Sir Stephen Timms
MP for East Ham · Labour · United Kingdom
“I agree with the hon. Gentleman. If he would like to send me details of that particular case, I will happily look into it. On the subject of people with hearing impairments, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities and I will be meeting the British Sign Language Advisory Board this afternoon.”
“Better outcomes require early identification and support for girls and young women with special educational needs, including dyslexia. That is the aim of the SEND reforms and the development of national inclusion standards.”
“Autistic people and people with ADHD have been struggling to get the right support at the right time. Recommendations from Professor Karen Guldberg’s neurodivergence task and finish group directly informed the SEND reforms that were published earlier this year.”
“The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on public bodies to make reasonable adjustments, so that disabled people are not put at a disadvantage by accessibility challenges.”
“The hon. Gentleman raises an important point. This benefit is there to contribute to the additional costs of disability. Too often, what has happened—my hon.”
“I think we can take the hon. Member’s question as a tacit recognition that in 14 years the previous Government should have done something to fix these problems. The steering group is clear that the provision of cash to meet the additional costs of disability is vital.”
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“I echo the final sentence of the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) but not much else of what he said. The Prime Minister was understandably very anxious to hold the general election before the Bill was scrutinised. As we go through the Bill in detail, the impact of his agreement on the UK will become apparent. The agreement will do a lot of damage to our constitution and to our economy, and Government Members will have a lot of explaining to do to their constituents as those impacts become apparent in the years ahead. I want to raise two points. First, I want to deal briefly with an important subject that I raised with the Prime Minister in the House on 19 October.”
“There will be major damage to the Union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. One of the ironies of this is that it has been directly facilitated by the party in this House whose raison d’être is to maintain the Union. The agreement that is implemented in the Bill will damage the UK, it will put the continued existence of the UK in its current form at risk, and it will damage the UK economy. I shall oppose it, and those who support it today will have a lot of explaining to do to their constituents as the impacts unfold over the years ahead.”
“Undoubtedly the measure does that, but it is hardwired into the deal that the Prime Minister has done. What he means in claiming that there will be no checks across the Irish sea is anyone’s guess—just read the Government’s own documents. His statement is quite clearly untrue. The Treasury presentation on the Northern Ireland protocol that we have been reminded of makes the position clear: “At minimum, this means that export summary declarations will be required when goods are exported from NI to GB, in order to meet the EU’s obligations under the SAFE framework.” It continues, in a slide in the presentation headed “Economic Impact on NI”: “Customs declaration and documentation and physical checks on W/E and E/W trade will be highly disruptive to the NI economy.” That is the truth about where we are heading.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker, and many congratulations to you. The Committee Chair reminds us that if the Prime Minister is unable to respond within 10 days he is required to provide an explanation for that failure. He has not provided an explanation, which, we understand, is unprecedented. Why has the Prime Minister not complied with the requirement placed upon him?”
“The level playing field clause would not constrain any improvement in workers’ rights, but it would limit and stop the reduction of workers’ rights, so why did the Prime Minister want that clause to be removed from the legally binding withdrawal agreement?”
“Will the Secretary of State straightforwardly confirm that the deadline set out in her party’s 2017 manifesto will not now be achieved? Competition between mobile providers has been very fruitful for consumers over the past 20 years, particularly in reducing call charges. How will Ministers make sure that future fruitful competition will not be blunted by this collaboration?”
“I just want to emphasise the need for scrutiny. In an earlier intervention, the right hon. Gentleman said that this Bill is repealing the European Communities Act 1972. In fact, in clause 1, it reimposes it. Surely that should be scrutinised properly by the House.”
“Does the Prime Minister understand the worries of manufacturers about new rules of origin checks and other red tape that his deal would impose on them, and the fears of Make UK that reassurances in the deal negotiated by his predecessor have been dropped from his deal?”
