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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“His mother went on to say: “I have serious concerns and really don’t know where to turn for support and advice.” I address the Minister when I say that this woman speaks for so many, whether it is youth workers, teachers, families or friends of those young people. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) said, where do they turn to tell someone about what is going on? After we had the riots in Hackney—a slightly separate issue from what we are discussing today—there were a good number of community events, where people talked about what had happened. I do not want to go down that route too far, but what was apparent was that people in communities know who the vulnerable children in their midst are. They know that, but they are not sure where to take that information or who can help.”
“I told him I was feeling sick and he said it’s okay, I’ve been sick so many times since arriving here, just sit down…He told me he was ambushed and knives were coming at him from all angles. I thought that was it, he said. I didn’t even know these guys. They just ambushed me and started stabbing me.” Her son underwent surgery to his legs, chest and arms, and both his hands will need plastic surgery, but she said: “I’m blessed that I am a mother who can say thank God my son is alive.” Despite that horror, that young man is alive today, but with life-changing injuries after such an horrific event.”
“We can quote the statistics as much as we want, but this is all about real human lives. Too many of us have had to visit families whose lives have been devastated and who will never live the same life again because of the loss of a child—their child, an actual child in their household. I have chosen not to name my constituents today; they have to live through enough pain as it is, and I am aware that there may be media scrutiny of what we say today. I will quote from one constituent, who I spoke to recently, whose son was stabbed eight times in an ambush in Hackney on 7 November last year. After she visited him in hospital, she said: “When he started to speak to me I felt physically sick and wanted to vomit.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Graham. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (John Cryer) on securing the debate, which highlights the tragedy that is affecting so many of our communities, as reflected by the speeches today. I will talk about the impact on Hackney and what the Government need to do. I warn the Minister that I have some very direct requests for her to answer, hopefully today. From November 2017 to today, there have been seven gang-related murders and three other murders in Hackney. I choose those dates because, prior to that, there was a two-year period when there had not been a gang-related death. Since October last year, there have been eight stabbings, including, most recently, that a 50-year-old man on the streets of Hackney last night.”
“My hon. Friend highlights a really important issue. One of the other challenges, of course, is that if a child is outside their own local area, they fall between different social services authorities. They are picked up as an emergency case, if they are young enough, by the receiving area, but ultimately they are not that area’s responsibility. I am sure she will agree that that issue also needs to be looked at.”
“It is not clear to me what the unforeseeable emergency was that allowed the Secretary of State to award the contract to Seaborne Freight outside the rules. Did he receive explicit legal advice about that, and if so, will he consider publishing it?”
“Earlier, the Secretary of State said that the deal laid out by the Prime Minister was a good deal for everybody in the UK. Can he seriously stand at that Dispatch Box and say that our friends in Northern Ireland are getting a good deal out of this deal?”
“We have to have an opportunity to discuss alternatives. If we fail, we need to consider going back to the people, even with all the problems I have highlighted that doing so would raise.”
“The Prime Minister has reached out far too late to Members in her own party, let alone trying to have any cross-party discussions. I was dismayed to hear from the hon. Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) that there has not even been proper dialogue with the Opposition Front Bench. There is no authority, and that is of real concern to me. How can we have faith that the sketchy political agreement will be fleshed out and delivered by this Prime Minister in her current weakness? I think we need to look—I say this rather reluctantly—at revoking or at least extending article 50 unless Parliament can deliver. Even with the three-day deadline, it is difficult to know how we can begin to coalesce around alternatives. I throw that at the Government; as the Executive, they still have power to determine the business in this place.”
“I have had the privilege of speaking to the Comptroller and Auditor General for the Northern Ireland Audit Office and hearing him describe the travel of goods back and forth across the border, which I know well. UK citizens in Northern Ireland and Irish citizens in Ireland have a lot of business—processing of milk and pork, a lot of other agricultural business—that relies on movement across the border. It is vital that that is maintained, and there is really no answer to that. One of the reasons why I cannot support the deal is that it does not resolve that problem. There is, as other speakers have highlighted, no simple answer, but we have had weakness upon weakness from this Government. There has been reckless rush and unnecessary delay.”
“There are options, but none of them is good. Customs checks could be imposed at the border because Ireland becomes a third country under EU law. How does that chime with our commitment to the common travel area? We could do nothing and temporarily have no border while we work out the political agreement, but if we do so, we could be the subject of a complaint to the World Trade Organisation. We could move checks further away from the border in the so-called max fac—maximum facilitation—option, which the UK proposed and the EU rejected. Even when the UK proposed it, it was still not clear what it was. It involves a bit of number plate recognition, and perhaps taking some goods and checking them.”
