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 will not give way as I have already taken two interventions. It is easy to make announcements; it is much harder to get the system to deliver on them. There is a will in this House, I think, to deliver on this, but the Government have to stop making cheap headlines. On jobs, only one in 100 young people aged 16 to 24 is benefiting from kickstart. Again, it is a nice headline, but unless it delivers for our constituents, it is not working. We need to act now on making sure that further education is properly funded so that it can plan ahead as, hopefully, we come out of lockdown and into more normal life, and make sure that people are able to be reskilled. Finally, I welcome the movement—as far as I have read the detail, which is not in full yet—on visas for tech entrepreneurs.”
“The Minister in her report highlights that there is £4.5 million of Government money to invest in research, including on the economic impacts on ethnic minority groups. With so many frontline workers having been removed from their posts for their own protection—that is the right move—is any of that money being spent on looking at the impact on their career paths of their having lost out on opportunities?”
“He should have the guts to come to the House, apologise, and promise it will not happen again. More transparency, not less, is vital when billions of pounds are being spent, in haste in a pandemic.”
“I will touch on that point first. Paragraph 18 of the summary says exactly what the Minister said, but it then goes on to say, however, that frontline workers reported shortages of PPE. It ill behoves him to come to this House clearly having had Back Benchers briefed about a partial element of the National Audit Office’s report that is inaccurate when taken in the round. He needs to deal with that point. My bigger point is on the transparency of the contracts. The Minister has talked breathlessly about the urgency at the early stage of the pandemic. Let us be clear: by the end of the summer and the autumn, many of the contracts had still not been published. The civil service is usually good at record-keeping and transparency, but on this occasion there was a failure.”
“Will you help the House and Ministers, Madam Deputy Speaker, by telling me and others how Mr Speaker can enforce the understanding that the National Audit Office is an independent body, headed by the Comptroller and Auditor General, who is an officer of this House, and whose integrity should never be questioned, and that reference to the NAO should never be used in an improper way in this House or in the media to back up arguments that it does not back up? I have the privilege of reading all the National Audit Office reports, and I see them in the round. We are all careful with this, but it would be very helpful if you could rule as Chair on what you think could be done to improve how these reports are used by Ministers in particular.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. In a previous urgent question, a Minister came to the House and cited the National Audit Office in support of arguments that he was making about the procurement of personal protective equipment in the middle of the pandemic. This is a growing trend. Ministers come to the House, or appear in the media, and cite the National Audit Office, as though comments in those report are a conclusion and a determination by the National Audit Office.”
“It is the right thing to do, but it contains an inherent contradiction: to implement it, work needs to be funded, because without that funding the Bill cannot be implemented. That is the problem, and that is why I support the amendments. I hope the Minister will come back, in his closing remarks, to explain what evaluation will be made about the £50 a month loan scheme. I refer him to the not great success of the green deal, which also put a charge on homes and failed badly. I would also like more detail and clarity on the timing of the Building Safety Bill, because all our constituents need that clarity.”
“Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup recognised that that direction had to be made and that the Government needed to step in with taxpayers’ money sends, to me, a very clear signal that that is the very best way of approaching this. Yes, we should be recovering money from the developers, ultimately, but we need to get the Government to do that. The Government are not always very good at getting money back from the private sector, but I am sure we can work together, across parties, to support the Government in that endeavour. I do welcome the Bill. It is right that it should be introduced, and I hear the heartfelt plea from the hon. Member for Kensington (Felicity Buchan).”
“Both the Public Accounts Committee, which I chair, and the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee have said that we need to make sure this is dealt with, and that we need to deal with the many challenges. I refer hon. Members to those reports. The housing association sector alone estimates £10 billion costs, so although I welcome the Government’s recent £3.6 billion injection, we know it is not going to be enough, and we are concerned about the £50 a month loan fee, on which I hope the Minister will come back to us at the end with a bit more information. While ideally the taxpayer should not pay, the fact that the right hon.”