“I am grateful to my right hon. and learned Friend for focusing attention on manufacturing. Is it his assessment that this deal would lead to new rules of origin checks and other red tape on UK manufacturers exporting to the EU?”
“What has become of the Tory party? If the Minister really believes that a £15 billion additional burden on business is acceptable, can he tell us how large a burden would be unacceptable?”
“Ministers recognise that the key to the level of chaos at Dover after a no-deal Brexit is the number of non-compliant trucks arriving without customs documents. In June, HMRC estimated that number to be at least 20%, or 2,000 a day. What is HMRC’s current estimate?”
“That strikes me as another good reason why Parliament has determined that if we do not have a deal by the end of this month, the Government need to apply to the EU for an extension—precisely so we do not have to impose those costly and difficult burdens on UK firms.”
“Similarly, when the UK would require an exit summary declaration, the EU would require an entry summary declaration. It is a good thing that, at least for a period, the UK will not require all those difficult and costly declarations, but can the Minister tell us whether the EU will issue a similar waiver for the first 12 months, or will all that information still have to be compiled in order to satisfy the needs of the EU authorities, even if HMRC will not require it? That strikes me as yet another very damaging burden that is being imposed on UK firms—perhaps not for the first 12 months but certainly thereafter—if we leave the EU without a deal. Under these proposals, in a year, that damaging burden will be imposed anyway.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I have a question for the Minister that builds on those that have been asked. I understand that safety and security information will be required on all goods transiting between the UK and the European Union. That has not been necessary before; it is onerous, difficult and complex, and both entry summary and exit summary declarations would normally be required. I can well see the sense of the UK authorities deciding that they do not want those declarations for the first 12 months, or six months in some cases. What I do not think the Minister has told us is whether the EU side will still require those declarations. When there is an entry declaration required of the EU, presumably the EU would require an exit summary declaration.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for explaining that the UK authority is not going to require these declarations, but what about the EU side? Will the EU still require them? He makes the point that businesses need 12 months to prepare. Are they going to be ready to meet the EU’s requirements, which obviously are not covered by the SI?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for that answer, but if the information and declarations are still required by the EU side, what is the benefit in not requiring them on the UK side?”
“I think the Minister is telling us that businesses need 12 months to prepare for providing these declarations, but he is also telling us that, from day one of a no-deal Brexit, the EU is going to require those declarations from our businesses. How are they expected to cope with that?”
“Child poverty is being driven up by the five-week delay during which people have to wait before they receive universal credit. Will the hon. Gentleman confirm that what Ministers refer to as an advance is in fact a loan that has to be repaid by claimants, and will he commit to scrapping the five-week delay?”
“In the referendum, the right hon. Gentleman held out the prospect of frictionless trade with the European Union. I think he has acknowledged that, whatever else one says about the proposals, they would not result in frictionless trade. For what reasons has it not been possible to deliver what was promised?”
“I was looking through my records this afternoon, and I saw that I wrote to the Child Support Agency on behalf of one of my constituents on 30 September 1999. She finally received a first, partial payment on 1 August 2018. It took 19 years. Is the hon. Gentleman as unsurprised as I am that people, as he says, just give up?”
“By December 2013 it had been established that Mr A owed £54,000: £15,000 was due to Mrs A; and £39,000 was due to the Government, to reimburse benefits that should not have been paid. It then took another five years for that demand to be enforced. My constituent finally received the £15,000 on 1 August 2018, 19 years after she had first approached me. The system completely failed to deliver the support that she and her son were entitled to throughout his entire childhood. As a result, he grew up in much more straitened circumstances than he should have. The point that I put to the Minister is that surely the Government must act to ensure that an absent parent can no longer use legal chicanery to avoid their responsibilities for 20 years.”