“It is good that article 5 of the withdrawal agreement confirms that the common travel area and free movement must remain for our Irish cousins, but it is of real concern to me that we have not debated how we will deal with the Irish border. The Prime Minister said in a statement in October 2018, and she has repeated this sort of phrase many a time: “We are obviously committed to no hard border, and we have made it clear that in any circumstances, including in a no-deal situation, we would be doing all that we could to ensure that there was no hard border. We would look to work with Ireland and the European Union to ensure that there was no hard border, but there has been no commitment in relation to that.” —[ Official Report , 22 October 2018; Vol. 648, c.61.] That last half sentence is the real issue.”
“We have been in the common travel area with Northern Ireland since the Irish Free State was declared in 1922, except for a brief period after the second world war. Ireland has aligned itself with us to maintain that position, in 1952 signing up to our immigration rules on the Commonwealth and in the ’70s joining the EU. The Republic of Ireland is not considered a foreign country under UK law. Irish citizens have a special status that confers on them the right to vote here. Under British law they have more rights than EU citizens, including the right to be Members of this House with Irish citizenship alone; they are not required to become British citizens.”
“Only 108 MPs in the House today were in Parliament when the Good Friday agreement was signed in 1998, and only 144 of us were here when we had the last republican terrorist attack on the mainland. There is a diminishing number of Members who were here and closely involved in that debate, when our leaders, Tony Blair among them, took us to the signing of the Good Friday agreement. In December 2017, the Irish Mirror reported that MI5 had disrupted more than 250 separate attacks in Northern Ireland alone, with seizures of explosives, weapons and ammunition, and that there had been 16 attacks in 2015-16 in Northern Ireland. There remain serious issues for peace in Northern Ireland and the security of Northern Irish citizens, as well as of Irish citizens across the border.”
“My constituency was very pro-remain, and many of my constituents viscerally want to remain, but the distress and delay is a problem. He talked about a three to four-month plan for a second referendum, which I would reluctantly support if Parliament cannot make a decision, but according to others it would be six months. We need to think carefully about where that would lead us and what uncertainties we would have to live through along the way. As I said in my last speech, the Government have proceeded recklessly, but today I want to talk about an issue that was never really discussed in the campaign on the mainland of the UK. I should declare that my husband is a dual citizen of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The Northern Ireland border is too often dismissed as a confected issue that does not matter greatly. I did some research.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon). Is it not depressing that we are here again having moved on no further in the past five weeks? The Public Accounts Committee has produced nine reports on Government preparedness. Every day we go on indecisively, the Government are spending money preparing for no deal and other options, and that is not to mention the money that will need to be invested, if we leave, in order that we can do all the things currently done through European institutions. I will not repeat what I said in my speech on 6 December, but I feel I need to mention the 41,500 EU residents in my borough, who are very concerned. The uncertainty that the right hon. Gentleman talked about is doing them and business no favours. I have sympathy with what he said about compromise. I am a remainer.”
“Q14. The Prime Minister has had 20 dancing rebels, has promised five golden trade agreements and has had one big defeat, and yet she still cannot find her withdrawal agreement. Has she checked her pear tree?”
“Further to the question asked by the hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith), will the Minister not acknowledge that there is a big challenge for many of my constituents who work in more than one job on low wages, who do not have the time or the money to progress to further training, and whose employers are not willing to invest? How will he help those people to move to better, long-term, secure jobs?”
“The Secretary of State has repeatedly told us that the Government have been preparing for no deal, yet it was under legislation that allows for the awarding of contracts outside the normal rules that the Department for Transport spent nearly £14 million on a ferry company with no ferries. We have also seen the issues around Operation Brock in Kent. Given that his Department’s job is to assure itself and Parliament that the Government are prepared for Brexit, what does he say about the Department for Transport? Is it really up to the job?”
“I am heartened that Baroness Harding is looking at the staffing side of things, but she does have a mountain to climb. Let me remind the Secretary of State that the last time the NHS went out to recruit GPs, it ended up with fewer GPs at the end of the year than it had had before. That is not to mention the pension cap put in place by his former mentor—or maybe his current mentor—the former Chancellor, which now means that there is a problem with the retention of senior clinical staff. We can add to that list the immigration rules and pay ceiling. Is the Secretary of State lobbying the Home Office and the Treasury, particularly to deal with the £30,000 cap and the pension cap?”
