Sir Jeremy Hunt
MP for Godalming and Ash · Conservative · United Kingdom
“It is a pleasure to speak under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I speak today as chairman of the all-party parliamentary group for financial markets and services. I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which states that I accept speaking engagements from financial services companies.”
“Chief executives of banks made very ill-judged decisions to continue paying themselves large bonuses at a time when the rest of the country was suffering, and the country suffered a longer and deeper recession at that time as a result of our exposure to the financial services sector, which was much greater than that of our peers.”
“We are in a much, much better state than we were in 2008.” But I do think that it has gone slightly too far in the other direction. Sometimes we can over-correct.”
“What further action will the Government take to improve access to finance for small and medium-sized enterprises and scale-ups, which has been a particular issue in the period since the financial crisis?”
“I thank the hon. Lady for her role in helping to salvage Barings. I did not know that before. She is absolutely right to raise that issue. I do not say this in a party political way, because my party pretty much supported it at the time, but there is no doubt that, in the run-up to the financial crisis, regulation was not as tight as it n…”
“To their credit, this Government have built on those reforms with the Leeds reforms, the Pension Schemes Act 2026 and the forthcoming Financial Services and Markets Bill, all of which are extremely welcome. But, as the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley said, our competitors are not standing still.”
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“They may have struggling A&E departments and are trying to meet other targets and to deal with safety issues—whatever it is—and they do not have the management resource to invest in putting together the case that, quite rightly, the Treasury and the Department of Health and Social Care demand is extremely rigorous and thorough. That is why things get delayed. If we want to ensure that these 40 hospitals get built, the Government should consider a central team at the Department of Health and Social Care to put at the disposal of hospitals that we want to build extensions or new buildings, so that they can actually navigate those hurdles— [ Interruption. ] I am getting nods from the very capable Minister for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Edward Argar), so that might be under consideration.”
“I do, because this Bill about the NHS in England. It would be nice if we occasionally had a word of thanks, because the Bill will result in a lot more money being made available for the NHS in Scotland. The hon. Gentleman should, if I may say so, welcome that, because I think that will be as welcomed among the Scots as it will be welcomed by the English. My point about capital to revenue transfers is that it is a big deal to get a hospital building project off the ground. So many get delayed because hospital management teams are very busy.”
“I can be honest with the hon. Gentleman and say that I regret not being able to build lots of hospitals around the country in that period, because funding was short. Now, however, we are in a different situation. It is important that we build these extra hospitals, but there will be some big challenges in ensuring that we do so.”
“It was an important step forward for the NHS that we did bring down waiting times, and I have often credited the previous Labour Government for that happening, as I hope the Labour party will credit this Government for the focus on safety and quality in the wake of Mid Staffs. However, as we focus on safety and quality, I would not want to lose the achievements that were made on waiting times, because it is fundamental to all patients that they do not have to wait too long for care. Indeed, waiting times themselves can be a matter of patient safety.”
“I agree with the hon. Lady. Maintenance is a big issue in many hospitals. A number of hospitals are still essentially prefab buildings that should have been torn down a long time ago, and there are others where maintenance can solve the problem. I think we have to attack all of that, and I welcome the fact that there is a real commitment from the Government to do so. Finally, I want to talk about new clause 4, which relates to whether the Government are giving enough to the NHS to meet the current waiting time targets for elective care, A&E, cancer and so on. I welcome the Opposition’s focus on this matter, because the public absolutely expect us to get back to meeting those targets.”
“That is because in the end it is not about money as much as it is about capacity.”
“My hon. Friend neatly makes the point that I was hoping to make next. I will elaborate on the brilliance of his insight and simply say that when we think about waiting times it is very important that it is not just a debate about money. I appreciate that the Bill is about money, and that is why amendments have been tabled about money, but I want to give the example of the annual cycle of winter crises that we seem to have in the NHS now. I looked up the figures and, over the past five years that I was doing the job, in the first year I gave the NHS £300 million to avoid a winter crisis; in the second year, £400 million; in the third year, £700 million; in the fourth year, £400 million; and in the fifth year, £400 million. In four of those five years, we still had a winter crisis.”
