Dame Siobhain McDonagh
MP for Mitcham and Morden · Labour · United Kingdom
“Q5. In a capital city still scarred by the loss of 72 lives in the Grenfell fire, we have a second equally flammable and deadly risk. In bedrooms and corridors across London, low-paid deliverers for Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats are charging the tools of their trade: lethal lithium e-bike batteries.”
“I am therefore delighted that NHS London announced up to £57 million to expand and modernise St Helier’s emergency department. However, that cannot be the end. St Helier needs renewal. Only days later, there was an announcement that disrepair in the women’s services block meant that it would have to close.”
“The walk-in centre at the Wilson hospital in Mitcham, which once treated patients every day until midnight, even on Christmas day, has gone. Out-of-hours GP services have been reduced. Those patients have not disappeared; they now go to St Helier.”
“A number of constituents who work as nurses in the A&E department at St Helier hospital asked me to come to see for myself what they were dealing with. They asked me to come late on a Monday morning, rather than a Saturday or Sunday night as I had anticipated. What I saw was deeply troubling.”
“St Helier hospital has the fourth best maternity unit in the country, the only exclusively NHS-run assisted conception unit in south-west London, and a specialist gynaecology ward where nurses are highly trained in counselling. Yet all that is set to close next May because of the need for emergency repairs.”
“I thank the Petitions Committee and my friends from Brain Cancer Justice, who I affectionately think of as the provisional wing of the all-party parliamentary group on brain tumours. In July last year, we launched Margaret’s trial at University College London hospital.”
The complete record
Every one of 600 lines we hold for Dame Siobhain McDonagh, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 7 of 12.
“The best example is, of course, Jeff Fairburn of Persimmon, who got a bonus of more than £100 million when the company’s sales had been 50% financed by Help to Buy, or the British taxpayer. Whatever we have been doing as policymakers, it is clearly not working. Home ownership is lower than it was in 2003. On the current trajectory, it is unlikely to increase. Since the Conservatives came into power, 800,000 fewer households under 45 own their home, and nearly 1 million more people are renting. Fewer than 7,000 social homes were built in England last year, and 1.6 million households are waiting for social housing. Over the past 40 years, the overall social housing stock has declined by 1.4 million homes. Big numbers often mean very little, but I will talk about my borough of Merton, which is a small, outer London authority.”
“The job of the Government is to ensure that the houses that are needed are built. Let me turn to Help to Buy. I did think, “Dear God” when I read that the Government might be thinking of bringing back Help to Buy, which they sold to us as an equity loan to help first-time buyers get cash together to get on the housing ladder. Along with so many other policies, the most well-off have benefited the most. Instead of opening up home ownership to the next generation, all the scheme has done is to speed up slightly the purchase date for people who were already likely to buy, often via family help. More people on high incomes—those earning more than £80,000—have used the Help to Buy scheme than lower earners. The main effect of Help to Buy has been to inflate house prices and give very large bonuses to chief executives.”
“If we add the FTSE 350 house building companies, the collective land bank was a staggering 470,068 plots, and yet those companies completed just 86,685 homes in the previous year. Where is the punitive or preventive action to prevent this from happening? It is not the small and medium-sized firms that are doing this. Barratt Homes is Britain’s biggest land banker, and as of 2020, Barratt owned 80,324 land bank plots. Second on the list is Taylor Wimpey, which owns 77,000 land bank plots, and third is Persimmon, with 67,205. I do not blame Barratt or Taylor Wimpey or Persimmon. I blame the Government for creating an environment where it pays to leave land empty and undeveloped. The job of a private property developer is to make money. That is what we expect of a private business.”
“It is incredibly important to bring them back, and I am glad that the Labour Front Benchers have committed to doing just that. The Government might think that they are keeping nimbys happy and protecting local authorities, but I would like to give them some advice. They are betting current political support against the future. Current estimates suggest that only a third of the children born today will ever become homeowners. The English housing survey says that the proportion of homeowners aged 45 to 54 fell from 74% in 2009-10 to 65% in 2021-22, and it is estimated to fall to 30% in the year 2070. For young people aged 25 to 34, home ownership has fallen from 70% in the mid-1990s to 40% today. We must deal with land bankers. In 2019, the FTSE 100 house building companies were sitting on land banks of more than 300,000 plots between them.”