“In the Government’s pursuit of paying down the debt, they are at risk of selling off assets that could be of benefit to the public in the long term. Although the Economic Secretary talks about the modelling, we know from our work on the Public Accounts Committee that the model is very debatable in exactly what the benefit and disbenefit will be to the public in the long term. Will he commit to assessing every upcoming sale rigorously and making sure that the Treasury is learning, so that it is not selling off the family silver and taking things away from the British public that belong to them?”
“T9. At our border, we need to ensure that we have security while securing freedom of movement of goods and people as well as gaining revenue. The head of HMRC has said that it will be almost impossible to do all those things if we crash out without a deal. The Chancellor keeps talking about a deal, but we are just over 100 days away from potentially crashing out, so what conversations is he having to ensure that we are not hit in the pocket as a result of a lack of revenue?”
“The Public Accounts Committee has produced eight reports in the past year raising serious concerns about the Government’s preparedness for Brexit, whether there is a deal or not. I did not vote to trigger article 50, partly for that practical reason, but also because of my love of the EU. The Secretary of State is a thoughtful man and a former member of the PAC, so does he really believe it is possible to deliver Brexit by 29 March? Surely this ruling— even if I were to agree with the Government’s policy—gives them a way of negotiating and taking us forward in a much more measured way.”
“The deal on the table is bad for Britain, and I cannot in all honesty support it. I do not believe that the Government will get it through next week, so Parliament will need to step up. If we cannot agree at that stage, there will be no alternative but to return to the people, with all the damaging consequences that that could lead to.”
“We need the understanding of what immigration will be like, and we need to reach consensus. If we cannot do that, we will have failed the British public. Many of my constituents have asked me to support a people’s vote. I certainly did not rush into supporting this. I think that the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex and I share some of the concerns about what it could do to our country and to the trust placed in referendums. The proposal is riddled with challenges, not least that it would take a great deal of time. We would also have to have a majority for it in this House, and the Government would have to heed that. They would have to bring forward a Bill, and that Bill would have to have a majority. This is before we have even decided what the question would be. The Government have so far failed this country at every step of the way.”
“Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn) because I believe that the House must not sanction no deal; it cannot be an option. I do not believe there is a majority in the House for no deal, but I fear that it could happen by default, and that would be a real betrayal of our role and responsibilities to the British public. So I urge all colleagues to rule out no deal emphatically. It is not a good solution by anyone’s count. We also need seriously to consider extending article 50 or, if not, at least having a much clearer purpose about extending the transition period to combat the uncertainty that my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) has already highlighted. I shall not repeat what he said. We need to get to a better solution. We need preparation and certainty for business.”
“HMRC estimates that in terms of customs declarations alone small and medium-sized enterprises will have additional costs of between £17 billion and £20 billion a year just to comply with new customs if we crash out with no deal. There will be huge supply chain disruption even if we have a deal, let alone if we crash out with no deal. There is also the huge issue of access to skills. As came out earlier in the House today, there is not even an understanding yet of what the Government’s new proposals for immigration will be. Many in the tech sector rely on immigration from around the world, including Europe, and that free movement has been crucial in filling some very particular skills gaps, but the Government have been silent on that as we approach this huge vote. So I back my right hon.”
“In short, the Government have been reckless: they were reckless to call the referendum so quickly in the first place, with an ill-defined question that resolved nothing; in having no plan for what to do after that—not a single civil servant planning for an exit outcome; in triggering article 50 so quickly, again with no planning; and they have been reckless in leaving preparations so late in the day. We are not even going to get the legislation through Parliament. We possibly will if we sit 24/7 between now and the March, but there is a real risk we will not get that done. The cost of uncertainty is also high in pounds and pence. I am proud to represent the tech sector in Shoreditch and the City fringe, but the cost of the deal is particularly harsh for small businesses.”
“In my view we should have thought much more carefully about that. There are huge practicalities in leaving which the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden did not seem to cover at all. My Committee—which I am honoured to chair, and of which the right hon. Gentleman is a former Chair—has produced eight unanimous reports highlighting the challenges to the Government of preparing to leave the EU, and the civil service has been hampered by the need to develop plans for three different scenarios—whether we have a deal, no deal, or a transition—and all the various complications within them. This approach has been costly and confusing and means we lack real certainty, and businesses in particular—businesses in my constituency and up and down the country—are worried about the future.”
