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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“In my constituency, we also have huge issues with housing, on which, as I say, I will go into in more detail. The digital services tax is very interesting to me as the Member representing Shoreditch and all the tech businesses there, including some of the big players. This is only a consultation, of course. The big question, as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) highlighted, is whether it will deliver a result. If it only levies up to £400 million, as I think the Chancellor said, it will not recover the tax that some of the big tech giants have avoided through their complex multinational tax arrangements. I will be watching this closely, not least to see whether those big players will cough up, but also to make sure that the growing start-up businesses in my constituency will be protected as the Chancellor has said.”
“It is about commitments that have already been made, and we have to pay our share of that as we were members at the time. The Chancellor talked about this Budget being for strivers, grafters and carers, and he said that austerity was not driven by ideology. His own phrases demonstrate, as austerity has demonstrated every step of the way, a disconnect with the reality of people’s lives. He talked about 3.3 million more people being in jobs and the proportion of low-paid jobs being at its lowest. I wonder what measure that was based on, because very many of my constituents have low-paid and insecure jobs working on zero-hours contracts, which may have their place for certain people but not for those who are trying to pay the family bills and trying to pay the rent on time.”
“I cannot stay sat down when the right hon. Gentleman talks about wages rising, when rents are going up way higher than wage inflation, if it exists; it does not exist for many of my constituents.”
“Does the Minister seriously believe that the Home Office will be able to cope with the number of applications from EU citizens, when its existing immigration systems are in overload?”
“At the Public Accounts Committee on Monday, we heard from DEFRA officials about preparedness for Brexit, and we are very concerned. One of the biggest concerns is that many businesses do not know what they will have to do to comply with the rules around Brexit. What is the Minister doing to make sure that real effort is going into telling those companies and businesses how they should be preparing?”
“The measure to introduce emergency childcare fills me with some nervousness. If Officers of the House or, indeed, Members need emergency support, we should be inculcating a culture of providing those Officers of the House with time off to deal with their children, rather than encouraging them to buy in childcare when that may not be the right thing to do. In addition to the costs, how many Members or members of the House staff have availed themselves of and drawn down this emergency childcare provision?”
“We have seen Crossrail delayed at great cost, a failure in electrification and many question marks over HS2. When will the Minister’s Department get a real grip on the cost and delivery of decent rail infrastructure in this country?”
“The former permanent secretary at the Home Office has acknowledged that the funding formula for policing is ineffective. However, as there has been a delay, it now looks like we will be waiting until the spending review before the new formula is agreed and comes into force. On my calculation that means it will not come into force or make a difference until 2020-21. Can the Minister give us any comfort on that and explain when the funding formula will be properly revisited?”
“T5. I am proud to represent the beating heart of emerging tech and digital businesses in Hackney South and Shoreditch, but dismayed that still, according to the Centre for Towns and the House of Commons Library, my constituency is ranked 384th out 650 for broadband speed. I welcome the Secretary of State’s tone on broadband, but will he make sure that areas such as mine also get the benefit?”
“Q7. Because of funding pressures, many schools are cutting short the school week, so what is the Prime Minister’s message to parents whose children will be out of school for half a day a week?”
“I welcome the fact that the Minister took action to make sure that the wrong was righted for those people who would otherwise not have had this payment from 2011 to 2014. I congratulate her on that. However, the real concern is that there were warnings from 2013 onwards, both from her staff in the Department and from agencies dealing with these people. She says that the Department found this out, but it took a long time to act. Many people have still lost out on passported benefits, some easy to calculate, like free school meals. Will she, in the light of the recommendations in our report, look closely at the impact of the passported benefits that were lost and consider a compensation scheme?”
“I am staggered and disappointed that in answer to the urgent question we have a Secretary of State who is still arguing over the detail of a report. This is an important constitutional issue. The National Audit Office is the independent watchdog of Government spending. In this case, the Secretary of State has come to the House twice and there has been an unprecedented letter from the Comptroller and Auditor General. I have had two letters from the permanent secretary adding information on what was an agreed report on 8 June. Just for the record, will the Secretary of State declare clearly in the House today that she has full confidence in the National Audit Office and the Comptroller and Auditor General?”
“9. To ask the right hon. Member for Meriden, representing the Church Commissioners, what the Church of England’s policy is on the development of affordable housing on Church land.”
