bureau, into the Disclosure and Barring Service, I helped to shape that picture, focusing particularly on people working in education and health settings and bringing together and changing the rules governing the way in which people were supported.”
“The idea that things are hidden from senior management, or that senior management will not deal with them, needs to be in the bin now. Sir Mark Rowley needs power to his elbow to continue to deliver what he is trying to do. I am very concerned about how we got here and there are still lessons to be learned. Very many years ago, I became a Home Office Minister. I had responsibility for the vetting and barring service. Building a picture about an individual police officer and vetting is still not being applied to the police. I served as a Home Office Minister for the three years from 2007 until the general election in 2010. Colleagues may remember the Bichard report, published in 2004 after the tragic murder of two young girls in Soham.”
“I strongly commend to the House Baroness Casey’s review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture in the Metropolitan police. It sets out clearly the scale of the problems and is a seminal piece of work, but it will only be a seminal piece of work in reality if it is actually taken on board. I therefore welcome the commitments made by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, to tackle those issues, and his strong acknowledgement of the systemic problems in the force he now leads. The leadership has to come from the top, but it needs to be root and branch from below as well. We need to have confidence that the police can report issues among their colleagues —the duty of candour is an important element.”
“The tone of the debate has been like the old days— we are actually discussing the matters in the Bill. I want to focus on a number of issues, starting with that important matter of public trust in policing, which we know is currently a real challenge. We have policing by consent in this country and that is a prize worth fighting for. In my constituency, over a very long period of time, before my election 18 years ago and since, we have seen that lack of trust and challenge played out viscerally at times. Nationally, we had the shocking cases of police officers Wayne Couzens and David Carrick. They were serving officers and continued to be in employment despite previous incidents that were clear red flags.”
“Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) will find this as well in her constituency—people caught with a weapon will often hide it in the bushes or somewhere else because they know it will be found by stop and search. If it is used badly, it does not work; if it used well, it does have a place in policing. It cannot be got rid of completely, but it must be done respectfully and properly. Given the current challenge the police are facing, particularly in London, in terms of trust with the community, we need to be really careful. In my constituency, I watch the statistics closely for who is stopped and searched, and the proportion of knives caught. It is important that we all keep an eye on that. We are at a point of disagreement, but I hope we can disagree well on this issue.”
“I thank the right hon. Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Sir John Hayes) for his contribution, but I feel I have to pick up on his point about stop and search. As I know from my own constituency, done badly, stop and search can have a lifetime impact on trust in the police. I know men of my age who can still remember when they were stopped and searched frequently and badly. It absolutely has to be intelligence-led and done respectfully, so that any young person—or any person stopped by the police—knows their rights and is treated properly, because not everybody carries a weapon. There is a point to it when it is well-targeted, but we have to keep monitoring the police so that the number of stop and searches and the number of weapons found are proportional. Across London—I know my hon.”
“No wonder we see such turnover among shop workers.”
“I am a Labour and Co-op Member of Parliament, so I am particularly keen to see this dealt with. I was struck as I talked to the staff in store by how helpless they feel when someone pretty much jumps across the till to take cigarettes and booze. They have to hide things, and they have to stock dummy products, which is inconvenient for customers. Of course, customers sometimes go into one of these shops and find that the goods they want to buy are not there because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) said, the shop has just had a large-volume raid. Shoplifting needs to be taken much more seriously. Nobody should go to work and expect to be attacked. Everyone I spoke to had suffered an incident of shoplifting. Even if they stepped back and were not violently attacked, it is still very damaging psychologically.”
“Lady says, if the Co-op, Tesco or Sainsbury’s clamps down on a particular store or stores in an area, other shops are left with less support. They are often small corner shops with a lone shopkeeper, and the fear for them is palpable. It is really worrying. If they know that the police are not going to come, they just have to back off and their goods are stolen. The Co-op that I visited has lost £155,000-worth of goods in the first six months of this year. For a small shop, that is the difference between existing and not. We rely on those local shops, and in lockdown we needed their support. Now we need to support them, and this needs to be a higher priority for the police. The Government could also be doing more. This is something that my own party is keen to look at.”
“The right hon. Lady and I are perhaps surprised to find ourselves in such agreement, but absolutely. I will finish highlighting what the Co-op does, because I think it plays into what happens in smaller stores. The staff pull together enough information to make it evidentially strong enough to take through the prosecution service and into court, but even then they often struggle to get any interest—and of course, if the stores clamp down in one area by putting more security into a shop where there has been a particular issue, the criminals just move to the next property. We have to deal with this problem area-wide, which is why it needs to be a police matter and not just dealt with store by store. Crucially, as the right hon.”