“He spent 20 minutes not telling us a great deal, but he was at the heart—on the frontline—of negotiations with the EU and he left: he walked away from the challenge and now comes to decry the Government option and nearly every other option on the table, rather than, when he had the chance, coming up with a solution. And I see the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson) in his place, too. These are people who wanted to leave and have walked away, and they are now not even content when we are leaving. Back in 2017, I voted against triggering article 50. Some might conclude that that is simply because I represent a borough that voted so heavily to remain, but, more than that, it was always practically impossible to disentangle from our long relationship with the EU in just two years.”
“I stand proud to represent the borough of Hackney—proud that my borough voted 78.5% in favour of remaining in the EU, and proud that my borough is home to 41,500 European citizens, representing 15% of our population. And I am delighted to follow the right hon. Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames), with whom I find myself in great accord in my distress that we are leaving the EU and making a long-term big mistake for this country. I celebrate the fact that the EU has brought peace and security to Europe for so many years. But I am dismayed to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis).”
“In 13 days, we in this House will vote on the future of our country, and yet the Government rushed into triggering article 50 and went recklessly into a general election without any timetabled plan for getting to 29 March, which is now the date. Will any information be made properly available to the House in the next 13 days to enable us to make a decision without being blindsided?”
“The demise of Moorside and NuGen underlines how the Government’s nuclear policy hinges on overseas investment, particularly from energy companies that are owned wholly by other states. Is the Secretary of State having a really good look at the other planned nuclear power stations to make sure that there will be enough nuclear power to maintain energy integrity in the UK in future?”
“The CRC contract has been a dog’s breakfast, so what is the Minister going to do to make sure that CRCs work better to support people, particularly those on shorter sentences?”
“The problem with publishing this long-awaited information in the spring is that that is likely to be too late to properly influence the spending review. Given that 85% of schools have asbestos and the risks are getting greater as those buildings age, will the Minister make a serious commitment to providing the funding to schools to tackle that asbestos? Otherwise, there is no real incentive for them to come up with a plan, given the pinch on their budgets.”
“T10. Children in Hackney with special educational needs have had their support protected because Hackney Council found funding from other sources to backfill the cuts in Government funding, but after cuts of 40% to the borough’s budget, and with £30 million-worth of cuts still to come in the next four years, that is now being stretched. Will the Secretary of State commit to ensuring that children with special educational needs get the full support that they need for the rest of their lives?”
“14. Before we get too excited about this, we should bear it in mind that it is still a small amount of the profits of these large companies that will come into the Exchequer. Will the Chancellor explain the timetable for the consultation and when he expects to get any tax revenue into the Exchequer from this measure?”
“As well as fast broadband, small tech businesses in my constituency and across the country need the right people to make sure that they grow and continue contributing to the economy. What conversations is the Minister having with the Home Office about the negative impacts of the Government’s immigration policy on attracting and securing the right staff to grow these businesses?”
“One of the issues with capital budgets is that some services are selling their capital assets and then renting from another part of the service, which can lead to very imbalanced budgets locally. Does the Minister have a grip at the centre on the long-term impact this could have?”
“It was the Prime Minister— was it not?—who said that we are a country that pays what we owe, and we do owe money.”
“It is a shame that I have only eight minutes, because I could use all those eight minutes to rebut some of the views just espoused by the right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood). If this was an “austerity is over” Budget, I invite the Chancellor to come to my constituency and see the challenges there, particularly with housing and homelessness, which I want to address. However, I must pause for a moment to touch on the views of the right hon. Member for Wokingham. The idea that we do not have to pay the £39 billion if we crash out of the EU is not the case. We have certain contractual obligations; I could go through them all in detail. In particular, there is the pension liability that we have for many of our own people who worked in Europe and have those pensions, and there are many other commitments that we have entered into.”
“To finish on a positive point, I welcome the business rates relief, if the revaluation delivers what the Chancellor says it will. I have lobbied for that in the past. But on the rest, austerity is not over for my constituents—it is still biting hard—and the Government have got to get in tune with the lives of real people.”