“There are 19,334 hectares of unbuilt green belt land within a 10-minute walk of a London train station, where there is enough space for 1 million new homes. We should be building affordable, good-quality homes on the land. Our best national estimates show that around 1.6 million households are waiting for social housing. Over the past 40 years, the overall social housing stock has declined by 1.4 million homes. We have a shortage of homes in this country and we cannot afford to prevent developments on land that is not really green. Previous speakers have already referred to housing targets. We all remember when the target of 300,000 new homes was scrapped. The Government gave in and scrapped mandatory house building targets for local authorities.”
“They house 10% of London’s population—that is one in 10 people in all homes, not just the rental market. The problem is that giant firms can buy land and sit on the asset for a number of years, whereas smaller firms do not have the funds for that and are much more likely to go out and get planning permission quickly so they can develop. To encourage those kinds of firms, we need to prevent the few large developers from dominating the market. We need to give smaller firms the planning support and access to finance that will give them a chance to compete. Much is being said about the green belt, but not all green belt is green. I do not mean the genuine rolling fields, ancient woodland or areas of substantial natural beauty. I am talking about the car washes, the waste plants and the scrubland that no one would ever dream of calling green.”
“At the heart of why small and medium-sized building firms are struggling is that they cannot compete with a few huge firms that have the scale and monopoly power to keep them out of the market. The eight largest house builders build more than 50% of all the new homes in the country, and the latest research suggests that small builders now produce just 10%. That was not always the case. In the 1980s, small firms were responsible for around two thirds of new homes, but since 2007, the number of small and medium-sized house builders has halved. The picture is similar in the housing association sector. Some 20% of housing associations account for 95% of all registered housing stock in the country. The top housing associations, known as the G15, dominate the London property scene and build one in four of all new homes in London.”
“I am making the point that the Government cannot possibly expect to deal with a housing crisis while constantly churning through housing Ministers. How can they possibly run the country’s plans to build housing and meet targets if there is a new housing Minister, on average, every nine months? When we debate the important question of why small and medium-sized house builders are struggling, a reasonable person might think it had something to do with the fact that we have had 14 housing Ministers in 10 years. I am having a great deal of fun doing this, as you can tell, Mr Robertson, but I want to be more constructive. In other words, I believe we should be taking on the big house-building monopolies.”
“Member for Esher and Walton (Dominic Raab), six months; the right hon. Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), 12 months; the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey), six months; the right hon. Member for Tamworth (Christopher Pincher) an unprecedented 23 months; the right hon. Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew), four months—back to normal business—the right hon. Member for Nuneaton (Mr Jones), nearly two months; the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire (Lee Rowley), nearly two months; and the right hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), three months. I welcome the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) to her role. She is already a veteran housing Minister compared to those on that list.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank the hon. Member for Northampton South (Andrew Lewer) for securing a debate about such an important issue, and it is good to see the housing Minister in her place today. I have taken part in a lot of Westminster Hall debates about housing under this Government and spoken to a lot of different housing Ministers over the past decade—14, to be precise. Since 2013, we have had the former Member for Hertford and Stortford, Mark Prisk, who lasted 13 months; and the former Member for Keighley, Kris Hopkins, who lasted 10. Impressively, the right hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Brandon Lewis) served a whole 24 months. The former Member for Croydon Central, Gavin Barwell, lasted 10 months; the right hon. Member for Reading West (Sir Alok Sharma), six months; the right hon.”
“I commend my hon. Friend on his speech on this really important issue. Does he agree that language is very important and that the word “affordable” suggests something that people on a normal income could afford? However, we all know that the word “affordable” in housing circles actually means 80% of market rent, which is unaffordable for most people. In some of the constituencies represented by Members present, that is unaffordable even for the Member themselves.”