“It was always the final point, and it is very much the final point. The other area that is essential for capacity is the social care system. My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) talked about how money can be wasted. One of the biggest wastes of money is that we pay for people to be in hospital beds, which cost three times as much as care home beds, because we do not have the capacity in the social care system. It is very important that we encourage people to save for the future and protect people against losing their homes, but if we want to see a change in the NHS in the next five years it is fundamental that we increase the ability of local authorities to deliver adult social care to people who cannot afford it. At the moment, they do not have enough to do that, and we must put that right.”
“Given that we will not end the annual cycle of winter crises until we fix the problems in adult social care, does the Minister agree that, however important the commitment that people will not have to sell their home, the absolute priority in any discussions with the Treasury must be to get more money to local authorities so that they can discharge their responsibilities to older and more vulnerable people?”
“We are in the first year of a five-year programme whereby spending on the NHS will rise by about double the growth in GDP, so we are heading toward being in the top quartile of spenders on health as a proportion of GDP among developed countries. That is a significant increase.”
“I hope that he will now use the same magic to get access to Kuvan for sufferers of phenylketonuria, including Holly and Callum, the children of my constituent Caroline Graham, who kindly agreed to a meeting. On funding, the central issue of this debate has been whether the amount the Government propose is enough. The facts are relatively straightforward: we spend 9.7% of our GDP on healthcare, and the EU average is 9.9%—almost the same. Our spending is almost identical to the OECD average and slightly less than that of the majority of G7 countries. Those numbers only reflect the situation today, though.”
“But if the Conservatives want to be the party of NHS, we have to talk about it, and my right hon. Friend is doing precisely that. I thank my right hon. Friend for putting into law the deal for the future of the NHS that I negotiated in May 2018. It is the challenge of the holder of his job—formerly mine—to stand at the Dispatch Box and constantly say that the NHS has enough money, when in reality it very rarely does. One of the most difficult challenges for Health Secretaries of all parties is meeting people who are denied access to a medicine that is not available on the NHS. He did that with the Orkambi families just before the election, and he did a brilliant job in securing access to that medicine, which will transform the lives of many families.”
“It is a pleasure to see you in your place, Madam Deputy Speaker. I refer hon. Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a trustee of the charity Patient Safety Watch. I also wish to correct a detail in the last speech I gave in the House in which I said there were four instances of wrong site surgery every day; I should have said every week. It is still an enormous number, but it is important to get the record absolutely right. I congratulate the Health Secretary on putting the NHS front and centre of the Government’s agenda. When I was in his job, I fought two general elections with Prime Ministers who were rather keen not to talk about the NHS. The second of the two did want to talk about the social care system, and I think both of us, with the benefit of hindsight, rather regret that.”
“It is essential that alongside the funding plan, we have in the people plan that I know the NHS is to publish soon an independently verified 10-year workforce plan that specifies how many doctors, nurses, midwives, allied healthcare professionals and so on we will need.”
“The capacity of staff to deliver really matters. I remember year after year trying to avert a winter crisis by giving the NHS extra money, and most of the time I gave the money and we still had a winter crisis, because ultimately we can give the NHS £2 billion or £3 billion more, but if there are not doctors and nurses available to hire for that £2 billion or £3 billion, the result is simply to inflate the salaries of locum doctors and agency nurses and the money is wasted. Central to understanding capacity is the recognition that it takes three years to train a nurse, seven years to train a doctor and 13 years to train a consultant, so a long-term plan is needed.”
“It is not about finding money to stop people having to sell their homes if they get dementia, important though that is; it is about the core money available to local authorities to spend on their responsibilities in adult social care. I tried to negotiate a five-year deal for social care at the same time as the NHS funding deal we are debating today. I failed, but I am delighted to have a successor who has enormously strong skills of persuasion and great contacts in the Treasury. I have no doubt that he will secure a fantastic deal for adult social care to sit alongside the deal on funding, and I wish him every success in that vital area. The second distortion that often happens in a debate about funding is that while everyone on the NHS front line welcomes additional funding, their real concern is about capacity.”
“I suggest to the hon. Lady, whom I greatly respect, that the overall figure is actually what counts. I agree that public health spending matters, but it is absolutely the case that we are heading to being one of the higher spenders in our commitment to health. That is very significant and should not be dismissed. Often, the debate about funding can distort some of the real debates that we need to have about the NHS. One of those is the debate on social care. If we do not have an equivalent five-year funding plan for social care, there will not be enough money for the NHS. That is because of the total interdependence of the health and social care systems.”
