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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Every one of 4,811 lines we hold for Dame Meg Hillier, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 24 of 97.
“We recognise that legislation is one step along the way, four years on from the Grenfell disaster, but there is nevertheless a long gap—a long time lag—between legislation and action. Let me give a recent example. The Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, recently examined the work of the Office for Product Safety and Standards, which has only just assumed responsibility for product safety in this sphere and has not yet developed a methodology for its delivery. I am making no criticism of the OPSS, which has a job to do, but it has only just taken it on—and this is 2021, four years since the Grenfell disaster. That is an example of how a small delay in the Government can mean a very long delay for the thousands of our constituents who are really suffering.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I welcome you to your position. I must declare an interest in that I am a leaseholder in an affected block, although, happily for me and for my neighbours, the developer who built the block is footing the bill for everything. I am surrounded by scaffolding, and cladding is being removed at this moment. The Bill is welcome, but it has taken a long time to get here, and, as others have said, it does not solve the problem completely. I want, in my brief remarks, to acknowledge and reflect everything that was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell). She summed up the challenges, while making it clear that for us this is not about scoring cheap party political points: we need to resolve the situation for all our constituents throughout the country.”
“I welcome the Minister’s tone in coming to the House in that she has acknowledged that mistakes were made and that the Cabinet Office has accepted both Boardman reviews and the National Audit Office’s recommendations on procurement. However, we are in a whole different ball game when members of her Cabinet are having private email exchanges and neither we nor officials know what is in them. She says that the Cabinet Office is reviewing guidance. Is it not time that she just said, “This must stop,” because nobody—not the National Audit Office or officials—can see what is in those conversations, and that is a very real concern for the taxpayer?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. More than 1 million people still use only cash, and approximately 4 million use cash regularly, so it is vital that they have access to it. This is now the second consultation that the Treasury is going through, but as the PAC has seen, all the distribution of cash is in the hands of private providers. Can the Economic Secretary give any indication of the type of legislation that he can introduce to ensure that if people are very poor, they can get cash? That does not mean going to the supermarket and getting it out when they do not even know what is in their own account.”
“I could probably write an essay on identity documents, having been responsible for the matter when I was in government a decade ago. I am particularly concerned about constituents of mine who are Commonwealth citizens, who are often seeking to achieve status in the UK but whose identity documents are with the Home Office—they do not have those identity documents to prove that they can vote. What is the Minister’s solution for those individuals?”
“Investment is all very well, but this is really damaging the future prospects of children in my constituency, some of whom will never have not only their own bedroom but maybe even their own bed between now and when they hopefully earn enough money to leave home, although frankly we are a long way off their earning enough money to buy a £750,000 flat. The Government really need to step up. They talk about levelling up, but that is certainly not happening for many people in my constituency.”
“That is not surprising: it is at least £1,500 a month to rent a two-bedroom flat in my constituency; £750,000 to buy a two-bedroom flat; and rent for a three-bedroom house is not much shy of £3,500 a month. We need to increase stamp duty immediately, while monitoring its effect, and we should increase it further for overseas purchasers. We should not have a housing market that has led to homes being owned by finance vehicles or absentee landlords who have no interest in it being a home but simply see it as an investment. Homes should be homes.”
“She has been coming to see me since they were toddlers, yet she still cannot get rehoused. This is no criticism of Hackney Council, which is doing a fantastic job of trying to build, and is building, affordable social housing, but it cannot keep pace with the demand. In the last week alone, two women I knocked on the doors of were sharing beds with their 12 and 13-year-old sons respectively. One of the saddest cases is an NHS porter I met less than 10 days ago who shares a room in a private rented home with his 16-year-old daughter. He works. He could not qualify for affordable housing even if he wanted to, because he has no recourse to public funds, despite propping up our NHS in one of the most challenging years in its history. He is doing all the right things—working, trying to be a good father—but he cannot afford private rents.”
“We are now able to go out and do our normal roving surgeries on doorsteps, and I will give some examples of people I have met in the last week alone. Faisal works in the NHS. He has three children in a two-bedroom council flat, and he has been bidding to move to a bigger property for 10 years, but such is the demand in my constituency that someone in housing need does not get to move. If they are homeless, they now get stuck in a hostel room for years, whereas only five or so years ago it was for about six months. Jane—not her real name—and her husband live with two large teenage boys in a two-bedroom flat. I have known her for some years, having seen her at surgeries. I happened to be on her doorstep the other day, and she made sure that I saw how big her boys have become.”