“And the ants are obvious, crawling across the floor. Last week, when we beseeched the homeless department to move them somewhere else, the only place that it had to offer was in Reading. That family chose their ant-infested home over having to be moved many miles away from where they had any support or help. I give that example not because it is unique, but because it is absolutely appalling. Unless we do something, we will have more children die of damp and mould growth, and we will have more desperate families. We will pay for that not just in human lives but in taxpayers’ money well into the next century. It is time to do something now.”
“Once we remove a desperate, vulnerable family from their environment, there are consequences for the children in school attainment and attendance, and all sorts of other things. I say without any pleasure at all that, in the statistics of child mortality between 2019 and 2022, 34 children’s deaths were seen as a direct consequence of their temporary accommodation. I am happy to take the Minister to the temporary accommodation that many of the families that I represent have to live in. I will talk to the House about Mr and Mrs N. They live in a shed in the garden of a house in multiple occupation. They have the benefit of the fact that it is in Streatham, so only around the corner from my constituency. They have two rooms and four children. The smell in the bathroom is so appalling that, put simply, no one would want to enter it.”
“Also, when we use the word “temporary”—as I said earlier, language is important—at the moment it means five years. By the time we get to the end of five years, it will mean 10 years, or maybe 15 or 20 years—we just do not know. There is simply no way out of this appalling struggle. Currently, in England, 99,000 families—including 125,000 children—live in temporary accommodation. That is an increase of 71% between 2012 and 2018, and a further 41% between 2018 and 2022. I give hon. Members those figures so that they have some idea of the scale of the problem we are experiencing. In June 2022, 26,130 of those families were placed in a borough outside their home, taking their kids out of school, their families away from their support networks, and individuals from jobs and away from NHS facilities that they might desperately need.”
“There is a consequence to not building homes other than the numbers, and that is families living in temporary accommodation. That currently costs the UK taxpayer £1.6 billion a year. I do not know about other hon. Members in this Chamber, but I can think of a lot better ways to spend £1.6 billion. I stand to speak out of desperation from what I see every single Friday at my advice surgery. I represent half of the London borough of Merton, which is certainly not the London borough under the greatest pressure for housing or temporary accommodation, but since last April even Merton has seen a 41% increase in the numbers of people in temporary accommodation. The numbers are tiny in comparison with the 3,000 in Hackney, but our numbers have increased from 243 to 343 units.”
“One in eight of the staff in our nurseries is paid £5 an hour because they are too young for the national living wage. That is how nurseries manage to keep going.”
“The money offered by the Government for the current proposal is £240 million, but the Women’s Budget Group says it will cost £1.8 billion, and that famously Trotskyist organisation the CBI reckons it will cost £1.6 billion. The Women’s Budget Group believes that the total cost in September 2025 will be £9.4 billion. The amount paid by the Government will be £4.2 billion, so it will need more than half as much again to make the scheme work. We are either going to collapse the nurseries that currently exist because they will not have anybody to cross-subsidise with, or the places will not be there for those children. It is not about the mums and it is not about the nursery, so is it about the staffing? Our childcare works on the back of very young women being paid very little.”
“This scheme benefits only 600,000 of them, and more—729,000 of them—will have no benefit from these proposals. However, it is not just the mums and the families who are going to have a problem. The nurseries—the providers themselves—already have problems. We know that 5,400 nurseries have closed since 2021, because they simply could not make up for the increasing cost of gas, electricity and staffing or for the fact that the current free hours are not free to the provider. It costs about £7.49 an hour to keep a child in a nursery, but that is only subsidised to the tune of £5.50 by the Government’s plan. Promises have been made that the difference will be made up to prevent more nurseries from closing.”
“Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) said, find nothing in these proposals that is going to assist them, because they really click in in September 2024 and September 2025. We could cynically ask whether those dates have been arrived at because they will be after the general election and the current Chancellor may not have to deliver on the promises. More worryingly, the Sutton Trust has found that only 20% of the poorest third of families will benefit from the proposals. Those are the women and the families who need to work to improve their chances. We all agree that working is the best way out of poverty, or at least that it should be. In September 2024, there will be 1,369,000 children between the ages of nine months and two years.”
“At a time when we know that we need more people in the workforce, mothers are not entering it because they cannot afford to do so, even if they want to carry on working to develop their skills, they hope for a better career in the future or they simply need the money. Something that makes all of our constituents cynical about politicians and Government is when much is promised and little is delivered. When my friend Natasha and her husband Pete were watching the Budget, hoping for help with childcare costs for their two-year-old son Noah, they found none. They pay more in childcare than they pay on their mortgage. There will be many women who, as my hon.”
“At that point, another Labour MP who is no longer in this House turned to the Duke of Edinburgh and asked him to take a photograph of me, Betty and himself. I thought I was going to die—at least, I thought I was going to stop breathing. Everybody was silent, until Betty opened her arms and sprang into a rousing chorus of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”, while one of the Duke’s aides took him away so that he would no longer be offended. She was a character, and we all came along behind on her coattails. Just because Betty achieved, it does not mean that everybody could achieve. We know that the number of working mothers in our economy is in decline in the 21st century.”
“Woe betide anyone who did not respond to her invites within 48 hours, because the invite would be promptly withdrawn. I do not know whether it is apocryphal, but rumour had it that she stood at the door of her social evenings and watched you come in, and if you were not appropriately dressed, you were asked to leave. I have one last story about Betty. It was an extraordinary time in 1997, and we were all invited by Queen Elizabeth to go to Buckingham Palace. I do not know whether my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster Central (Dame Rosie Winterton) recalls it, but we arrived terrified. I walked into a room and I saw Betty Boothroyd. I knew that I knew her, so I could talk to her.”
“I wanted to start by saying a few words about the late Baroness Betty Boothroyd, because I think I may be the only Member currently in the Chamber who was here when she was Speaker. She was an extraordinary, indomitable, wonderful, tough and completely terrifying person to a new young MP—one of the 101 Labour women elected in 1997. She smashed her way through every glass ceiling that ever stopped her. She was a working-class woman, proud of her roots and of who she was, and she would let nothing get in her way. Betty led a very different House of Commons. When you came here in the morning, you did not know what time the House would go on to in the evening. You would be terrified to get one of the invites to her many social occasions; you had to be sure you had the appropriate outfit on the back of your door in case she did invite you.”
“Well-qualified and well-trained staff need to be paid properly. Childcare should not be the service that is provided on the back of the least well educated and the least well paid.”
“I completely agree with the right hon. Gentleman. I am sure that, like me, he gets emails from parents who are absolutely desperate because nurseries are closing at short notice and no alternatives are available. We think we have a problem in outer London, but the problem in Newcastle is even tougher. Some 90,700 staff have left the profession since 2018. The Women’s Budget Group—we thank it for all its efforts in getting these details—believes that for the Government to meet their plan, they need 38,000 more childminders and nursery workers. That does not happen by magic. It requires intervention. It requires the intervention of the businesses, but also the intervention of Government. We know, and we have known for years, that children benefit from the most well-qualified and well-trained staff.”
“I am sure the right hon. Member is also aware of allegations that a number of the people sanctioned have moved their money around into trusts to give to their children in order to avoid having their assets taken. Does he agree that the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill should be strengthened to require sanctioned individuals to disclose assets that were owned six months prior to their designation? That would prevent oligarchs such as Roman Abramovich from moving assets around and evading the sanctions.”
“The right hon. Gentleman was kind enough to participate in my Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall the other day. This is not just about oligarchs; it is about companies that are sanctions busting. I am aware of a Belarusian company that imports goods through Russia in order to undermine and take customers from a business in my constituency. Does he agree that, whether it is an oligarch or a business, the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation and the Foreign Office should be adaptable and able to react to rogue actors, who will do everything possible to avoid the sanctions regime?”