“That is a good news. I am sure the right hon. Lady will not be surprised that, in my constituency, which has such a severe housing problem, many of my churches are keen to deliver their Christian mission in part by providing long-term properly affordable homes. St John’s Hoxton has hit a real problem. Because it is in a heritage setting, it is grade 2 listed. Paragraphs 144 and 145 of the national planning policy framework, on planning and development, prohibit the church from building, and prohibit the council from giving it permission to build, affordable homes on the site. Is she or the Church having conversations with the planning authorities about how to change the law?”
“We can see those problems with other strategic suppliers in the papers we have received, and we will be calling them before the Committee, as well as those in government, to challenge them and to consider how this broken system can be fixed.”
“Carillion continued to believe, as it set out in evidence to us in a joint hearing with the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, that it would receive a Government loan to keep it going, right up to the moment of collapse in January. The Public Accounts Committee has long raised concerns about the lack of transparency in large contracts funded by taxpayers to deliver public services. Our concern, especially given what we have seen in the papers, is that secrecy can lead to a cosy relationship in which the Government are more focused on the interests of the supplier, because of the potential impact of the collapse of that supplier.”
“There remains in government a shortage of the necessary skills to let and manage contracts. Quite simply, the Government are not a clever client, and taxpayers and small businesses are losing out as a result. The Public Accounts Committee has agreed that we will look closely at the nature of the relationship between the Government and their strategic suppliers, the Government’s approach to procurement and contractual management, and—of course—the impact on taxpayers and service users every step of the way. Failure of essential services is not an option, but neither is the prospect of the Government bailing out private companies that fail. Some of the companies are running such large swathes of government that they have become too big to fail.”
“The Government have become dependent on large contracts to deliver public projects and services, and great secrecy surrounds them. If a company providing a number of those contracts fails, that is bad news for service users and the taxpayer. The Government should act in the interests of the taxpayer and the public, but the system has become skewed so that too often the Government act to protect the contractor, rather than the service user. The system is broken. There are not enough suppliers bidding for contracts across whole swathes of government, and the system is skewed against smaller, specialist businesses that get work only as part of a longer supply chain. At each stage, margins are squeezed, and too often we see poor service, sharp practice and an unnecessary cost to taxpayers.”
“A strategic supplier is a company that has business worth £100 million or more across central Government and their agencies. The risk assessments relating to other strategic suppliers raise concerns about their performance against contracts, and about the relationship between strategic suppliers and the Government. The Committee has currently chosen not to publish those papers, although I warn the Minister that we reserve the right to do so. We have been clear every step of the way, as we have looked at these papers, that our duty is to be responsible, not reckless. We are mindful of the impact of releasing information that could damage jobs and smaller supply chain businesses, and it is not our intention recklessly to pursue that. However, there might be information that we choose to put in the public domain at a later point.”
“The Carillion assessments—the documents the Government were using—show that although Carillion had been rated as “amber”, owing to its performance against contracts with the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Justice, it was not until after Carillion issued a profit warning in July last year that the Government downgraded it to “red”. It therefore appears that the Government were not aware of Carillion’s financial distress until that point. In November last year, officials recommended a provisional “black” rating for Carillion—that information has come directly from the papers that we have published—but following representations from the company, the Cabinet Office did not confirm that designation. Carillion collapsed less than two months later. The Committee has also considered papers relating to the other 27 strategic suppliers.”
“As Members will recall, the House agreed on 24 January that the Government’s risk assessments of its strategic suppliers should be released to the Public Accounts Committee. I commend my fellow Committee members for their hard work in looking closely at all those papers. Yesterday, we published in full the papers relating to Carillion, which of course subsequently collapsed. We strongly believe that taxpayers, and those who were served by the public services that Carillion was supplying, deserve to know what happened. The Carillion papers identify clear and compelling problems with the business in the months leading to its collapse.”
“As a Committee, we always set deadlines for the Government when we make recommendations, so I commit to the hon. Gentleman that it is fully our intention to publish a wider report on strategic suppliers by the summer recess. We do not quite know how our inquiry will go, because clearly we are evidence-led, but that is our aim.”