“A patient who acquires a bedsore or an MRSA or C. diff infection, or has a fall that could have been avoided, will stay in hospital longer, which will cost more. It will cost the hospital more, it will cost the NHS more, and finances will deteriorate. Invariably, the path to safer care is the same as the path to lower cost. That is why it is so important that we recognise that the safety and quality agenda is consistent with the plan to get NHS finances under control. It is also why it is important to remember that the Mid Staffs scandal happened in a period of record funding increases for the NHS. So when it comes to NHS funding, transparency, openness, a culture that learns from mistakes, innovation and prevention are every bit as important as pounds and pence.”
“The final distortion when we talk about funding for the NHS is the link between funding and the quality of care. It is totally understandable that many people think that the way to improve the quality of care is to increase funding, but in reality the relationship is much more complex. As the Health Secretary knows well, we pay the same tariff to all hospitals in the NHS, and with the same amount of money some of them deliver absolutely outstanding, world-class care and others do not. Almost without exception, hospitals rated good or outstanding by the Care Quality Commission have better finances than those rated as requiring improvement or inadequate, which are often losing huge sums. The reason for that, as every doctor or nurse in the NHS knows, is that poor care is usually the most expensive type of care to deliver.”
“When we talk about the workforce, training is vital. We know from the 2018 “Mind the Gap” report on the issues at the Shrewsbury and Telford and the East Kent trusts, among others, that only 8% of trusts supply all the care needs in the “Saving Babies’ Lives” bundle, so the maternity safety training fund is essential. I hope the Health Secretary will renew it, because it makes a big difference. It is vital that we have an independent figure for the number of doctors and nurses the NHS needs, not a figure negotiated between the Department of Health and Social Care and the Treasury, because the Treasury will always try to negotiate the number down and we will end up not training enough people. I know the Health Secretary is on the case.”
“Inside that teddy were William’s ashes. That is a meeting I will never forget as a Minister. We must not let this blind us to the fact that the vast majority of NHS care is absolutely brilliant. I have three beautiful healthy children, thanks to the NHS. About a year before I was Health Secretary, I was in the Cabinet and I had a basal cell carcinoma removed from my head. A local anaesthetic was administered, and the surgeon had his scalpel out. The head nurse looked at me and said, “By the way, Mr Hunt, what is it you do for a living?” This was a time of austerity and cuts, and I froze before giving the answer to that question. But thanks to substantial additional funding by the last Labour Government and by this Government, the NHS has improved dramatically, and we now have record survival rates for every major disease category.”
“Those people all did something that most of us would never do. Most of us, when we have a tragedy in our lives, want to close the chapter and move on, but they chose to relive their tragedy every single day because they wanted to tell their story and make the NHS change so that other families did not go through what they had been through. They paid a terrible price for doing that. James Titcombe had to write more than 400 emails over several years before we were prepared to admit why Joshua died. Martin Bromiley sacrifices 40% of his salary as an airline pilot so that he can go round the NHS talking in hospitals free of charge about what happened to Elaine. Melissa Mead carries William’s teddy everywhere. She goes into TV studios to try to alert people to the dangers of sepsis, and she brought it to her first meeting with me.”
“If we do the maths, that works out at about 150 preventable deaths every single week—the equivalent of an aircraft falling out of the sky every single week. Then I met a group of people who persuaded me that this issue should be my main focus as Health Secretary. I met Scott and Sue Morrish, a young couple from Devon who lost their son Sam to sepsis when he was three because it was not picked up early enough; James Titcombe, who lost his son Joshua at Morecambe Bay when he was nine days old; Deb Hazeldine, who lost her mother in a horrible death at Mid Staffs; Martin Bromiley, who lost his wife Elaine because of a surgery error at a hospital in Milton Keynes; and Melissa Mead, who lost her son William when he was just 12 months old—in December 2014, when I was Health Secretary—again because sepsis was not picked up.”