“There was a short period when she was distracted because of the ill health and later the death of her mother. However, she showed extraordinary ingenuity and determination in compiling evidence of Mr A’s true circumstances. Without that evidence, I do not think that he would ever have been forced to pay at all. He was absolutely determined not to pay. He spent a fortune in legal costs. If only that money had gone to his child, things would have been very different. He made three small contributions in 2003, amounting to just over £1,000, and that was after he had lost three tribunals in succession and appealed against the decision each time. But other than those three small payments, he refused to pay any money.”
“I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing the debate. I would like to say a little more about the case I referred to in an earlier intervention. By the time of the letter I wrote on behalf of my constituent, Mrs A, on 30 September 1999, the father, Mr A, had been assessed as being due to pay just over £100 per week towards child maintenance. He never paid. He claimed to be on a very low income. He claimed that he had absurdly high housing costs. At one stage, confronted with incontrovertible evidence that he was working, he claimed to be doing so free of charge. He is actually a prosperous and busy builder, who owns his own large home. I was more or less continuously in touch with the Child Support Agency, its successors and Ministers for 19 years on my constituent’s behalf.”
“T7. In June, HMRC said that at least 20% of the 10,000 trucks reaching Dover on day one of a no-deal Brexit will not comply with French customs, leading to very long delays and causing shortages of fresh food and medicines. How many non-compliant trucks does HMRC currently project at Dover on day one?”
“I think that the Minister is seeking to assure us that there will not be any customs posts, checks or controls anywhere at or near the border.”
“But the Prime Minister has said this morning that Irish customs checks will be the reality after Brexit. So where will the checks envisaged by the Prime Minister take place?”
“As the Minister knows, the Freight Transport Association says that long delays at Dover are inevitable after a no deal because hundreds of non-compliant trucks will continue to arrive. Those trucks will have lengthy inspections in a lorry park in Calais that has only 300 spaces. When the lorry park is full, the ferries will stop. On what grounds does he reject that assessment?”
“After the visit, one commission member emailed me and commented, quite rightly, that our society should not tolerate people having to live in such conditions. I was delighted to take the commission members to the Didsbury site, where Newham Council’s own developer, Red Door Ventures, which was set up in 2014, is building new homes on council land that was previously occupied by a community centre. It is committed to building 50% of its homes for social rent, and 50% at market rent, and it plans to build hundreds of homes over the next few years—thousands, I hope, before too long. As my hon. Friend reminded the House, after world war two, social housing was built at a rate of well over 100,000 homes a year. The crisis today is just as bad as it was then, and we need that scale of ambition to deliver such a programme again.”
“We had “Faith in the City” in the 1980s, “Unemployment and the Future of Work” in the 1990s, and both those Church reports caught the mood of the times and profoundly influenced the policies of Governments. I hope that the archbishop’s housing commission report will do the same when it is published. We visited a family in my constituency—mum, dad and a young son—who are essentially living in one room in a ramshackle property above East Ham High Street. There is serious damp and a rat infestation. They have been there for five years, and both of the couple have been employed and were working in the NHS. Recently, a second child was born and, tragically, very soon died, probably because of the conditions in the home. That is how it is for thousands of people.”
“We are in the grip of a major housing crisis. You will not remember, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I can just remember “Cathy Come Home”, and the determination of our predecessors in the 1960s—this picks up on some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) in her excellent opening speech—that the lives of families should not be destroyed by housing misery. Today, lives are being destroyed again. One day—sooner, I hope, rather than later—we will again need a major national programme of council house building to give those families a chance. Last month, I had the privilege of hosting a visit to my constituency by members of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Housing, Church and Community.”
“Given the welcome change of the Prime Minister’s recognition of the benefits of migration, will he bring forward the reconsideration system proposed by the former Home Secretary, now Chancellor, for overseas students falsely accused of cheating in the English language test by the US firm ETS so that they finally have the chance to clear their name?”
“Professor Toumazou’s behaviour has been a disgrace, but has led to him being showered with wealth and honours. And I am sorry to say that Imperial has facilitated a shameful cover-up. Anyone planning pioneering scientific work, even at an institution as reputable as Imperial, needs to be aware of what can go wrong. Students’ IP should be protected. A change in the law, in my view, is going to be needed.”