“Again, I find myself breaking out in agreement with the right hon. Gentleman. If the sanction is too low, people will keep doing it. As with county lines, it is clear that criminal gangs are often using and exploiting vulnerable people to do their dirty work. Those vulnerable people get caught, but we do not get Mr Big. Shoplifting is becoming an epidemic in many of our areas.”
“This is not just a crime issue; it is about making sure we are helping and diverting young people, who are often drawn into this activity not because they want to be but because, for young people living in certain areas, it is safer to be part of a gang than to step away. It is hard to resist that pressure at times, and those innocent young victims need as much support as other victims.”
“Those who want to get hold of a dangerous weapon can do so all too easily, even if it is banned in law. That alone is not enough for somebody who is determined to do this. We need to take a much more holistic public health approach to knife crime. I was in the Home Office when my party was last in government. The right hon. Member for Witham (Priti Patel) and I are proud of our service in the Home Office, which is a great Department to be in, but it is also frustrating. At that time, we were trying to work with accident and emergency departments to get the data so that we could track what was happening, to make sure we had a more holistic approach.”
“Friend the Member for Vauxhall on knife crime. She highlighted the utter tragedy that she and I have experienced too often. It is not right that our young people feel unsafe roaming the streets. They should have the right to roam, but instead they and their parents are constantly worrying about knives on the streets. Just banning zombie knives is not enough, because people will hide them. As with county lines, people will find a way. An 11-year-old in my constituency was recently asked to hide a gun, and when the gun went missing—it was taken from him—he had to pay back the person who had asked him to look after it. That is a classic example of grooming, and the same thing will happen with knives, which are not always held by the criminals themselves.”
“I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. Like her, I have spoken to shopkeepers and it is heartening that they want to do a good job. They said the problem is that, after a shoplifting incident, not only do they go home with it in their head but they have to take time out to record it all. This is what one said to me, and it was really heartfelt: “It stops me doing what I’m here to do, which is to help customers.” He was so proud of his job, and he wanted to help customers. Nobody should be forced not to do their job well. Frankly, there is a real issue here, and there needs to be a strong signal that there will be action on the ground, with the police working with the retailers. The big retailers can help, but action needs to be area-wide. We need to take a completely different approach to shoplifting. I commend the comments of my hon.”
“I am not being flippant, because this has a huge impact on the individuals who get hit, sometimes to the tune of several thousand pounds. For many of my constituents, even £50 or £100 is enough to tip them over the edge in a month, so this is a really big concern. Of course, this is about not just financial fraud, but other fraud.”
“This is like the tip of an iceberg; it is as though the Government had to put something about fraud in the Bill so they went for SIM farms. Is that going to solve anything, given that most of the crime is overseas? When we looked at this again this year, the Committee concluded that fraud is “everyone’s problem but no one’s priority”. The Bill backs up that premise. Some 41% of all crimes currently committed are frauds; we are talking about 3.8 million instances of actual or attempted fraud in the year to June of last year. Such little progress has been made in the past year, with fraud increasing and victims paying the price. The cost of fraud to individuals cumulatively is £4.7 billion. We all want to boost the economy, so if we stop fraud, we could have £4.7 billion being spent in our economy.”
“Frankly, it will be cheaper for the Home Office to put money into early intervention than deal with the aftermath—the victims, the deaths and, later, the prison system, which goes to the Ministry of Justice budget. We need to break the government spending silos, looking across them with a mission statement as the leader of the Labour party has suggested. No longer can we look at individual silos; we need to find a way of tackling these wicked issues. On fraud, the PAC has been looking at the issue for some time, and it is a failure of the system that we have such a poor response to it. The PAC looked at fraud in 2017 and again this year. Outlawing SIM farms is all very well, but victims continue to be let down.”
“Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi), did a bit of work to analyse the tragic knife crimes of that year and a clear pattern of victims emerged, one that often related to their being in care and to challenges in the education system. I give credit to Hackney’s gangs intervention unit, which finds the young people who are at risk of getting involved or who are involved. It then finds a way to divert them out of that path, through rehousing and education, and supports the family in doing that. This is a real challenge and so many parents want to talk to me about it. They do not want a uniformed police officer coming to the door if they know that there is a drug or gang issue in their area, because they do not want the young person in their family, often their son or daughter, to be targeted. We can talk about that issue.”