“I feel that sets the tone for what the Government should be doing. I commend the hon. Members for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) and for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) for their work to try to maintain the profile of this issue, which is particularly difficult to do as a Back Bencher. I also align myself completely with my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) on the impact on residents. I am are not going to go into that, because I have repeated that many times and my constituents know that I understand their challenges. This is the biggest consumer and fire safety failure in a generation.”
“Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I was tempted for a moment to think that you were saying that I am just perfect. I must first declare an interest, as I am a leaseholder in a building with dangerous cladding, but happily for me and my neighbours, our developer stood up and is paying for every aspect of the costs, which is what every developer should do, although clearly that is not the case. I, too, pay tribute to the Minister for Security, the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), and commend him for his decisive action at the early stages of this challenge, when he issued a ministerial direction to ensure that ACM cladding was removed from blocks. He recognised that it would take too long legally to chase down who should pay, and in the meantime the urgency of the issue was so great that it needed to be done.”
“I have been following this debate with interest. Unfortunately, I was unable to speak in it, because I was in Committee. In a couple of months, it will be 12 years since I was the first Minister to have maternity cover; I took six months of maternity leave and I had a named cover. It is great news that we are finally getting something sorted now, so that maternity is much better organised, particularly for Cabinet Ministers.”
“I have listened to as much of the debate as I could this afternoon. Ministers have had maternity leave. We took it and said that it was something that women should have. We led on that. I was lucky enough to have as Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who championed proper maternity cover. It is absolutely right that we pass this Bill and put the provision on a proper footing, especially for people such as the Attorney General, but I think it is worth putting it on the record that it is not completely unprecedented.”
“We need to be careful to reflect and recognise in this debate that, while, of course, this Bill is a good move and while there are still many other measures that need to be put in place, maternity leave is there for a reason. It is there so that we can bond with and nurture our child and come back to work at the point that we are ready to do so, with our child and our situation in a good place. It is important to make sure that, with some of the mechanisms that could be proposed, we are not unnecessarily tethering a woman to her job.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and congratulate her on her happy news. I have had the interesting experience of having three children: as a councillor, where I took six months’ leave; as a member of the London Assembly, where I was the first then to take six months’ leave; and as a Minister and a Member of this House, where I took six months’ leave. It can be done, but there is an important element to consider. Proxy voting, for example, which has an important role to play, can be seen to tether a woman to her job during her six months’ maternity leave and make sure that she has to follow every twist and turn of her job.”
“My hon. Friend will know that a Minister is on the payroll of their Department, so in that sense they are more of an employee. There is a really interesting issue here that we will need to consider carefully, and it is that MPs are not employees. We have a payroll, but we are not employees; we are obviously answerable to our constituents. That is one of the fundamental differences. For my part, when I was on maternity leave, I had a clear plan and support. Like my hon. Friend, I asked for some cover—some extra money for my staff—but it was not possible. There are certain things that an MP does that cannot be replicated by anybody else, as we know. This has obviously been well rehearsed. This is a complex area, and she is making some interesting points.”
“I just want to make it clear that I was not unhappy about the system that I put in place for myself. It was very clearly worked out: I had colleagues who were able to step up if my staff needed any extra support, and they had the right to be signatories. However, this was during the expenses scandal, and because my name was above the door, there were some things that it would have been very difficult to pass on to somebody else. So despite the great support I had, it was difficult, and I would have liked to be able to pay some of those staff a little bit more for the extra responsibility they were taking. That was the bit that I had the most issue with at the time.”
“I wonder if my hon. Friend could clarify that last point, because I think we all approach our jobs slightly differently. Certainly, it was not at all an issue for me when I was laying out everything I did that would need cover. The description was really what I did already, so it was not a very difficult challenge. I would be very reluctant to have IPSA or somebody else write the job description for somebody who was providing support, whether it was my existing staff or anyone else. I would be interested if she could clarify that point.”
“So many others have spoken about the real difficulty for so many women out there who do not get a good package of maternity cover. Does the hon. Member acknowledge that as MPs we get a good financial package and that we are paid all the way through? As the hon. Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) highlighted, we get a good deal in that respect and we must ensure that we recognise that.”