“My right hon. Friend refers to the average length of survival as being 18 months. Actually, it is nine months. His figure suggests that everybody completes treatment. Nine months is the life expectancy of somebody diagnosed with glioblastoma.”
“It is what I have learned from my family, what I have learned from my faith, and what I have learned from my politics. I accept my responsibility. All that I want is for the NHS, cancer research charities, and pharmaceutical companies to stand up and accept their responsibility, and give some hope to the 3,200 people who will be diagnosed with a glioblastoma this year.”
“We must have access to trials for 200 people and the training of medical oncologists, and we must require the pharmaceutical industry—because we will make no progress without it—to trial every drug that gets licensed to deal with tumours on those with brain tumours, so that there is access to existing drugs that can be repurposed. I am sorry about the time I have taken for this speech, but I want to tell the House that when I go to bed tonight I will keep my ear open for Margaret to hear her call my name, I will get up and I will go into her room, and it may be that she is asleep and I have imagined that she has called me. I accept that. That is my duty. It is what I have learned from my family, from my faith and from my politics. I accept that. That is my duty.”
“Some 15 years ago, the survival rates were so poor, but somebody came up with the idea that immunotherapy would be successful, and today we see successful survival rates equivalent to the best in any discipline. We also see young doctors wanting to take on the specialism, because it is exciting, there is hope, there is a future and there are alternatives. Who in their right mind today would become a medical oncologist in glioblastoma? There is no hope, no future, no trials—nothing. It would have to be someone with the belligerence and tenacity of my sister Margaret, and we have found that person in Paul Mulholland, but there needs to be more Pauls and more determination.”
“I ask the Minister to please not give the NHS or the cancer research charities any more money until they guarantee that at least 200 sufferers every year get access to a trial—that would be 1,000 patients over the lifetime of a Parliament—because with those trials we can begin to understand what works and what does not. The Minister should give no more money to the NHS trainers until they commit that every young doctor training to be a medical oncologist has to go through a course on brain tumour. At the moment, there is no compulsory training. The reason why there is nobody on those wards and nobody doing the work is that we are training nobody, and we are training nobody because nobody is required to do the course, and it was like that 15 years ago with melanoma.”
“Those who know about Margaret’s experience have come to me and sought support from Dr Mulholland because there is nothing else. The number that the NHS is currently forsaking and, for the lucky people who can get the funds to do it, abandoning to international travel is nothing short of a complete and utter national scandal. I wonder what my mum who came here in 1947 to train as part of the first generation of NHS nurses from Ireland would say about the NHS abandoning her daughter. But things can be different. Things can be better—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, and maybe not within Margaret’s lifetime—and they can be different if we want them to be different.”
“The help that we received from Dr Sahinbas and his wife, who runs their small clinic in Germany, with hyperthermic treatment was amazing. Their kindness was overwhelming, but there were times when I thought that I would not be able to get Margaret on the plane—that somebody would stop her because she was so unwell. There was one night when I stayed and stared at her, because I did not think she was going to make it through the night, and how would I explain that to anybody? By June 2022, Margaret had a scan, and they could not see the tumour. When I asked Dr Mulholland, “Is this normal for this treatment?”, he said, “Normal? I have never tried this on anybody before.” Nobody has ever had this drug so early in their treatment or at the quantity that Margaret has had it, or at the same time as hyperthermia therapy.”
“It is not that there are a few trials: there are no trials, and there is nowhere to go. So, like so many of us who are lucky enough to have friends and family and access to money, we looked to the private sector and international travel. Margaret has been on a course of treatment with nivolumab, a Bristol Myers Squibb drug that was seen to be unsuccessful in the treatment of brain cancer, and Avastin, and has been going monthly to Düsseldorf, Germany for four days. That might seem an easy thing to do, but taking a seriously ill person on an aeroplane to a hotel, with no access to healthcare and no emergency services, would be foolhardy unless there was nothing else in this country. There was, and is, nothing.”