“I absolutely agree on that, and we need resourcing for that early intervention. Something we look at on the Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, is what I call “cost shunting”. A classic example of that would be where mental health services get cut and the police end up picking up mental health patients and having to divert resources there. We could have early intervention to support young people so that they are not caught up in this. I am not blaming young people, as they themselves are not a problem—the young people in my constituency are amazing and are going to be great leaders of the future—but some of them, sadly, get sucked into this. That little bit of money going in early can prevent a lot of challenge for young people. Many years ago, a police chief in Lambeth, in the constituency of my hon.”
“I absolutely am. I recommend to my right hon. Friend our report of this year and, I am sorry to say, our back history of reports on this issue, because things have moved so slowly that people might as well read the 2017 report as not much has moved on since. I am going to come on to the issue of how reporting works, because the Bill misses an opportunity there.”
“Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) highlighted what happens to many young teenagers, particularly teenage girls, so this measure acts as a protection. In addition, we need to ensure we educate people that such behaviour should not happen. As the Bill makes progress, I hope some of those issues will be picked up in Committee.”
“I held an Adjournment debate in April 2018 calling for exactly this issue to be addressed and made an offence. New section 66AA sets out three offences of taking or recording intimate photographs or film, including an offence of “intentionally” taking a photograph or recording a film that shows another person in an intimate state without that person’s consent or a reasonable belief in their consent. This is a moment to pay tribute to Emily Hunt, who bravely named herself, took on the system and was a force of nature in making sure the issue was tackled. We could not understand why the crime of taking such a photograph was not identified in law. At the time, the fact the person who had taken it had not published it was the issue, but this measure has now been introduced and it would have protected Emily. My hon.”
“Action Fraud is set to be replaced in the new year, yet the Bill does not mention the victim experience, which is a missed opportunity. I hope that will be probed further by members of the Bill Committee. It is sobering that the time taken by law enforcement agencies to take on and tackle fraud is often longer than the sentence that the fraudster receives, so something is going wrong. We need a concerted effort to deal with this wicked issue, which cuts across many areas. The measure relating to intimate images is welcome. I pay tribute to my previous constituent, Emily, who has now moved back to the United States, who worked tirelessly over a period of years to shift the dial on the issue, after she was filmed naked without her consent.”
“When the Committee looked at communications this year, there were 13 public campaigns running about fraud, but fewer than 10% of citizens were aware of any of them. We raised the matter five years ago, when the Take Five campaign was run by the National Crime Agency. However, five years on, that campaign is still being evaluated, so it is not working very well. My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North raised the issue of fraud not being reported by people. Only 300,000 cases were reported to Action Fraud by the public, which given the overall numbers is not very many, and another 600,000 were reported by business and industry. Of the 900,000 cases reported annually, fewer than 15% end up with further action and only 1% result in a criminal justice outcome.”
“The Home Secretary said that percentage balancing was not possible, but we can all acknowledge that if 1% of police officers are dedicated to fraud and 41% of crime is fraud then the balance is out of kilter. Some 20,000 new police officers are being recruited, which is a welcome step, but only around 2% of them—some 380 officers—will be focused on fraud. The Public Accounts Committee looked at new officer recruitment; recruiting fast can mean that a lot of junior staff are recruited, not the specialists that are needed, so there has been a missed opportunity. I will not go into that further, as it is outside the scope of the Bill. Public communications could be improved by the Home Office, working in partnership with others, as campaigns can be effective.”
“We ended up recommending slightly time-delayed reporting as a way of keeping institutions on their toes, so that customers could vote with their feet and know exactly which banks were on top of dealing with fraud. We think that the different sectors where fraud is happening could do more. Over 70% of fraud has an international element, so whatever we do domestically will not resolve the situation unless we have better relationships with overseas criminal justice agencies. This is immature in the Home Office currently, as we concluded in our report published earlier this year, and the matter is not helped by the lack of capacity in the UK. Only 1% of police are dedicated to fraud, yet it represents 41% of crime.”
“Because the Home Office is dependent on the banking, technology, telecoms and retail sectors to fight fraud, its response has been slow and sluggish, relying on voluntary agreements with organisations in those sectors to deliver change. Frankly, those agreements have not delivered enough. The banks were reluctant to give evidence at all to the Public Accounts Committee—I suggest to the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson), that she pushes the banks to give more information—and when we suggested publicly reporting fraud levels against the banks, they were apoplectic.”