“The excuse is often that developers need the money because they cannot operate without that cash-flow model. I think they would adapt pretty quickly. In my constituency, there are blocks that local people have kept their eye on, wanting to try to buy, only to find they have already been sold en masse overseas. A stamp duty increase would help a little bit. The stamp duty holiday has been helpful to many people, but all that contributes to fuelling demand for housing while the Government are not increasing supply. Those rising house prices put homeownership out of reach of so many of my constituents and people up and down the country. It is having a major dampening impact on people’s lives and livelihoods and on the economy in the long term. It does nothing for private renters and nothing for those in desperate need of affordable housing.”
“I then managed to inveigle my way on to the distribution lists of some of the estate agents, which were advertising the properties in Hong Kong and Dubai, and they sold over a weekend. These were not homes for local people. They were often bought up by finance companies overseas and sold on. The original reason for the extra stamp duty surcharge was to try to curtail that to some extent, but I do not think it is enough. Foreign investors are buying homes, which are becoming commodities; they are advertised with yield—it is simply about increasing the rent. As the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Erith and Thamesmead (Abena Oppong-Asare), highlighted, at least £53 million and counting in revenue has been lost from the Exchequer at a time when we need it more than ever.”
“First, I draw Members’ attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I rise to support my colleagues on the Front Bench and new clause 24 about the surcharge on overseas buyers: the extra stamp duty that is charged. Although we are seeing a 2% uplift, it is not what was originally promised, and even that, I would say, is still not enough to prevent people from speculating, particularly in my constituency and elsewhere in London, on the expensive London housing market and overheating that housing market. I came across this level of investment in my early days in this place—I have now been here for 16 years—when I discovered that whole blocks of new developments were being bought up overnight. I could not work out who was doing it.”
“I have to challenge the Minister on IR35. He is speaking as though it is somehow all fine. It has decimated sections of the tech and IT industry in my constituency, where groups of people came together to deliver short contracts and were actually paying as much tax as the Exchequer was getting from them. I can provide figures if he would like to take this up further, but let us not pretend that it is all fine.”
“It has just got to be done, and if we do it well and we do it right, we will be thanked, ultimately, because we will have saved this building and created jobs around our country.”
“We need to get on with it, and we need to open up the opportunities. As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) says, doing nothing is not an option. We must not reopen every option every time we debate this. We all aspire to run the country—sadly, my party is not running the country at the moment—but if we want to be in that position, we need to show that we can boldly take difficult decisions. Government is not about being popular and always choosing an easy option; it is usually the opposite. Proper governance is actually about making difficult decisions. I want to put on record my thanks to the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire. She did not mince her words today, and I thank her for that. It is not a political game. It is not about pitting London against the country.”
“In the House in the past, and let us look at the Elizabeth Tower as an example, reporting to the Clerk of the House through the system in the House has not worked. The Elizabeth Tower refurbishment started off with a price tag of £29 million, and it ended up at £80 million. So the idea that somehow we are passing responsibility over and losing control of costs is hardly borne out. We need to keep a close eye on the costs, but the idea that it can be done in the old-fashioned way through the House systems has not proved to work. I will not highlight it, but I recommend to Members the National Audit Office report of last year that looked at the Elizabeth Tower, when the House’s own auditors recognised some of the challenges and problems, such as mission creep and the inability to bottom-out costs at the beginning.”
“All the evidence shows that any major project will get more expensive and more complex the longer it goes on, so we need to decide and we need to get on with it quickly. We should not be prolonging it, and we need to have a focus on what needs to be done, including setting the parameters and making sure that good governance is in place to get on with it. This will also help us control costs, which of course we are all concerned about, but we must not be concerned about the big figure at the beginning, because there will be a big price tag. There is no getting around that. Let us just run through the governance. We have the Sponsor Body, which is a group of professionals who understand how to manage projects, and it will oversee the Delivery Authority. Of course, Members—we have heard from some of them—are represented on those bodies.”