“I agree with the right hon. Lady that the clause uses a dry way of saying something that I think is actually really important, which is that in all of this discussion we need to remember that prime ministerial patronage is limited by that Act for good reason. While that should not be the enemy of improvements for women who are going on maternity leave, I do think that it needs to be considered. If we think of recent Parliaments, in which majorities have been very small, it is quite an increase, percentage-wise, to the payroll if more people are added to it. I am grateful to the drafters of the Bill for having thought this through, and I hope that in any future work she does, that is seriously considered as part of the mix, so that the House at least debates any decision to change that.”
“The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that HMRC will forgo around £800 million in customs income and VAT over the next year. Some is deferred, but much is forgone. Will the Chancellor tell us what he is doing to make sure that that number shrinks and that revenue comes in at a time when the Exchequer needs it really very badly?”
“I was one of those advocating for schools to stay open as long as possible, but I agree with the Minister that, given the height of the pandemic we are in now, this was the right thing to do—I say that very reluctantly. However, the longer it goes on, the worse it is for pupils, as we all know. There is a lot of fanfare about the national tutoring programme, but what serious consideration are he and the Department giving to providing proper catch-up summer lessons and so on, particularly for young people going into exam years, because they will not get that time back, no matter how good the online learning is?”
“I will not be voting against it, because I recognise that the votes in 2016 and 2019 give this Government licence to take us out of Europe, but I cannot be complicit in what is a wrecking ball in the name of sovereignty. We now need to drop the “remainer” and “leaver” labels. We need to unite to fill the gaps in the creative and performing arts, in the financial sector, in the recognition of professional qualifications and, above all, in security. It is because of those security measures, in particular, that I cannot be complicit with the Government and will abstain today.”
“As a constituency Member for the City fringe, I am very concerned we still have not bedded in arrangements for financial services. It is security arrangements that concern me most. They have been massively weakened by this agreement. I spent three years in government negotiating over access to SIS II, Prüm, the European arrest warrant, Europol, Eurojust and mutual legal aid. Those were all things that I dealt with day in, day out with our European neighbours, and we have thrown that away. We have thrown away so much of what we have been fighting, even in the last decade, to get much more closely involved with. We are now attempting to patch together, with more bureaucracy, the same things that we are giving up with this Bill. The lack of scrutiny and the impossibility of reading the Bill properly make me unable to support it today.”
“This place does not always make good legislation, and this is clearly rushed legislation. I have many concerns about this Bill. I have big concerns about Northern Ireland. As someone married to a dual Irish-British citizen, I spend a lot of time on the island of Ireland, and I see the real challenges of what is being put in place, and I saw the lack of thought about that land border right from the get-go in the run-up to the 2016 vote. The security matters concern me, including SIS II, the European arrest warrant, and Europol. Services are not included in this agreement, despite, as others have said repeatedly, their accounting for a trade surplus with the EU. Professional qualifications and issues affecting musicians and others in the creative industries affect my constituency particularly.”
“Four and a half years after the referendum, here we are. I accept we have left the European Union, we are in the transition period and at 11 o’clock tomorrow the shutters will finally come down on that chapter of European-British relations, but we have more than a thousand pages in an agreement and a hastily drafted Bill that runs to 80 pages, but that has to be read alongside many other pieces of legislation to be fully understood. We have five hours of debate today and I have three minutes, of which I have already used up half a minute, to talk about how poorly the Government are using this place. This is not parliamentary scrutiny; in keeping with the festive season, it is much more of a charade. It does not give us the chance to do properly the job that we should be doing.”
“I pay tribute to Homerton University Hospital in the heart of my constituency, where the staff are working flat out now with the rising number of cases, and to the Royal London Hospital in a neighbouring constituency, which of course had a queue of ambulances with covid patients waiting to be treated. Given the pressure on the NHS, which I know the Secretary of State also feels very strongly about, what is he doing to ensure that the nurses and other staff we need are available? Recent press reports suggest that of the 71,000 available nurses, only just over 1,000 had been deployed. Is he working with the Nursing and Midwifery Council to track down those with the right registration and skills and to get them into the right places?”