“I do not dispute what the right hon. Gentleman says, but there is a danger that that lets the Home Office off the hook. In the five or six years during which the Public Accounts Committee has been looking at the issue, fraud has got worse. Indeed, I was dealing with some of the issues when I was a Home Office Minister, and we are seeing a growth in the crime but not a growth in the action in response to it. That is not surprising, as the volume and complexity of cases are overwhelming police forces and Action Fraud, the civil body to which people report such crime. The point that the right hon. Gentleman makes about interdependency is valid.”
“Can he explain when this legislation will apply and whether it will apply retrospectively to any ballots that have taken place?”
“This will put a chill on people being able to withdraw their labour, and I go back to where I started: people working in our ambulance service do not want to withdraw their labour. It is not something they have done lightly; it is something they have done almost with embarrassment, because they want to keep doing their job well, but they cannot do their job well with a lack of resources. I ask the Minister to answer these specific questions. Is he confident that this is ECHR compliant? Does he acknowledge that there was universal coverage across the country on the days of strike action by ambulance workers? If not, can he explain what he means by there not being universal coverage? Can he explain the impact on pickets and the role of the picket supervisor in law if this statutory instrument is passed?”
“The House of Lords Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee was critical of the lack of detail in the main Bill and called for these measures to be included on the face of the Bill, yet here we are in Committee Room 10 today. I am sure that other Committees will meet this week to discuss similar measures for other sectors, and there have been others today. These measures are being discussed in small Committee Rooms, barely noticed and nodded through by a Government majority. The Lords are critical. Employers are unhappy, as others have said, so I will not quote them. The trade unions have pointed out the many complex legal issues, as well as the impact on staff. Staff are at risk, but who wants to be the test case?”
“This truncated parliamentary timetable is a real problem, and the Government’s explanatory notes even talk about the challenge, saying: “The impact on the public sector of the instrument in conjunction with the 2023 Act is that NHS ambulance workers in England will lose their automatic protection from unfair dismissal if they go on strike despite having been named in a valid work notice and their employer has given them notice of the work notice in line with section 238A(9) of the 1992 Act, as inserted by part 2 of the schedule to the 2023 Act.” In simple terms, that means we are putting many staff at risk of losing their jobs for exercising a human right in law.”
“They appreciate knowing that there is an ambulance service, and they know that the service is broken and ambulances are not attending in time, but that is not down to the staff; it is down to the lack of investment in our ambulance service by this Government over 13 years. Staff do not want to strike, and it is the Government’s failure that they are there in the first place. We can add to this the arrogant disregard for Parliament and a proper scrutiny process. We are doing our best here, but there are 10 Government Members and seven Opposition Members in this room. Interestingly, at one point I counted eight Government Members on their phones, not listening at all to my colleagues.”
“The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels: Passenger Railway Services) Regulations 2023 apply to action balloted for before 20 July 2023, when the 2023 Act received Royal Assent, but the point at which the first work notices would be issued remains uncertain. There are a lot of complications, which I do not have time to go into. I am not a lawyer, but I can work out that there are problems here, so I hope the Minister will answer that point about when this legislation applies retrospectively and what needs to be done for it to come into action. This is about disrespect for ambulance staff and dog-whistle anti-strike politics, but citizens, who are the neighbours, partners, parents, children and colleagues of ambulance workers, know what they see. They know when they see their friends and neighbours coming home exhausted after a hard day’s work.”
“We are tying up staff, their trade union representatives, employers and many lawyers—who, I am sure, will be making a mint out of this—in deciding what is to be done. With the timeframes involved, it is not practically possible to do that. This is a deliberate tactic; it can only be that, because the Government have lawyers at their behest who are able to work on such matters. The Government must know what they are doing. They are just making these things incredibly difficult. There is also the issue of retrospective application. When legislation is passed, there is a discussion about when it will apply, and the retrospective element of this legislation remains unclear.”
“It is shameful that people who aspire to be in government—and are in government, in this case—play such games. There are further questionable matters. As TUC lawyers have explained, this proposal is unnecessary and unworkable, and it cuts across the law. We are discussing the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 as it pertains to ambulance workers. As colleagues have highlighted, the right to strike is protected by the Human Rights Act 1998 and article 11 of the European convention on human rights. It therefore has legal underpinning, yet the Government are trying to ride roughshod over it. The Government have also taken on the challenging issue, and significant legal grey areas, of picketing. It is unclear what reasonable steps would need to be taken to make sure a trade union knows whether its actions break the law.”
