Sir Christopher Chope
MP for Christchurch · Conservative · United Kingdom
“When was the last time that an allotted Opposition day was withdrawn in the way that the Leader of the House is withdrawing this one? I was looking at my calendar of business, otherwise known as the Order Paper, and it says that “The selection of the matters to be debated will be made by the Leader of the Opposition (Standing Order No.”
“The Climate Change Committee has condemned the Government for failing and falling short of adapting to climate change and accepting the reality as it is, which is that by the end of this century, global temperatures will have increased to between 3.5° and 4.5° above pre-industrial levels.”
“The Minister has referred to the grooming gangs inquiry carried out by our friend, the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe), and early-day motion 380 makes a number of recommendations. Will the Minister engage with the hon.”
“The landmark 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence by the United States takes place in the week commencing 29 June. I have applied for an Adjournment debate, but will the Leader of the House enable more Members to be able to participate in marking that historic event?”
“That is exactly what I did on behalf of my constituent Paul Kenchington: I wrote to the Secretary of State about the specialist steel that he uses, and I have not had a reply.”
“Next week, can the Leader of the House produce a Government statement in response to the Hallett review on covid-19 vaccines? Lady Hallett recommended major reform of the vaccine damage payment scheme.”
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“I have exercised my discretion to allow the debate to go a little longer, because the next debate has been withdrawn. Question put and agreed to . Resolved , That this House has considered support for children and families during the covid-19 outbreak.”
“We need a clear explanation from the Minister why this very important activity, which is designed to save lives and save public expenditure, has not been funded to a much better extent already within the Prison Service. One of the great benefits of such a Bill is that it gives us a chance to discuss the policy background. I hope that, if the Bill gets to Committee and we do not get satisfactory answers, we will have a chance to explore it further on Report. I certainly support its Second Reading.”
“The cost to society of illegal drugs and substances being not just within prisoners inside the prison but within drug-dependent people who are released from prison is far in excess of £4.4 million. It almost seems as though the Home Office is giving some sort of perverse incentive to the Prison Service not to do more testing because it will be too expensive. It seems to me that of all the benefits that could come from the expenditure of money, few could deliver better rewards for society than higher expenditure and more testing in prisons of those who are suspected of having drugs and other illegal substances. Therefore, although the explanatory notes say that we will have a money resolution for additional expenditure, it is envisaged that it will not be very much.”
“We seem to be able to get a lot of procurement pretty quickly under the covid-19 emergency legislation, so why can we not deal with the monopoly problem in the Prison Service drug testing system? The explanatory notes suggest that “Affordability will depend on achieving much better value for money from the new contract.” If we are going to get new a new contract, why not get on with it now? Why is the specification for a new contract not being drawn up? Perhaps the Minister would like to place a copy of the draft specification in the Library so that we can see whether it will attract more than one bidder and save a significant amount of money. It is amazing that so little money is being spent on this drug testing. The explanatory notes say that the current budget for mandatory drug testing is just £4.4 million.”
“It seems to me, as so often happens with private Member’s legislation, particularly when it has the support of the Government, that instead of concentrating on the real issue, which is the prevalence of drugs in prisons—there is already the power to test for that, but testing is not being carried out frequently enough—we are moving into saying that we need to test for other substances as well. I am sure that we do, but the same paragraph of the explanatory notes says that the Prison Service drug testing procurement exercise currently taking place—we heard earlier from the hon. Member for West Ham (Ms Brown) that there is a monopoly supplier, which is in itself unhealthy—is not scheduled to conclude until December 2021. Why is that? What is the delay?”
“There is a minimalist approach and tokenism in relation to testing for drugs, because many prison officers take the view that it is better to have drug-dependent prisoners because they are less trouble. Why do we still have a situation where we are trying in vain to stop drugs coming across the borders into our country from overseas when we have proved ourselves incapable of preventing a single prison in this country from being infiltrated by illegal drugs?”
“We have been discussing a lot of policy failures in this House recently centred around the Department of Health and Social Care, but there has been, and is, a continuing policy failure on the part of the Home Office not to enable people to stay in prison without being addicted to drugs. The one way of dealing with that is to have regular testing. I was most concerned to see in the explanatory notes the financial implications of the Bill. Paragraph 29 states that “the legislation would not significantly affect the practice of drug testing in England and Wales, so any financial impact would be modest.” I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us why she does not believe that the present practice should be changed, because at the moment, a sort of game is being played within prisons.”