“The first crisis with which I had to deal was the one at Mid Staffs. I remember the then chief executive of the NHS, Sir David Nicholson, taking me aside and saying, “You just need to understand, Jeremy, that in healthcare we harm 10% of patients. That is what happens all over the world.” I then asked the awkward question about how many people actually died because of mistakes in healthcare. It is important to point out that this is not about the NHS; it is about how healthcare is practised everywhere. However, being the good old NHS, we have carried out endless academic studies on this. The Hogan and Black analysis shows that, at that time, 4% of hospital deaths had had a 50% or more chance of being preventable.”
“Let me start by saying that it is wonderful to see you in the Chair, Mr Deputy Speaker, and that your presence there is a signal to every new Member that it is possible to undergo the ups and downs of politics and come through on the other side. I thank the Health Secretary for his personal commitment to patient safety in including the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill in the Queen’s Speech, and I thank the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries), for her personal commitment in ensuring that it featured in both last year’s Queen’s Speech and the current one, despite many competing pressures. It is about patient safety that I wish to talk in my brief six minutes. When I became Health Secretary in 2012, I had not heard the phrase.”
“I thank the hon. Lady for raising that. We have made huge progress in sepsis care, and the vast majority of people who go to A&E now are checked for sepsis, but mistakes still happen, and I am sure that it affected her as it affected the families of the people I have talked about. We must not be complacent about the things that go wrong. In the NHS, we talk about “never events”—the things that should never happen. Even now, after all the progress on patient safety, we operate on the wrong part of someone’s body four times a day. It is called wrong site surgery. When I was Health Secretary, we amputated someone’s wrong toe, and a lady had her ovary removed instead of her appendix.”
“We should take pride in the fact that we are the only healthcare system in the world that is talking about this issue as much as we are, and if we get this right, we can be a beacon for safe healthcare across the world and really turn the NHS into the safest and highest-quality healthcare system anywhere.”
“That shows the courage of entering that profession, and if we make it difficult for people to be open, we will not learn from those mistakes. That is why we need to change from a blame culture to a learning culture. That is also why, as we reflect on the devastating news that the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries), gave the House last night that the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust is now examining 900 cases dating back 40 years, we realise that the journey that the NHS has started on patient safety must continue.”
“They want to do nothing more than to be completely open and transparent about what happened and to learn the lessons, but we make that practically impossible. People are terrified about being struck off by the Nursing and Midwifery Council or the General Medical Council. They are worried about the Care Quality Commission and about their professional reputation. They are worried about being fired. In order for a family whose child is disabled at birth to get compensation, they have to prove that the doctor was negligent, but any doctor is going to fight that. The truth is that many of the mistakes that are made are not negligence, but we make it so difficult to be open about the ordinary human errors that any of us make in all our jobs. As we are not doctors and nurses, people do not generally die when we make mistakes.”
“Actually, we do have WHO checklists throughout the NHS in England—I think they were introduced under Lord Darzi in the last Labour Government—but the truth is that even with those checklists, which are an important innovation, mistakes are still made because sometimes people read through lists and automatically give the answer they think people want to hear. This is why we have to be continually vigilant. What is the solution? It is to ask ourselves honestly, when a mistake happens and when there is a tragedy, whether we really learn from that mistake or whether we brush it under the carpet. To understand how difficult an issue that is, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of the doctor or nurse when something terrible happens, such as a baby dying. It is incredibly traumatic for them, just as it is for the family.”
“I wish to repay the compliment and thank my hon. Friend for her tireless campaigning on this issue. It is not easy publicly to criticise a local hospital trust, and for an hon. Member to do that, as in this case, shows enormous courage. Does she agree that the biggest mistake the Government could make when they publish and respond to the Ockenden review would be to say that this is a one-off incident? The most important thing is to consider what went wrong at Shrewsbury and Telford, and to learn those lessons for the whole NHS. The big thing that we learned from Morecambe Bay and Mid Staffs was that such lessons apply across the system.”
“I thank the Minister for her personal commitment to patient safety, which I have seen on many occasions, but she will be aware that what she has just told the House is deeply shocking. She is saying that the scale of potential avoidable death at Shrewsbury and Telford may be no different from that at Mid Staffs. Could she reassure the House, given the huge resources devoted to the public inquiry into what happened at Mid Staffs, that the Department will make sure that Donna Ockenden has all the resources and support she needs, because getting to the bottom of this will be a huge job? Does the Minister also recognise that, while it will take more time, the families would also like it resolved as quickly as possible?”