“Mr Purushothaman’s invention achieved immense commercial success, which continues, for DNA Electronics, and great wealth and numerous awards and honours for Professor Toumazou. My constituent has had no benefit from his invention at all. Robbed of a promising career, he has endured over a decade of hardship. The central problem was that Imperial College’s intellectual property policy specifies, rightly, that any IP created by its students should be vested in the first instance in the college. In the case of Mr Purushothaman’s invention, that never happened; it was vested instead in Professor Toumazou’s company. That should never have happened. I have been writing to the provost of Imperial about this for over four years, but he has never been willing to meet to discuss it.”
“A third of the shares in DNA Electronics were vested in Mr Purushothaman. On completing his PhD, Mr Purushothaman finally left Imperial in March 2006. He was due to start GP training a few months later, but instead, tragically, he suffered a nervous breakdown brought on by the strain at Imperial. He was unable to work at all for over 10 years. He continued to receive demands from DNA Electronics, addressed to him as shareholder, adding to the pressure he was under. So in 2010 he handed all his shares over to the company, receiving no payment at all for them, and he agreed to have his name taken off a European patent of his work, leaving Professor Toumazou as apparently the main author. My constituent was in fact the sole author of that work.”
“My constituent has since discovered that there was no such pipeline agreement and that obtaining a PhD did not require him to write a patent application, still less to vest it in Professor Toumazou’s company. However, he felt that he had to do as he had been told, and so he did. Initially his idea was just a vague idea, but it proved to be a very good one and in 2004 he demonstrated it successfully. The demands of delivering it were immense, and it took Mr Purushothaman six very stressful and demanding years. He obtained his PhD in 2006. In August 2003, Professor Toumazou arranged the establishment of a company, Suniseq Ltd, subsequently DNA Electronics, to commercialise my constituent’s idea. Professor Toumazou instructed him to raise investment of £50,000 to buy the rights to his patent from Toumaz Technology.”
“Fascinated since childhood by electronics, he was very interested in its medical applications, so in 2000 he started a PhD at Imperial College, supervised by Professor Christofer Toumazou, who is now regius professor of engineering at Imperial. My constituent came up with the idea of using a common electronic device for DNA testing. Professor Toumazou thought it was a good idea but told my constituent that in order to obtain a PhD under his supervision, under the terms of what he called a “pipeline agreement” that he had with Imperial College, my constituent would have to write a patent for the new idea and to vest it in Professor Toumazou’s company.”
“I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Sweeney), and I commend the work that he has described, not least his campaign to save the Springburn works. Years ago, as a Minister in the Treasury and the then Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, I played my part in encouraging universities to commercialise their superb research outcomes. I think that was the right thing to do, but there is growing evidence that in some very prestigious institutions that approach can go badly wrong. My constituent Sunil Purushothaman qualified as a doctor at Guy’s Hospital in 1998 and worked as a doctor for two years.”
“(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will announce his decisions on the cases of overseas students falsely accused of cheating in ETS TOEIC—test of English for international communication—English language tests.”
“At the Home Affairs Committee on Monday, the Home Secretary suggested a new reconsideration system for TOEIC cases, although yesterday’s inadequate written statement did not even go as far as that. Does the Minister envisage a reconsideration system for those wrongly accused? When will it be set up? How will it operate? When will full details of it be announced? Would it not be better and easier just to allow students to take another secure English language test, and if they pass, to allow them to regain their visa status?”
“ETS’s records are confused, incomplete and often plain wrong. The professor of digital forensics at Birmingham City University told the all-party parliamentary group on TOEIC last month that it was “unsafe for anyone to rely upon computer files created by ETS…as a sole means of making a decision”, but those files are the only basis for the cheating allegations. Appeals were not allowed in the UK, but a growing number have convinced a court that they did not cheat. Immigration judge Lucas, dismissing the Home Office’s case of TOEIC cheating against one of my constituents, wrote last month that “the reality is that there is no specific evidence in relation to this Appellant at all.” This is a grave injustice that must be brought to an end.”