“We work in our constituencies and in all sorts of different environments. We do not have to have the perfect solution, but we need a solution for the time we are out of the building. We must also plan to ensure that businesses up and down the country are enabled and prepared to bid for the contracts that will come up. Some years ago, I visited New South Wales ahead of the London Olympics to see how businesses in New South Wales had been worked with to get them ready to understand what they needed to do to bid for contracts for the Olympics. We can do a similar engagement project, but while we are debating whether or not we do it, we are going to be a long way off getting to that point of supporting such businesses to get jobs.”
“Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) let me say that, yes, there needs to be an envelope of costs, contingency needs to be built in and we need to be rigorous about testing and pursuing people on that. That is why we have made sure that the National Audit Office looks regularly at this and that the Sponsor Body works closely with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, so that each step of the way the project planning is in place to make sure we are doing this. Of course we should not gold-plate things. We certainly do not need to gold-plate temporary provision, because it will be temporary. It needs to be functional and workable. We have shown over the past year that we can be very adaptable and their lordships seem to be even more adaptable, able to work in different ways.”
“I chair the Public Accounts Committee for a reason: I believe that every pound of public money saved is a pound for the Government of the day to spend on something else that they consider to be important, on the basis of the manifesto on which our voters elected them. That means that the business case is important, but it will cost billions and billions of pounds to do this work. Let us be honest about that. Let us forget this £4 billion figure that is being bandied around. We know it will cost a lot of money, but it cannot be done on the cheap—there is not a cheap option for a building such as this. We have to acknowledge that and accept that we are the custodians and we have to make the tough choices. This must be value for money and in response to the hon.”
“There is a sense that this is a bit like musical chairs, with everybody believing or hoping that they will not be standing when the music stops, a bit like as it is with covid-19. I recall that just over a decade ago, probably about 12 years ago, I was serving on a pandemic planning sub-committee of a Cabinet Sub-Committee, where I was a bit-part player in discussing then how to deal with a pandemic. It is apparent that over time that drops down the agenda because nobody thinks that they are going to be the Minister in charge when the pandemic hits. It dropped down the priority list, but this issue cannot, as we know what we want to do and there is a real risk here. Of course, value for money is very important—I am clear about that.”
“The Leader of the House is proposing options that would put staff at risk. I do not want to be responsible for any staff in this building once we start ripping out asbestos. He is also proposing options that would lead to a lack of clarity over who is responsible. If we had a hybrid set of working, are the contractors, the Sponsor Body or the Delivery Authority responsible, or is the Clerk of the House? If something went wrong, who is in charge in that complex set-up? We need to be clear that those are dangerous and risky options. The Leader of the House speaks of Parliament agreeing it, but I remind him, as others have, that Parliament has agreed with this. We must be careful about endlessly opening up options, and having a start-and-stop approach.”
“Much of the work that has been done, with this £127 million a year, will have to be redone once major works start. The Leader of the House has used his position to delay, not progress. Of course we have to keep an eye on things, but we have set up a structure that allows us to do that. I agree with the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) that there is a danger that it is seen as self-indulgent to discuss this today. We should not be discussing the principle of what we do and when we do it; if more Members were here talking about the businesses that could benefit from this, that would be a good thing. There are many other issues we could be discussing. Rather than this, we could be talking about jobs and opportunities for people who have had a really tough time over the past year.”
“The great stink got the sewers of London built, but the great stink might finally get us out of this place. There are holes in carpets, with more seeming to emerge even in lockdown, and dangerous voids, top and bottom of the building. The main change is that a lot of money has been spent to keep people safe in the event of a catastrophic fire. So we have all got fire alarms in our rooms and in Committee Rooms, but that does not save the building; if the worst happened, that is what would happen. That is a real issue because this is a grade I listed building, a heritage building and a UNESCO site, so there is no option here. Ultimately, the Government—it is the Treasury’s responsibility—under UNESCO rules, have to make sure that this building survives.”
“Let me re-emphasise, as the former Leader of the House the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire did, that there is a risk of catastrophic fire here. There have been 29 incidents between 2015 and 2020. There are 24 fire wardens on three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not long before lockdown, one of the fires was found on a weekday. If it had been a weekend, the wardens’ patrolling pattern meant that they might not have picked it up. Mechanical and engineering is a mess. Anyone who has been down to the basement can see the problems there, with hot water next to electricity. This has all been highlighted many times, as have issues with the sewers; you do not need to ask someone where the lavatories are in this place because you can sniff them out most of the time, and staff have to work in that stinking smell.”