“That drug was introduced in 2005, and since then there have been no variations to the gold-standard treatment in our NHS, so when you read articles such as the one in The Times on Monday, telling us all how successful cancer treatment in the UK is—how 85% of people with a breast cancer diagnosis, 55% of people with a bowel cancer diagnosis, and 98% of people with a prostate cancer diagnosis will get to live for 10 years—do not believe that it is the same for brain cancer. The Times may have chosen a brain as the photograph for the top of the article, but those statistics do not apply. Margaret had her treatment in early new year 2022; like so many, she could not go through with it—the treatment would have killed her. At that point, where do you go? There were no alternatives.”
“I leave it to Members to guess my reaction to that, and how we got that operation in the end. The best piece of advice I have ever received in my life, and I have received many bits of good advice, was from the clinical nurse specialist. When we asked her where Margaret should go for post-operative treatment— St George’s, down the road from where we live; the Royal Marsden, around the corner; or to stay at University College—Róisín said, “We have Professor Paul Mulholland, and he is the best. He is the best in the UK, and he is the best in Europe.” I want to confirm to the House that he is the best. He is why Margaret is still alive. What you get when you have your tumour removed, if you live that long—many people do not—is six weeks’ radiotherapy, followed by six months’ chemotherapy with a drug called temozolomide.”
“For the woman who had run Labour’s only two consecutive successful general election campaigns, and achieved her ultimate ambition to see two full-term Labour Governments, the diagnosis was of a glioblastoma. All her toughness evaporated, and there was my little sister with a diagnosis that meant that she might have nine months left—a condition for which there was no cure, for which treatment had not made progress in over 30 years. Just before Christmas, she had the tumours removed by two amazing female surgeons, Róisín Finn and Anna Miserocchi at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, but this was post Brexit, so there were not enough nurses to keep all the operating theatres open, and Margaret’s operation was cancelled three times.”
“I crave the indulgence of the House for the speech that I am about to make. On 27 November 2021, my beautiful, unique, tough, resilient, successful sister collapsed in front of me and had a series of fits. Five hours later, in University College Hospital, two doctors named Henry told me that they suspected that she had a brain tumour, but as this was the NHS, MRI scans were not done at the weekend, so they could not confirm their diagnosis. On Wednesday, when I stepped on to her ward, she demanded—and everybody here who knows her will be able to hear her say it—that I ask the ward doctor to come and speak to her. She said, “It’s bad, Siobhain, because he can’t look at me.” And it was.”
“I agree that we must isolate both Belarus’s and Russia’s economies and target the key industries that support President Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered sanctions and tariffs on Belarus and Russia. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Fovargue. Sanctions and the war in Ukraine have been given a great deal of attention, and rightly so. It is fitting that just downstairs in Westminster Hall, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, was able to address parliamentarians from both sides of the House. Members of all parties have been united in their response to the illegal invasion of Ukraine, and I hope we can continue that cross-party consensus today. I want to make it clear that I have not held this debate to undermine the Government’s policies on sanctions and tariffs against Russia and Belarus. I am on board with the policy.”
“I agree with the hon. Member. The sanctions regime is integral to Britain’s role in supporting Ukraine and holding Putin’s regime accountable for the acts of violence that it continues to perpetrate against civilians across Ukraine.”
“The Government then introduced additional tariffs of 35% on Belarusian and Russian goods, which made it clear that the decision by those businesses was not just the moral thing to do but the right thing to do from a business perspective—that is, if the sanctions and tariffs were implemented effectively. Unfortunately, they were not. The original Belarusian supplier is now managing to circumvent the sanctions and is continuing to import banned products. It is also able to pay the relatively low additional tariff of 35% with ease, so it can operate very competitively in the market. The British group, based in my constituency, has played by the rules and has had to find a more expensive manufacturer elsewhere in Europe.”