“We all know that children benefit from being in school, and we have seen the gap between those from the richest and the poorest households widen during covid. The Secretary of State’s permanent secretary set great store by the tutoring programme when she appeared before the Public Accounts Committee nearly two weeks ago. Could the right hon. Gentleman give us an update on that, as well as on the steering group in his Department that is looking seriously at this issue and at the impact on more vulnerable pupils? Can he be precise about what he is doing to ensure that that gap, which had been narrowing massively in some of the excellent schools in my constituency, will not stay wide and get wider still as we come out on the other side of the pandemic?”
“People in government always think they need to have a definite decision or a definite point of view to put out there, but actually, in this situation, people can sense what is coming and the Government need to be much more honest about that. I hope the Minister will respond when she winds up the debate.”
“Frontline nurses from various parts of the country, not just Hackney, have told me that they are struggling to get to the right place to contribute. In short, we need proper economic support for the businesses that are closed. We need proper testing in place, and that must be worked on with the organisations that will have to deliver testing. We need clarity on testing and in the messaging. Above all, we need honesty—honesty about the route out. We need to treat the British public with the respect they deserve by providing information and explanation when it is not clear. That is enough. People understand that difficult decisions have to be made, sometimes at the last minute, but they need to know if something is coming down the line.”
“When I talk to permanent secretaries, as I often do on the Public Accounts Committee, and ask them who they are engaging with, I get vague answers, but sometimes they do not have the right people in the room. However brilliant and clever our civil servants are, they need to be talking to people on the frontline, because in the end who is delivering the tests in schools? It is the headteachers and staff. Who is on the frontline in hospitals? It is not civil servants; it is our health workers, and we need to listen to them. I am concerned about the frontline impact in the NHS. Earlier, I raised with the Secretary of State the number of nurses who are potentially able to work and want to—about 71,000 of them, yet only 1,000 got through the system.”
“They need clarity and certainty. They are vital frontline key workers, doing their best to educate our children in difficult circumstances. I completely agree with the hon. Member for East Devon (Simon Jupp) about the business issues. My local hospitality industry has been decimated. The 10 pm curfew seems to have been plucked from the air, because it became 11 pm only about six weeks later. Again, we need clarity. If it is not clear, or the decision is a subjective one, fine, but level with the British public and the industries affected—the events industry, the creative industries. Tell them, engage them, get them into contact with Government earlier.”
“As MPs in our area, we need information to be able to answer the questions that are already flying in from headteachers not knowing what is going on with schools next week, with our rates so high but our schools still open. Of course I and local headteachers want our schools open, but why are they open when schools in neighbouring boroughs with similar rates are closed? It is very confusing. We also need clarity about where the transmission is coming from. What I understand from public health briefings—I am sure the Minister will elaborate—is that it is largely community-driven. The community driver goes into schools, from where it then spreads. We need to be really clear about that, because, judging by a number of emails I have had in the past couple of days, teachers and headteachers are frightened about what next week will bring.”
“We all pray that no strain becomes apparent that will affect our children more badly than they are already affected. I do have concerns—very big concerns—about how the Government have handled this. We have had mixed messages. The schools announcements today and just before the recess were all over the place. Half-announcements are made, but no detailed information is available. If we press a question, we get nothing back. It is great when the House is sitting, as theoretically we can hold Ministers to account, but too often we get no answers. At times we have online briefings, but—I say this with respect for the Minister, who is a good Minister and tries hard—they are short; they are not enough. We cannot get hundreds of colleagues on and get their questions answered.”
“Hackney and the City—we were linked with the City for health purposes—were already in tier 4 and have been since before Christmas. Our cases are now more than 850 per 100,000, which is an exponential increase when we look back to 25 November when we were at 124 per 100,000. Just before we went into tier 4 we were at just over 500 cases per 100,000. It is a very serious matter and had this been a month ago, when we were at 124, I would perhaps have been arguing a slightly different case. So on public health grounds I back tier 4 and I suspect—I hope that the Minister will be honest—that there will be a tier 5 or some further lockdown if this new strain keeps replicating at the rate it is doing, and of course if any other new strains arrive.”