“We therefore have to recognise, as the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) said, that we are the custodians now and we need to make the decision. It is worth noting—this is a bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so there is probably somebody I have missed out—that there have been three Clerks of the House, two Mr Speakers, at least three Leaders of the House, three Prime Ministers and three Parliaments since the Joint Committee reported in 2016. As others have pointed out, it was on 31 January 2018 that this House made a decision to get on with it. It has been a very slow process since. There is a danger that this will be endlessly revisited, with new Parliaments, changes to the public finances and everyone coming up with a great new idea about what the different needs are.”
“I caution new Members in particular that it can be tempting to say—I think the Leader of the House is dangling this in front of us regularly—that Parliament has changed, people have changed and there are new views. But that is the thing about this place: it is a constantly renewing democracy and place. Unfortunately, with the byzantine structure of Committees and Members changing all the time, if we take the view that we always have to revisit everything because it is a new group of people working here, we will never settle on tough decisions. The Government are the same. How long does a Government Minister last or indeed a permanent secretary in Whitehall? I have been the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee for six years. Only one permanent secretary is still in post, in a different Department, from six years ago.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but there is a danger that he is doing what I am very concerned about, which is keeping going the debates about many options. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion, but we are getting to the crunch point now. It does feel a bit like groundhog day. We are, once again, debating these options and, in essence, what has changed? What has changed, as others, including the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), have said, is that we are spending more money: £127 million a year, according to the National Audit Office. What has not changed is that we still need to do a major refurbishment. What has changed is the personnel involved.”
“The right hon. Gentleman talks about cost, but we of course do not know what the cost is until the business case comes through, and I think that needs to be clear. Is he really suggesting that if we do the work around us, that will be cheaper than if we move out and do it in one hit and then come back?”
“The figures quoted are from the National Audit Office, and the full details are in the National Audit Office’s work. They are then simply quoted in the Public Accounts Committee report. It is National Audit Office work that is done to get those figures in the report.”
“On the Elizabeth Tower—I alluded to this, but perhaps I should quote directly from the NAO report—Parliament’s internal auditors identified, among other things, “inadequate project governance; high turnover of project staff; and poor cost estimation.” That really encapsulates the things that we do not want to get wrong with this project. It will cost a lot of money, but we need to be sure that we have had proper governance and proper cost destination and that we are presenting to the public a figure that is real, even though it will not be cheap.”
“One could be forgiven for thinking that COP26 is approaching and the Government need to make some headline announcements. What is missing in the Secretary of State’s statement today is a clear set of metrics against which this House, this country and the world can measure the Government. Will he take on board the thoughtful recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee, which said that he should report properly to this House with clear targets and metrics which we can hold him to? I know that he is a man of intelligence, and a man who is committed to this; if he is that committed, will he open up that scrutiny so that we can really hold the Government properly to account?”
“I want to touch briefly on identity checking for elections. I was the passport and identity card Minister in the last Labour Government. We concluded then—and the Act of Parliament that set up the ID cards was very clear—that having an ID card would never be required to access a public service. Yet we see this Government proposing what seems to be a plethora of alternative paperwork that is costly and out of reach for, as I recall, about 10% of the population: passports, which are more than £90 each; and driving licences, which people cannot have unless they can learn to drive and have a car, or have the money to do that. They will need those in order to vote—to access a public service.”
“It was a promise made in 2015 by a Conservative Prime Minister. It was a promise made by this Prime Minister in 2017, yet four years on and ticking, there is nothing to be seen. It is crucial that we start this now and that we reach across the Aisle and find cross-party consensus to tackle this, especially because of the shameful approach to social care and care homes in the pandemic, whereby people were exported from hospital with covid, spreading it rapidly through care homes. As the Public Accounts Committee said, they were thrown to the dogs. Let us also not forget domiciliary care; more of us will have care in the home than institutional care, and we need to make sure that is wrapped up in the mix as well. The PAC has a list of asks on this issue, which I commend to the Prime Minister.”
“I welcome some of the changes on leasehold reform. I declare an interest, in that I am a leaseholder and I live in a property with dangerous cladding—happily, my developer is removing it and paying for the whole thing, so I am one of the lucky ones. I welcome the ground rents reform, which is long overdue, but where is the wider leasehold reform? We need to see that. It is not mentioned in the Queen’s Speech, and I hope that is just because it is not in enough detail. I think I have made my point on unsafe cladding. One of the great hopes, and a cross-party one, was that we would finally see some movement on social care, which we have been discussing for 30 years and more—we have seen multiple reports of that. Again, we see the headlines from the Government—the promise of something, at some time.”