“I thank the Foreign Secretary for his support for the Iran nuclear deal, because the simple truth is that if Philip Hammond had not negotiated it, Iran would have nuclear weapons today and the middle east would be immensely more dangerous. However, it has caused a lot of stresses in the western alliance, and I would like to ask the Secretary of State’s view as to the best way to strengthen that alliance, because however tattered and strained it is, it is a vital foundation of our peace and prosperity, and has been for the past 70 years.”
“It was disappointing that we were not informed about the attack in advance, but does the Defence Secretary agree that, while that may be partly because this US Administration have the habit of doing a lot of things unilaterally, it is also because of growing scepticism in Washington about European commitment to global security, given the vast disparity in defence spending between European countries and the United States? The right place to address this issue is the defence and security review that is happening this year, which can show that a newly confident post-Brexit Britain takes its defence obligations seriously.”
“The question is about NATO. Does the Foreign Secretary agree that one of the biggest fault lines in NATO at the moment is the fact that the largest partner is spending 4% of its GDP on defence, whereas no one else is spending much above 2%? Does he agree it is time for the UK to show a lead and commit to spending 3% of our GDP on defence in the next decade?”
“As this is your last Health questions, Mr Speaker, may I thank you for your many years of campaigning for speech and language therapy for children? It has given great hope to many families in a situation similar to your own. On the issue of early intervention, given that half of all mental health conditions are established before the age of 14, does the Minister, who is passionate about this, agree that mental health provision in schools is essential? Will she update the House on progress towards the 2023 objective of a quarter of schools having a mental health lead?”
“Haslemere in my constituency has a busy minor injuries unit, used by 8,000 people a year, which is currently threatened with closure. Given that that would be catastrophic for the town of Haslemere and for the Royal Surrey A&E in Guildford, will the Secretary of State listen to the residents of Haslemere and agree not to close this vital facility?”
“The most powerful way to change culture is to shout out loud and clear those human stories of the terrible loss involved, because that is what promotes change. I finish by commending everyone involved in Baby Loss Awareness Week—the brave Members of this House who have spoken out, and given many others hope that they are not alone; the many brave members of the public who have relived their own tragedies over and over again to try to promote change in this area; and the Ministers concerned, who have a heavy responsibility when it comes to this agenda, and who I know take that responsibility with the utmost seriousness.”
“There has not been enough effort to try to share the learnings from such tragedies. I commend the efforts of the Government and my successor Ministers for doing everything they possibly can to put this right and to ensure that we really do become a learning organisation. In truth, though, this is a big job that will take a long time, because it is about changing culture. The NHS needs to look at other industries that have successfully changed from having a blame culture to having a learning culture. The airline industry is the most famous example, but there are also the nuclear and oil industries. That job of changing culture will be our central responsibility if we are to reduce the agony for parents and the professionals involved in the care of babies.”
“People are terrified of the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the General Medical Council, the Care Quality Commission and their trust. They are worried about being fired and they are worried about all sorts of consequences, so the one thing that should happen—the one thing that everyone in that situation wants to happen more than anything else, which is that lessons are learned from that tragedy—is often the one thing that never happens at all. Let us remember that there are 1,400 neonatal deaths every year, as the shadow Minister said. That is about four every single day across the NHS. The great tragedy—not just in the NHS but in hospitals all over the world—is the fact that a tragedy can happen in Blackpool one day, and a month later exactly the same tragedy can happen in Cornwall.”
“We often talk about the trauma for the families, who of course are the primary victims in this situation, but we must never forget the people who are sometimes called the second victims: the doctors, nurses, midwives and other professionals who have to go home, worrying that if they had done something differently that baby might still be alive, and who have to come back to work the next day and struggle on, dealing with that incredible trauma. In that situation, those professionals want nothing more than to be completely open, transparent and honest with the families and with their colleagues about what happened to ensure that lessons are learned and that that tragedy is never repeated again. But in the NHS today, we make that practically impossible.”
“I just want to make one observation from my many years—some would say too many—as Health Secretary with respect to this issue, and that observation is about the impact on professionals. When you go around hospitals up and down the country, and ask the doctors, nurses and midwives, “What is the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to you in your professional career?”, almost invariably they will say that it is when they lose a baby.”