“It is extraordinary: as Unison says, the claims that there has been a refusal to provide a national safety net are just not true. Cover agreements were made with every ambulance trust at a local level. That was really critical. Unison reached agreement with every ambulance trust before the strike date. On every picket line, there was a Unison picket supervisor, and we will come to picket supervisors in a moment, because there is a particular legal point to make about them. Those individuals carried a radio and were in direct contact with the employers—the individual ambulance trusts, in this case. When an emergency call came through, workers jumped straight into the ambulances, which were kept ready on the picket line. The attacks are therefore mean-spirited and wrong and a sign of the Government’s obfuscation.”
“On the specific point of minimum service levels and the way in which the strikes have been paraded about and painted by the Government, the whole set-up is always about smoke and mirrors, myths and obfuscation. Ministers have been on national media making completely false statements. They say there was no national cover on strike days—well, there is no national employer of ambulance services, so who were the ambulance staff supposed to negotiate with on a national level? They are not employed by the NHS; they are employed by trusts, whether the London Ambulance Service in my area or others. Every single trust had a protocol in place with the strikers for providing care, thanks to Unison’s negotiating on the ground to deliver it.”
“There is concern about the cost of living, but concern about safe levels of staffing is really what is driving frontline workers, whether nurses or doctors. That is what we hear from them—that is why they are concerned. They want their voice to be heard. I have spoken to people who were really concerned about having to strike but who said, “We are doing it for the safety of our patients.” As the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish, said, these were the people we were applauding during covid. How hollow those pots and pans sound now, when the Government are riding roughshod over those vital public sector workers.”
“When the Public Accounts Committee, which I am privileged to chair, looked at this issue a number of years ago, their salaries were so low that more money had to be injected into ambulance trusts around the country just so they could maintain minimum staffing levels. That was compounded by the tentacles of the former Member for Tatton, George Osborne, who, when he was Chancellor, froze public sector workers’ pay for a Parliament and then increased it by only 1% per annum. That left those vital public services—ambulance workers among them—at a lower level of pay than they should have been. That was then compounded when we were hit by a cost of living crisis, largely down to the incompetence of the former Prime Minister and the Government’s 13 years of rule. That has led to real concerns about safe levels of staffing.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Huq. I should declare an interest, as I am a member of Unite. I do not receive any financial benefit: I pay them; they do not pay me. We should not be here in the first place. No ambulance worker wants to strike. They do this because of the Government’s lack of investment in staff, in our NHS—particularly in the ambulance service—and in public services generally. Ambulance workers have a very stressful work life: they work at full tilt about 90% of the time they are on duty, which is extremely high compared with other emergency services.”
“What does the Minister think will be the difference between what is happening now and what will happen when this measure comes into place? As voluntary agreements have been in place and have worked very well, what does he think this will add?”
“I thank the Minister for giving way again; this is an important issue. Is he suggesting that what is provided for staff in the London area by the London Ambulance Service as a voluntary agreement under a picket is exactly the same as should be provided in the area of Yorkshire that my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) represents? There are hugely different circumstances; does he not think that a blanket national approach would be a completely wrong-headed thing to do?”
“The Minister is sticking close to a couple of areas where he said services failed during a strike, but services are failing every day because of the stress and strain on an overstretched ambulance service, wherever it is in the country. How can he point to things that arise as a result of a strike, but bear no responsibility or have any care for what happens on an ordinary day of the week?”
“I am amazed that the Minister talked about the consultation, which is a bit of an open goal. Some 76% of people did not agree with the proposals, so I would suggest that they do not really have popular support. The Minister is also talking about recovery in the NHS; this is his Government. He may not want to admit this, but it is 13 years of this Government that has brought the ambulance service to its knees. If they are increasing ambulance staff by 30% in a year, that is a sign that there was a very big problem, and this is being done to get it back to anywhere near where it should be—and it is still not where it needs to be. I think the Minister needs to be careful about using the word “recovery” as though it is somehow a magic wand to improve things.”
“For instance, our Committee recently produced a report on the school building programme which revealed that 700,000 pupils were in inadequate premises; and although a former Prime Minister announced a programme for the building of 40 hospitals, there are still only 32, and the building of those hospitals is expected to “bunch” by the late 2020s or thereabouts.”