“I also pay tribute to those working on the frontline, particularly at the moment at the Homerton hospital in the heart of my constituency, which is experiencing a very high pressure of new covid cases coming in, and the Royal London, where I lived for nine weeks with one of my children when they were very sick, which is also experiencing huge pressure and which also serves my constituency well. I also pay tribute to Hackney council staff, in particular those who empty our bins and keep our streets clean and our parks nice. Our public realm has risen to the occasion, which is an odd thing to say in covid, but we always had clean streets and good parks. They have done a sterling job and kept us going through the dark days of lockdown.”
“I have hundreds of constituents—there are thousands up and down the country—who are trapped in homes that are technically valueless and that they cannot sell or get permission to do anything on, even if they are less risky, because they need certain bits of paperwork, such as the infamous EWS1 form. It is clearly a bigger issue than the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government can solve on its own. Its budget alone will not resolve this. We need a proper cross-Government review of how these people are going to be supported.”
“There was, however, no new money in the spending review this year, which alarms me, because that £1.6 billion was effectively reannounced. That is a little trick I am aware of as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. I say this to be helpful to Members on the Government Benches: beware a figure brandished by a Minister in this House, because usually it is not as simple as they suggest. The £1.6 billion available to remove cladding is exactly that; it has already been announced. We had the cladding fund announced in March just before the pandemic really kicked off, which was £1 billion on top of the £0.6 billion that was previously put forward and had mostly been spent. There have been bids for the £1 billion, but it is about a 10th of what is needed to replace the cladding.”
“We demolished those, but they have been replaced with private sector leasehold properties. I must declare an interest in that I live in one of those properties. I am affected by the issue of fire-safe cladding, but the developer that built my block is funding its entire removal, so I am not financially affected. That is a blessing for me, but most of my constituents affected by this issue are not in that happy situation. The Government have announced a total over the past few years of £1.6 billion to remove cladding in the light of the Grenfell tragedy. The first tranche was to remove the same type of cladding as was on Grenfell, and the next tranche was to recognise that other cladding is also unsafe and needs removing.”
“I smile wryly to myself as the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes) talks about being on a diet. He can look at me and see how it fails after 15 years. Clearly I need to take a leaf out of his book. The cycling in is clearly not working yet, but I live in hope. There are some very important issues to raise, and I am glad to have the chance in this debate to raise issues affecting my constituency and the country as a whole. One of the key issues affecting many householders in my constituency is unsafe cladding on tower blocks and leasehold properties. In the early ’90s, Hackney demolished a lot of council housing stock in high-rise flats that had not lasted well. Between Birmingham, Glasgow and Hackney, we had more high rises than any other part of the country.”
“Many constituents of mine—around a third of them overall, although the number fluctuates, particularly with more people going on to benefits at the moment—are on free school meals. They do not all have access to wi-fi or equipment at home to work on, so pupils have been working on their parents’ mobile phones that are on contract, not on data-rich wi-fi. This has had a real impact: the gap between the richest and poorest students is getting wider in a constituency where for 20 years we have been shrinking that gap. A number of my local schools are in the top 1% in the country.”
“He recognised that, so I urge the Government to recognise it too, and to come to the rescue of my constituents who are waiting. It is an uncertain year and an uncertain Christmas and, as it stands, there is no further money for the 12 months after March next year. Let me touch on the issue of schooling, and particularly the issues relating to covid. It has been a really challenging year for our schools and all the staff working in them, and of course the parents and pupils are affected too. When schools had to stop teaching physically, for the most part, there were not enough laptops. No one could have predicted that we would need quite so many so fast, but the Government continually overpromised and underdelivered on the laptops and other necessary equipment.”