“It is a great privilege to speak from the Back Benches for the first time in over a decade following two extremely powerful speeches from both Front Benches. I thank the Minister of State and the shadow Minister for two extremely compassionate and understanding speeches in which they spoke about the sheer pain felt by so many families up and down the country. I also thank the many hon. Members on all sides—my hon. Friends the Members for Eddisbury (Antoinette Sandbach), for Colchester (Will Quince) and for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), the hon. Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) and many others—who have spoken so powerfully on this matter. I cannot possibly compete with the power of their words because there is nothing that anyone can suffer more than the loss of a child.”
“I understand the issue relating to how the Iranian Government treat dual nationals, but is it not imperative that we send out a signal from the House that every British citizen is equal and all British citizens will receive the highest standards of support from the British Government? My biggest sadness as Foreign Secretary was not being able to bring Nazanin home. Will my right hon. Friend confirm to the House that the highest duty of the state is the protection of its citizens, and that nothing—no other priorities—will stand in the way of reuniting this innocent woman with her loving husband and daughter?”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his appointment, for which I was delighted to be the warm-up act. Does he agree that western policy towards Iran is, unfortunately, basically failing? It is failing to stop malign activity, as we saw with Aramco, failing to stop re-nuclearisation, and failing to stop hostage taking, which has sadly continued long after the case of Nazanin. Is not the answer close alignment between the United States and Europe, clearer consequences for wrongdoing, and a ladder for Iran to climb down so that we can get out of this incredibly dangerous situation?”
“Can I congratulate my right hon. Friend on becoming Prime Minister? I hope he is enjoying doing the job as much as I am enjoying not doing the job. Does he agree that those who claim to defend parliamentary democracy are in fact putting it at grave risk by alienating a large proportion of the population who fear that this House is trying to block a democratic referendum result that we promised to honour?”
“We have taken every available opportunity to reduce misunderstanding while standing by our rock-solid commitment to the international rule of law, which is the foundation of global peace and prosperity. However, we must react to the world around us as it is, not as we would wish it to be, so if Iran continues on this dangerous path, it must accept that the price will be a larger western military presence in the waters along its coastline, not because we wish to increase tensions but simply because freedom of navigation is a principle that Britain and its allies will always defend. I commend this statement to the House.”
“These changes—both short and medium-term—are made possible because of the commitment that this Government have already made to increase our security presence in the Gulf, including the opening in April last year of the first permanent British naval facility in the Gulf for over 40 years. This establishment in Bahrain now hosts HMS Montrose, along with four mine countermeasure vessels and one supply ship. Finally, let me say that it is with a heavy heart that we are announcing this increased international presence in the Gulf, because the focus of our diplomacy has been on de-escalating tensions in the hope that such changes would not be necessary. We do not seek confrontation with Iran.”
“The combined British red ensign fleet is the ninth largest in the world, and on an average day two or three ships belonging to the red ensign group pass through the strait of Hormuz. The Gulf spans an area of nearly 100,000 square miles, and HMS Montrose covers an operating area of some 19,000 nautical miles. So far, she has escorted 30 merchant vessels through the strait of Hormuz during 17 separate transits, travelling 4,800 nautical miles in the process. It is not possible for the Royal Navy to provide escorts for every single ship, or indeed to eliminate all risks of piracy, but those risks can be substantially reduced if commercial shipping companies co-operate fully with instructions from the Department for Transport, which we strongly encourage them to do.”
“It will not be part of the US maximum pressure policy on Iran, because we remain committed to preserving the Iran nuclear agreement. Thirdly, while we will seek to establish this mission as quickly as possible, the Government have in the meantime dispatched HMS Duncan, a Type 45 destroyer, to take over from HMS Montrose, and she will arrive in the region by 29 July—a week from today. Fourthly, we will ask all British-flagged ships to give us notice of any intention to pass through the strait of Hormuz, to enable us to offer the best protection we can. We will then advise them of the safest way to transit, which may involve travelling in convoy. Finally, we are strengthening measures to protect ships flying the flags of other countries but which have British crew on board. About 1,300 ships appear on the UK ship register.”