“That means £10,000 for a primary school and £50,000 for a secondary school on average, which is not even enough to pay for the teachers they are having to shed, not enough to make up the short weeks they are having to introduce and not enough to reintroduce the full curriculum that they have had to cut. I have not even had a chance to get into the details of Brexit or the fact that policing is under such siege in our city and in my borough. Extraordinarily, for the first time in my 13 years as an MP and 25 years in elected office, I have had a stream of people coming to my surgeries saying that the police did not investigate something—not something they would normally come to an MP about. It is becoming a pattern, because we have lost a fifth of our officers in Hackney.”
“Hackney’s bill for temporary accommodation has gone up from £26 million in 2013-14 to £54.8 million—an increase of over 100%. That is money down the drain—money that is not helping people, but just keeping a vague, bare roof over their heads and nothing more. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West touched on education. It is important to highlight that we in Hackney have some of the best schools in the country. We heard that there will be a £400 million in-year bonus for some little extras—what a patronising way to provide money for our children’s education.”
“A 2017 report by Shelter ranked Hackney 10th in a list of the 50 areas in the country with the highest levels of homelessness—something the Chancellor did not mention. According to that survey, one in 44 Hackney residents were either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation. This is a real issue. My surgeries are full of people who are desperate: women sent home from hospital with a baby and toddler to a hostel where they have been living for 18 months or two years. Four or five years ago, they were waiting only six months. Six months in a hostel was bad, but 18 months has a destroying effect on family life, the ability to work and the ability of children to study. There has been a 300% rise in homelessness in Hackney since 2010, with 3,000 households now living in temporary accommodation.”
“Rising rents have meant that the average two-bedroom property now costs £1,820 a month in the private market, which is over £300 a month more than in 2011—and that is if people are lucky; many are more expensive than that. The brutal reality is that, given the cap, housing benefit does not pay the rent on any three or four-bedroom property in my borough or in many boroughs. In London and the south-east in general, people will find it hard to pay their rent if they are relying on housing benefit. Let us be clear: the majority of people claiming housing benefit are in work, which puts the lie to what the Chancellor said about employment solving everything. Of course employment is important, but the jobs have to be decent enough to pay the wages.”
“If we want universal credit to work, we need a Government who are listening and understanding people’s needs. My hon. Friends have outlined the problems. For my borough, housing and homelessness is the really big issue. In London as a whole, almost nine in 10 households believe that there is a housing crisis in the capital. In Hackney, a borough-wide survey in 2015 showed that housing affordability was the top concern for residents, and things have got worse since then. The average house price in Hackney South and Shoreditch is £530,000 as of March this year. Hackney now has 34,000 privately rented homes, which is around 30% of all homes in the borough—a proportion that has more than doubled in the past decade. Rents in the private sector are astronomically high and out of many people’s reach.”
“I will not repeat what my right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Frank Field) and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West said, but suffice it to say that the problems with universal credit were predicted, foreseeable and exacerbated by the £2 billion of cuts under the former Chancellor. The Public Accounts Committee has been looking at universal credit since 2012, and our voice was added to a chorus of concern. The Government just have to listen, but they are detached from the reality of people’s lives. In the past, there has been broad cross-party consensus on universal credit. It is still not Labour policy to completely get rid of it; there would be a pause, a review and an assessment of what could be done to make it work, because it would be very difficult to unpick it now.”
“Dividing the £650 million by the number of local authorities in the country, Hackney will get a tiny amount, possibly for only one year, I think the Chancellor said—obviously, I have not had time to go through the Red Book. The cuts to Hackney so far are the equivalent of £471 per head—one of the largest cuts in England. In terms of spending power, Hackney will lose £1,425 per household between 2010 and 2020—the highest amount in the country—and we have £30 million more of cuts to find. We are having big discussions about some budget cuts with Government, particularly for special educational needs, which Hackney Council has been cross-subsidising since 2011 from other parts of the budget. There is only so far that we can squeeze before the pips squeak, and the pips have been squeaking for some time now in Hackney.”
“We need an ecosystem of tech businesses. We need those start-ups to start and grow in Britain so that they become the big employers and the responsible taxpayers of the future. On local government funding, the £650 million in grant funding as a one-off is not good enough. We have had so much money taken out of local councils. Their real-terms spending on social care, for example, reduced by 5.3% between 2010 and 2017, while the number of over-85s rose by 28% between 2006 and 2016—a slightly longer period. The £20 billion for the NHS does not cover social care. It may make small contributions, but on its own it is not enough. Since 2010-11, in my own borough, Hackney Council has had £130 million cut from its core grant funding from the Government.”