“I would say to my hon. Friend that a piece of the jigsaw is missing. The papers released to the Public Accounts Committee only went so far, and the evidence we were given does not indicate when the Government made a decision about what to do with the recommendation in the risk assessment papers. I cannot provide any more evidence for why the Government chose not to implement the “black” rating at that stage, but I assure my hon. Friend that we are widening our inquiry and have access to the other papers. Sadly, and rather depressingly, the Committee has a large back catalogue, and we have highlighted a number of issues to do with contract management in government. We will not leave a stone unturned in our inquiry, and as I said to the hon. Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), we hope to publish a report by the summer recess.”
“Given the size of these contracts, few organisations are bidding, and that means that some organisations are running huge swathes of government and have effectively become proxy Departments, even though they are in the private sector, which means that the Public Accounts Committee and other Select Committees do not have the same oversight of them. The National Audit Office can look at a contract, but not at how the company is running. There are real issues here, and we want greater transparency in these contracts. We will be looking closely at the issues raised by the hon. Gentleman in our inquiry.”
“The hon. Gentleman hits an important nail on the head. The problem with large companies dealing with large contracts is that cash flow can be a problem, and it is tempting for the Government to step in to deal with that. This is a real issue because if a Government contract is failing, it is still difficult for the Government not to award other contracts because of contract law, and we think that that area needs to be looked into. In any other situation, it would be crazy to give a contract to a supplier that was clearly failing.”
“My right hon. Friend, as ever, raises his point in a very effective way. This is one of our concerns about the size of these contracts. If the collapse of a large supplier means that a hospital in our one of our constituencies is not completed, we see that the system is skewed to try to ensure that does not happen, but that means that the interests of the supplier can come first, in that they might end up being bailed out. Carillion was deluded in believing that it would be given a bail-out, and we want to examine why it kept believing, right up to the moment of collapse, that a loan would come.”
“I thank my hon. Friend. That would be outside the remit of our next inquiry, but she highlights an important point. The collapse of a large supplier has a wider impact than simply the contracts it runs, because suppliers are so embedded in the system. The way in which apprenticeships work means that, quite rightly, private businesses are providing apprenticeships, but there is a real risk of a ripple effect when a large supplier collapses. That goes back to the point about how large such suppliers are and how difficult it is for the Government to allow them to fail, which can then skew Government decision making.”
“As we have heard, other Committees are looking at other aspects of Carillion. I am delighted that our sister Committees—the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, and the Work and Pensions Committee—are looking at those aspects, and particularly pensions. I will leave other expert Committees to look at that area of work so that we can motor on and ensure we produce a useful report to the House by the summer recess.”
“Taxpayers’ hard-earned money is handed to the Government to deliver a public service, and when companies do not deliver, we need to see that very clearly and the Government should not be afraid to call it out.”
“My hon. Friend, who served with distinction on the Public Accounts Committee in the previous Parliament, highlights a really important point. The Committee constantly highlights the need for more transparency in relation to these contracts. This is taxpayers’ money funding public services, albeit delivered by private companies. I would hope that the Government share our view that where we shine sunlight, we can also see benefits. Sharp practice comes to the fore if it is hidden away under the guise of commercial confidentiality. When taxpayers are funding something, commercial confidentiality needs to be treated very differently from when private companies are doing business between themselves.”
“I admire the Minister’s confidence, but I wonder whether she has had conversations with her colleagues in the Home Office, which has now declared an amnesty on Commonwealth citizens and is having to implement a helpline and support for the Windrush generation. That will extend to others, and the Home Office is also having to introduce, by November, the new fast-route EU citizens settlement programme. Does she seriously believe that, practically, the Home Office and the Government have the resources to deal with this, and can she reassure my constituents?”
“One of the key players in discussing and settling the EU financial settlement is the European Court of Auditors. As a member state, we have Phil Wynn Owen as our representative, but as it stands, he is set to leave the European Court of Auditors come 29 March 2019. Will the Secretary of State add to his negotiating list the need to make sure we have a full British representative on the European Court of Auditors during the transition period?”
“However, even with the current desire to tackle the issue, I bet that it will be a big challenge to secure the necessary money from the Treasury to deliver that.”