“Prior to the war, the businesses were, in part, the sole and exclusive distributors of a Belarusian manufacturer. They imported and distributed aluminium extrusions and products from Belarus. For example, they supplied components for roller garage doors—not the most glamorous of products, I agree, but over 10 years these British businesses had grown their revenue to £30 million per annum. Over 10 years, they had managed to supply 30% to 50% of roller garage doors in the UK using their components. Then, the war in Ukraine happened. In response, the businesses did the right thing. They decided to abandon their exclusive contract with the Belarusian manufacturer and sourced their components from elsewhere in Europe—a decision that was expensive, risky and lengthy but nevertheless the right thing to do.”
“I agree with the hon. Member entirely. This winter, the people of Ukraine carried on through the difficult war that they face, and we need to back their bravery by being brave and bold with sanctions and tariffs. However, the joint sentiments are worthless if things do not happen in practice, and sadly this is the case for a business group in my constituency. I recently met SGG Manufacturing Ltd, JDUK Ltd and Alunet Systems Ltd—a small group of wholly UK-owned businesses that I am glad to see represented here today. They are based in a number of MPs’ constituencies—particularly that of the hon. Member for Dewsbury (Mark Eastwood), who apologises that he is unable to attend, but he is absolutely on board with the case that I am about to raise.”
“I hope that the Minister can provide more information about that and explain how we will close the loopholes that Russia and Belarus are using. We can have the toughest regime on paper, but if Russia and Belarus are finding ways round it in practice and costing UK businesses, we have not done the right thing. I ask the Minister to address the detail and the consequences for British business. If he is in a position to do so, I would welcome it if he gave a few minutes after the debate to the businesses that are here today.”
“However, it makes a difference only if the detail is correct. The sanctions are effective only if the product lists are drawn up effectively and we are able to target Belarusian and Russian businesses. Tariffs are effective only if they are high enough to make goods originating from a country uncompetitive. In the recent co-ordinated package of sanctions by the US, EU and UK, only the US increased tariffs on metals by up to 200%. As we know, Putin and his cronies will be seeking every single loophole, omission and error to try to circumvent the sanctions. It is quite clear that Russia and Belarus are actively trying to get round sanctions and absorb tariffs on an industrial scale. Currently, companies are claiming that their goods originate in Russia to avoid sanctions. That is absurd.”
“This will have a different name and a commodity code which can be imported to the EU and the UK.” The company can change the commodity code to one that is allowed to enter the UK from Belarus, and it can evade sanctions altogether. The most egregious part is that the Belarusian company is now approaching the former customers of the British business in my constituency and offering to supply them directly, profiting and expanding its business because of the war in Ukraine. It is just unbelievable. If that is happening in one company, surely it is happening in a number of businesses right across the UK. It is important that President Zelensky comes to Parliament to speak, that our Opposition and Government leaders visit Kyiv and that we all get together to stress how strong our sanctions and tariffs need to be.”
“I am glad that the Foreign Office Minister is present today, and I hope that the sanctions list is updated, because it is costing a business in my constituency millions of pounds. In other cases, this Belarusian company is assigning its products a new, intentionally incorrect but unsanctioned commodity code, enabling it to import to the UK sanction-free. I got hold of an email from this company to one of its customers to prove that. The measures are quite technical, so I hope hon. Members will forgive me if I go through them in a little detail. The company stated: “We are looking for a way to supply you with roll tubes which are currently banned from entering the EU due to their commodity code 7308905900, and it seems like we have found an option. We can bundle the roll tubes with other items.”
“It stated: “We would like to clarify the situation with regard to the current import of sectional doors and operators to the UK.” The company says: “Since the UK Government has introduced economic trade and transport sanctions on Belarus,” it has “imported garage doors from our Russian factory”. It states that “shipments fully comply with import restrictions by the Government of the United Kingdom in the last months.” There we have it. Because of the way our sanctions list has been drawn up, Belarusian companies are avoiding sanctions. They are manufacturing and shipping products that were originally from Belarus, and are now supposedly from Russia, to avoid the sanctions.”