“There are really only three ways to do it: through finance vehicles, although they can affect mortgages, as we can imagine people having to take out a loan or a charge on their property; as a direct grant, which would cost the taxpayer, but I cannot see much alternative given the fact that this consumer and fire-safety failure is the biggest in a generation; or the sector pays, which I would love to see, but we would have to wait. I applaud the former Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), for getting a ministerial direction for the first tranche of fire-safety money because he knew that it would take so long to track down the owners of properties and so much legal cost would be involved that it would not be feasible.”
“The right hon. Gentleman raises an important point that underlines the longer-term need for leasehold reform. I welcome the fact that the Government are committed to doing that. We have obviously had a lot of upheaval this year, but it is something that we all need to work on. Many people now live in leasehold properties and need protection. We all need to join forces, and I will join forces with anyone, in this House and beyond, to try to persuade the Treasury, and perhaps the Prime Minister too—that is the level of the decision that will have to be made—to provide the funding.”
“I gasp, because most of my constituents do not have £37 left at the end of the month, let alone to spend every day on wi-fi. It is a real problem. I have poverty in my constituency—people see the trendy side of Shoreditch and Hackney, and there is wealth, but there is also immense poverty—but there is no poverty of ambition, and children have been doing very well at school. We need to make sure that the catch-up money is available. The permanent secretary at the Department for Education gave a commitment today that she would do everything in her power, but we know that her power is limited unless funding is available to make sure that the tutoring and catch-up is in place.”
“They are living on fresh air, and it is unacceptable. We need a clear route map out of tier 3, and I look forward to that. My final point is about Brexit. What a shambles. We are here today on 17 December. The Government—the Prime Minister, indeed—offered and promised an oven-ready deal. As I stand here today, we do not even have a cold turkey coming out of the negotiations. The Public Accounts Committee has 13 times now, in different reports, raised concerns about preparedness. With 14 days to go, it will be a miracle if anyone is prepared for the chaos that could ensue.”
“My constituency, in London, went into tier 3 at a fast pace on Tuesday night, and that followed a 10 o’clock curfew for hospitality, which hit my constituency very badly. When I challenged Ministers and the Prime Minister on the rationale behind the 10 o’clock curfew, I got the impression that it was rather subjective, which was very much proved by the introduction of an 11 o’clock curfew later. The Government should give some trust to the businesses in my patch; they are well run, well organised and can manage to run a very controlled environment inside if they are given the opportunity. We have also seen a huge impact on the creative industries, particularly the forgotten freelancers. I have a large number of them in my constituency, many of whom have not received a penny since March.”
“While we were in the Committee, it was being laid out by various journalists who had clearly been briefed, but we were not able to get answers from the very top civil servant. That is ludicrous. This was a chance for parliamentarians of all parties—admittedly, a small group of us on the Public Accounts Committee—to ask direct questions. It seems that, as it stands, we will not have that opportunity today, on the last day that Parliament sits. We need earlier decisions and clarity on decisions, and, crucially, school leaders need to be involved, because the logistics are vital. I want to touch on some of the issues with tier 3 and covid. What concerns me, as I see Manchester and Leicester still in tier 3, is whether there is any understanding of the route out.”
“That does not leave enough time for headteachers and school leaders to plan and makes it impossible for parents, especially if they are working. We should remember that many parents will not earn money if they do not go to work: they do not get the luxury of paid leave, parental leave or work that they can do from home, although that is hard enough for people with children at home. There seems to be a real gap between Whitehall and the centre of Government and the reality on the ground for parents, pupils and teachers. The Government really have to get a grip on this issue. Only this morning, the permanent secretary was unable to tell the Public Accounts Committee what would happen in schools on 4 or 5 January.”
“The hon. Gentleman and I sing from the same hymn sheet: broadband needs to be seen as an essential service. The Public Accounts Committee has looked at the idea. Government after Government have not quite got there with getting broadband fully rolled out, but it is vital. It is heartening that during the height of the pandemic, broadband did hold up for those who had it; my particular concern is for the people who do not have it. The exams fiasco this year has really hit young people hard. The Government need to be really clear about their plans for next year. My key ask of the Government is that information is clear and timely. We have seen too many Saturday-night or Friday-night announcements from No. 10 Downing Street about what will happen in schools on the next school day.”