“If we take a generous view of house prices, the average house price is 17 times the average local salary. We must bear in mind that in my constituency there are some generous local salaries in the mix; the City workers will make that figure lower. The poorest—people in a good retail job or working as a nurse in a hospital—just cannot afford a new home. So renting is out of reach for many people; they need that good-quality, properly affordable housing in order to keep our city going. If levelling up means anything, it does not mean levelling down or keeping people in my constituency and in London squeezed into inappropriate and overcrowded accommodation, in order to build nice, identikit, three-bedroom houses with gardens elsewhere. Of course, I want everybody to have opportunity, but not at the expense of those in London.”
“That is not unusual in my constituency. It is a living tragedy that people go through their whole childhood and adolescence, and into adulthood, sometimes sharing a bed with a parent, and certainly living in severely overcrowded conditions. At any one time, we have more than 3,000 people in temporary accommodation—a number that has grown exponentially. The promise of new housing rings hollow to those people, and the Prime Minister needs to look at the reality of people’s lives, not just in some parts of the country but particularly in its expensive parts, such as the city where he was Mayor and where he believed that “affordable” housing was 80% of private rents—80% of £1,500 or more a month for a one-bedroom flat. In my borough, a typical new two-bedroom property comes in at £750,000.”
“Gentleman and I are the beginnings of a campaign on that issue, so the Prime Minister had better watch out. So we need more homes. Again, that is something I want to support, but will they be affordable? Rights for renters—yes, but that can come with a sting in the tail if not done well. It must be properly done. On homes and homelessness, in the past week alone I have been on the doorsteps of two women whose story I should tell. One is a victim of domestic violence, with the glass on her front door still broken. She is living in a one-bedroom flat, with her 13-year-old son still having to share her bed. Another woman, who I have met before, said, “Now you are on my doorstep, see my big boys.” Her teenage sons came to the door. She lives in a one-bedroom flat with her two teenage sons and her husband.”
“However, as the Public Accounts Committee has highlighted, along with our sister Committee, the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, we need skilled people to do the safety work. We are already four years on from the tragedy of Grenfell, yet there are not enough people to do the work, assess the need, and carry out remediation. The cost to leaseholders is extraordinary. It is damaging their futures, it is putting their lives on hold, and I concur completely with the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley): we must tackle this issue now. The Government need to step up, be more imaginative, and ensure that those homeowners who have sunk their life savings into their future and their homes are rescued. This is a generational failure in fire safety and regulation, and it must be tackled. Perhaps the hon.”
“We have a promise of more homes, but every housing programme that the Public Accounts Committee has looked at over the past six years or more has shown a lack of delivery, and a failure of that promise. The Gracious Speech mentions finances being returned to a sustainable path, but there is a sting in the tail because until we see the detail of how that will be paid for, none of the other promises can be guaranteed. I do the maths, and I will continue to do them. I will support bits of the Gracious Address. I will support any policy that benefits my constituents, but I will watch like a hawk the detail, the money and the delivery, because the delivery is what matters. On fire safety, we need the new building safety regulator, and I welcome the fact that that is in the Gracious Address.”
“I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Today we see a Queen’s Speech full of headlines. This Government are good at painting headlines, yet those headlines are often lacking when it comes to detail. I spend my time—privileged as I am to be Chair of the Public Accounts Committee—doing the maths. We have levelling up, but does that mean levelling down for cities such as mine, here in London, and an attack on the poorest there? We have promises of high-quality education in the Gracious Speech, while teachers are being laid off and children who are in touch with social services are more in need than ever before. Both those budgets are stretched to squeaking point.”
“This Queen’s Speech has bits in it that I want to support, but I want to see the detail and I want to see delivery. I want to see movement on social care, on housing and on green jobs, of course, but on the basis of the last 11 years, we have seen failure after failure, promises made and not delivered and—crucially, from a public accounts point of view—lessons not learned and mistakes repeatedly made. Cheap headlines over substance just let people down. I will back what is good for my constituents, but on the basis of this Government’s record, and despite the Prime Minister talking about hope, change and opportunity, I am not very hopeful.”