“I, too, have a heavy immigration workload, and I have some advice for the Minister, because another thing that has been said in this debate is, “Why aren’t we looking at the Labour years?” Well, I was the Immigration Minister in the last three years of the Labour Government, so perhaps I can help to bridge that gap. Let me be candid: the Home Office has long had administrative problems on immigration. One of the issues that the Minister and her boss the new Home Secretary will face is that, to deal with the problem, we need proper investment in the right quality and numbers of people to be able to turn casework around in the necessary time, so that people are not dribbling through the system for a decade or bouncing backwards and forwards with decisions that require legal challenge.”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy), who is no longer in his place, on bringing this matter to the Government’s attention and my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) on her dogged determination in pursuing the issue. I want to take issue with some of the comments made in this debate. The hon. Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove), who is no longer in his place, spoke about the matter as though it were just a small administrative error, but my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Ladywood (Shabana Mahmood) summed up the ignominy that many of my constituents have faced because they have a west African name or a strong accent. They come to see me for things that they should not have to see me about—not just immigration issues but, yes, those as well.”
“I am afraid to say that we have a real dearth of good-quality legal advice with legal aid—it is a desert in some areas—and many lawyers are charging high fees for, frankly, poor service. The Minister needs to take that into account, or we will see further such problems along the way.”
“Had it done so, those people who are not yet citizens—those who have not chosen to go down the citizenship route, but have indefinite leave to remain—would have been in a better position. The issue goes wider than just the Windrush generation, and let us hope that there is not just a quick fix for them, but a much wider review of the system. Let us not forget that this Government chose to abolish identity cards, which were being rolled out on my watch in the Home Office. They would have made a big difference to many of my constituents who very much wanted to prove that they had the same rights as other citizens. I have little time to cover compensation and legal aid, but good-quality legal advice saves time and money for everybody in the long run, and justice is denied if justice cannot be accessed because someone cannot afford it.”
“They are frightened about ringing the Home Office helpline in case it causes them problems. Those people are from the Caribbean, but I also have Commonwealth citizens who are in the same position. They are originally from Africa, but they are British, and yet they do not have the paperwork to prove it. The little paper Immigration and Nationality Directorate letters that people come to our surgeries clutching have been enough to get them a job and their entitlements, but their employers have suddenly said, “But you need a biometric residence permit.” Why did the Home Office—this happened strictly under this Government when they changed the rules—not write to everybody on the immigration lists and say, “You now need this new document in order to hold your job and keep your rights”?”
“They are not yet citizens, but they aspire to be and they are doing everything right. Turning to the people who are citizens, the Government have in effect declared an amnesty for those people from the Commonwealth who arrived here between 1973 and 1988, and I have another word of advice for the Minister. In declaring an amnesty—officials will be quavering at my use of that word, because they hate it in the Home Office—will she be clear, as other hon. Members have asked, about whether it applies to all members of the Commonwealth? Will it cover my west African constituents who are in exactly the same position? If I only I had the time, I would tell her about some of the horrific cases. One man is homeless, and another is about to lose his home because it belongs to his partner.”
“Tackling that is a huge challenge for the Department, and I agree with my hon. Friend. This was not just an administrative error. Dealing with the administration of immigration with never enough resources has been a challenge for the Home Office for years. The hostile environment has bitten hard in my constituency. Discretionary leave to remain was reduced from five years to three years, meaning that people had to apply twice before they could get citizenship, and is now reduced to two years, meaning that people have to apply three times. The fee is £800 a time—it keeps going up; I lose track—before they pay over £1,000 for British citizenship. The costs are bankrupting my constituents who are working hard in this country, paying their taxes and paying their dues. They are being treated like second-class citizens.”
“Testing of that system, which is to replace the outdated customs handling of import and export freight—CHIEF—system to ensure we have a customs declaration system fit for purpose, is only now just under way. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs estimates that the volume of customs declarations per year could rise by 200 million, from 55 million in 2015 to 255 million, and that the number of traders making declarations could increase from 141,000 to 273,000. We will need border checks for people and goods—we heard a lot from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on this; we will see increased costs for businesses and Governments, as others have touched on; and we will see enormous delays at the border.”
“Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) spoke about what the public voted for. Had there been a very clear exposition of the either/or position, we could say that, but it was not clear at all, and now is the time for clarity. I want to focus on the practical issues facing this country if we leave the customs union. The Public Accounts Committee, which I have the privilege of chairing, is a cross-party Committee made up of Members from four parties in this House—Members who voted both Brexit and remain and whose constituents voted similarly differently. Yet as a Committee we have produced a series of reports, two of which I want to talk about today, that highlight the practical challenges facing this country. The first report was on the customs declaration service.”