“By 2017, more than 35,000 refusal, curtailment and removal decisions had been made in ETS alleged cheating cases. Thousands of those accused and denied visas remain in the UK protesting their innocence. The Home Secretary, who I am delighted to see in his place, told the House three months ago: “We had a further meeting to make some final decisions just last week”. —[ Official Report , 1 April 2019; Vol. 657, c. 799.] However, there has still been no announcement. He said on Monday last week: “I am planning to come to the House with a statement to say much more before the summer recess.” —[ Official Report , 15 July 2019; Vol. 663, c. 586.] He has come to the House today, but we have not heard that statement. Thousands of students who have been falsely accused now face grave hardship and need this to be resolved urgently.”
“Will the Secretary of State confirm that the assessment of the National Cyber Security Centre is that the risk posed by Huawei equipment to the security of the 5G network is manageable and that that assessment is based on long experience and the unique experience of working with Huawei over 10 years, looking carefully at every Huawei product that comes on to the UK market? What is his estimate of the impact on the speed of 5G roll-out, which was rightly highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Tom Watson) as a critical question, of excluding Huawei equipment from that network?”
“Will the Secretary of State use this pilot to review thoroughly the impact of the catastrophic five-week delay policy in universal credit? It is forcing people to use food banks, as the Trussell Trust reports; forcing people into debt to her Department, because they have to take out what she calls an advance but is, in fact, a loan; and, as we have discovered over the past two or three weeks, opening up a bonanza for crooks and fraudsters who dupe people into taking out unwanted advances and claiming universal credit. Will she do a thorough assessment of the impact of the five-week delay as part of the pilot’s evaluation?”
“Is it not in everybody’s interests to get to the bottom of what went wrong here? Given that the Intelligence and Security Committee said that it could not produce a credible report, we surely do still need that judge-led inquiry.”
“My constituent Bibi Rahima said that “my life is just a prison” after she was accused of cheating in the test of English for international communication. She was overjoyed when she won her appeal in May, but I have written to the Home Secretary on her behalf again today to plead against a further appeal now being taken against her. I am certain she did not cheat, and the judge in her appeal in May said that “there is no specific evidence in relation to this Appellant at all.” Will Ministers now withdraw that cruel and pointless action?”
“When a Minister of the Crown stands at the Dispatch Box and says that something will be brought to the Chamber within 60 days, how should we understand such a commitment? Given the utter failure to deliver on this occasion, surely the House is entitled to a fuller explanation than the one the Minister has given so far, which is that this is terribly difficult?”
“Ministers have made one monumental misjudgment after another with universal credit. The five-week delay is forcing people into debt and dependency on food banks, and now we learn that it has opened up a bonanza for crooks and fraudsters. Will the Minister now urgently review the catastrophic five-week delay policy?”
“I am sorry to hear that. Brexit was supposed to deliver frictionless trade, the exact same benefits as the single market and the customs union and an extra £350 million a week for the NHS, but the Prime Minister was not able to deliver and any actual Brexit deal will fall far short of those promises. Should not the voters get the choice between proceeding on the basis of whatever deal is actually available or remaining?”
“The hon. Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy) is absolutely right. The Prime Minister failed in her aim to secure a continuing place for the UK on the European Data Protection Board, which oversees GDPR. Is it not a profoundly unsatisfactory aspect of the Prime Minister’s deal that, in that area and lots of others, we would have to comply with loads of EU rules over which we would have no influence at all?”
“My constituent Mr Rishikesh Kardile has been in custody since a business conference in Barcelona in February. Will the Minister’s officials ask the Indian Government to lift their extradition application so that he can return to his young son and family in my constituency and the matter can be resolved through the normal legal process?”