“The Prime Minister talks about making Britain great again and about Britain having a big place in the world, so why is it that when someone comes from outside Britain to contribute to our country, we put these barriers in their way and make life difficult for them and, worse still, for their children? I am proud to be working with We Belong and with my constituent, Chrisann Jarrett. This organisation represents young people who arrived in this country as toddlers or young children and who have now found that, because they are unable to pay these fees and their citizenship fee, they are excluded from university and often from the workplace. They are legitimately here in most cases, but they are being priced out. That is a crying shame and a stain on our country.”
“We need to continue to support those people to find sanctuary where they are fleeing challenge, but we also need to better support those who are legally here but are unable to fully participate as citizens because of the barriers that are put up. The cost and complications of our immigration system have gone through the roof. When I was elected 16 years ago, people had to apply for indefinite leave to remain. They then got five years and they could then apply for citizenship. It then went down to three years, so they had to apply twice to reach their five years for citizenship. They now have to apply three times, each time paying a fee.”
“Over the last decade or so, we have seen the privatisation of the UK Green Investment Bank, and even the removal of its absolute requirement to deliver green investment; we have seen the failed green deal, which cost over £100,000 per loan; and we have seen a fourth contest launch for carbon capture and storage, which would help to tackle some of our energy intensive industries. The first three fell at the first hurdle. I want to touch on immigration. I proudly represent a constituency that is the world in one borough. We hear tough talk from the Home Secretary on this, and then we hear talk about how she is going to support the Windrush victims. We should be proud of our record of accepting people from the old empire, from the Commonwealth and from across the world when they are fleeing persecution to come to this country.”
“They have been promising the Earth with big broad-brush headlines, but potentially really damaging the Earth through their inaction. There is no planet B, so we have to get it right now. Ambitious projects such as stopping production of petrol and diesel cars within nine years make great headlines, but there is a lot to be done in the nine years between now and then, and very little detail. So it is vital that that is got right, and I think that there is, or should be, cross-party consensus across the aisle that we need to tackle this generational issue for our planet. On green jobs, again the Government make promises, but I have been looking at this for at least a decade. With COP26 on the way, we can expect a flurry of stage-managed headlines, but the detailed plans to achieve all these things are not there.”
“We need to see a proper, coherent approach to this, not an approach that just stops the poorest from voting and cuts people out of exercising their basic democratic right, when the percentage of in-person fraud is minuscule. Yes, we could do more to tackle postal fraud and the harvesting of votes, but not this. I want to touch on some of the environmental issues that are touched on in the Bill, although we do not yet know the detail. I am pleased that the Environment Bill is being carried over, but let us hope that we see more detail and more meaningful steps towards action on this issue. The Public Accounts Committee has spent some time over the last year looking at environmental and climate change issues, and we have found the Government wanting.”
“The hon. Gentleman and I could have a completely separate conversation about ID cards, but I absolutely agree with what he says; I used to use that as an example of how it can be done affordably and well. But we have a disconnect in government on this issue. We have discussions about vaccine passports and talk about ID, but not ID cards. We have talk about vaccine passports by an app, but without ID. If vaccine passports are ever going to work, we need some form of verifying ID card. So it seems to me that the Government are arguing, counter to their 2010 position, for abolishing not just ID cards but fingerprints in passports, which took us way below the international standards on identity verification.”
“If we can take anything from the way she did things here, we can all learn from that hard work, that intellectual curiosity and that ability to work with people—even with those with whom she disagreed—in a gracious matter in these times. I will miss her enormously. I cannot really believe that she has passed. It is also extraordinary to realise that only two Conservative women MPs elected prior to me are still serving in this House. Her loss is a loss for women in this place, too. I pass on my condolences to her family, her staff and her many friends.”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I associate myself in full with the comments of the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), save the bit about the 1922 committee, which I have obviously not had the privilege—a dubious privilege, in my case—of serving on. Cheryl was, as the hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) and others have said, a member of the Public Accounts Committee. I have to confess, Mr Speaker, that I pursued her to join the Committee, and you would not have realised that she was dealing with this serious illness unless you knew. The amount of work she put in would put many other Members to shame. I really valued her intellect, her robustness and her good fun. We did sometimes disagree, but with Cheryl we always disagreed well.”