“I fully associate myself with the remarks of my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) when she opened the debate and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), so I will not repeat their arguments now. I will, however, pick up on what my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) and the right hon. Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) said: we should be having a reasonable and evidence-based debate. Four of us who have spoken so far have the privilege of chairing Select Committees and seeing and hearing from witnesses directly about what is happening out there on the ground, and it is right that we have this opportunity to pass this information on to the Government and make sure that we have a serious discussion. The right hon.”
“That is the cost we will have to pay for the political exit, but there are the on-costs—the lost opportunity costs. We need to see the full bill and to have it analysed by the National Audit Office. We need to have that before any meaningful vote in the autumn. We are still woefully short on such information, but the right hon. Member for Loughborough and I are on the march, so I warn the Government: they had better be prepared. As with the emperor’s new clothes, we need to call it out. Wishful thinking is not enough. It is not about ideology or romance, though many of us hold ideological positions. We need clarity. We need a decision so that business, and indeed the Government, can prepare. We need a customs union—we need the customs union. The alternative is chaos, cost, confusion and huge damage to the UK economy.”
“It went on: “The Government is reviewing the specific areas where the risk posed by these imports could change, both immediately following EU exit and over time, and the measures that should be put in place to address this”— should be put in place! We are one year away from Brexit. Even with a transition period, it will be enormously challenging—in fact impossible—to deliver the infrastructure needed to make sure that our country is safe. We need full clarity on the costs. The Treasury Committee and the Public Accounts Committee are pressing the Treasury and other bits of Government about what the total cost will be. Let us be clear: there will be additional costs to the financial settlement, which will be only a small portion of the overall costs.”
“Pieter Omtzigt, the Dutch Parliament’s Brexit rapporteur, has said that his country is “preparing for the stated policy of the UK government” and that it needs “hundreds of new customs and agricultural inspectors”. He says: “if we need” that, “the British are going to need thousands”. Already this week, we have seen Border Force advertising to recruit 550 staff—in addition to staff it has already had to recruit and will have to recruit again in the future. Extraordinarily, a response to our work from the border planning group, which comprises a number of Departments, told our Committee there was no evidence to suggest that the risk profile of goods would change on day one.”
“My hon. Friend raises an important point. In another report, published last December, we looked at Brexit and the border—I say “looked at”, but the situation is not static; we are working closely with sister Committees, particularly the Treasury Committee, with which we are doing some joint work on the cost of Brexit. We need to look at the wider cost and what Departments are having to do to implement these new systems and employ new staff. HMRC has told us very candidly that it does not expect, as the right hon. Member for Loughborough highlighted, to have any additional border infrastructure in place by next March, yet other countries are planning for this already. In the Netherlands and Ireland, they are buying up land and planning to build facilities to do those necessary checks.”
“Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) is promoting a private Member’s Bill to ban upskirting—that is when someone takes a photograph up someone’s skirt. Upskirting has been banned in Scotland since 2009, and I raise the issue because its prevalence, and therefore the impact, has been exacerbated as well by the growth of mobile phone use. That is one reason the Government’s response is not good enough. No one, least of all Emily, expects a change in the law to be without its challenges, but in this modern digital world we need laws that deal with the reality of life.”
“This video was not, as far as anyone knows, distributed to any third party, uploaded online, shared or transferred to other digital platforms. The video was taken on that ubiquitous modern-day accessory, a mobile phone. Prior to today’s debate, I have been in contact with the Government about what plans they have to legislate. So far, the answer is none, although I thank the Minister for the detailed response that came from her Department. I want to highlight today the concerns I have with the Government’s response and to push her to see what she can do to take this back into the heart of Government and push for change herself. Before I do that, I want to highlight the fact that, although my debate is focusing on this private video, there is a wider theme here. As I am sure you are aware, Mr Speaker, the hon.”
“The taking of digital images without consent, and particularly the lack of recourse in law for victims, is a very serious issue. I pay tribute to a very brave woman, my constituent Emily, who has chosen to speak out about her experience in the hope that we can secure a change in the law. I hope that by speaking about her ordeal today, I, along with other Members who I know share an interest in this issue, can encourage others to share their experience with us so we can add their voices to persuading the Government of the need for action. Emily found herself alone in a hotel room with a strange man. There is the prospect of legal action, so I will skip over the detail of everything that happened that day, but it came to light later that this man had filmed Emily for just over a minute while she was asleep and naked.”