“One of my concerns is that when one talks to people who have been in prison and know the Prison Service, one finds that a lot of prisons seem to be rather relaxed about the current regime for drug testing. The Bill extends the substances in respect of which there can be testing, but why are we not already testing a lot within prisons? I have constituents who have served time in prison and have come as drug addicts having gone in without having a drug addiction. Too much of that is going on, and I would like to know from the Minister why there is this manifest policy failure.”
“I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan) on bringing forward the Bill; it is a pity that she is unable to be here physically to support it today. This is a good Bill, but I will say a few things about where I think we could make it better. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have been in this House for some time and one of the perpetual challenges that I have put out to successive prisons Minsters is, “I hope that during your time as prisons Minister you will be able to deliver not drug-free prisons, but just one prison in this country that is free of drugs.” The short answer is that none of my right hon. and hon. Friends who have held that position has ever been able to achieve a single drug-free prison as an objective, and likewise, Labour Ministers were unable to deliver that.”
“When the electronic system was introduced in 2009, why did the Government decide not to abandon the hard copy record? Surely the reason was that it was a safeguard. Hard copies are an essential safeguard, are they not?”
“In terms of the need to pass these records on up through the lines, from the area manager to the regional manager and then to the top dog, I think that is a very sensible reform, but dispensing totally with the written record will save only £20 million over 10 years. The other savings to which he referred are from the other streamlining processes set out in his Bill. I have no problem with those, but I question whether, for £2 million a year, it is worth taking the risk both in terms of opening up fraud and damaging the potential for future generations to be able to examine this period of our history, which is much easier to do with hard-copy, written records than it is with electronic data.”
“I think most of us will have safes at home where we keep our birth certificates for ourselves and our children, our marriage certificates, our passports, our driving licences, exam certificates, degree certificates and so on. The reason we do that is that we have the security of having a hard copy, instead of having to faff around trying to get duplicate copies. How can we be sure that the back-up system, which will now become the main system under my right hon. Friend’s Bill, will be 100% reliable and proof against fraud? My right hon. Friend identifies savings, and obviously any savings that come from efficiency are good.”
“If that was not just a general proposition, it was brought home to me last evening because I was talking to my wife and she showed me an email that she has had from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency saying that her driving licence details need to be updated. She looked at the email and saw that the details registered were not correct. She tried to change the details but could not. Suffice it to say that, in those details, there are names of foreign people and suggestions that my wife’s driving licence record has now been tampered with and been the subject perhaps of fraud or forgery. I cite that as a topical example of what happens if we become wholly reliant upon electronic systems.”
“Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones) identified two concerns: the risk of identity fraud associated with the registration of births, and the problems that there already are in the reliability of the Registration Online system. We have a registration system at the moment and there is a back-up, which is the hard copies. What this Bill is going to do is to deprive us of that back-up. I am sure there are hon. Friends who run their constituency offices on the basis that it is all purely electronic, but I certainly do not, and I have good reason not to do that because on so many occasions the electronic systems fail and we need to rely on the hard copy back-up.”
“I am not sure that we wanted our parents to give us really popular Christian names, but I note that my parents had the foresight to give me the same Christian name as my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder), so that was obviously a good thing. We are 152nd in the league table. I predict that it will not be long before we are about 1,000th in the league table because obviously Christopher is a name that has Christ in it, and I fear that the Christian emphasis in our society is on the decline, rather than on the increase, but that is by the bye. The Bill of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) is one about which I have considerable concerns. The hon.”
“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his confidence. I approach this sort of legislation in a constructive frame of mind. One point occurred to me when he referred to draft regulations. In due course, we will all be able to see these draft regulations. Although they would be affirmative resolution regulations, we know that we would not be able to amend them. I ask my right hon. Friend: would it be possible, by the time that the Bill reaches Committee, as I expect it to, for us to have a draft of those regulations so that we can look at them in Committee alongside his Bill? That practice has often been supported by Ministers, and I think that he would support it as well.”
“Friend will be able to explain what has happened in the last 10 or 11 years that has removed the necessity for the safeguards which this House thought were absolutely essential back in 2009.”
“I look forward to seeing these assurances in Committee, but it would be helpful and desirable that we should be able to give them a line by line examination, rather than just rely on expressions of good intention. I go back to the point that I made in an intervention on my right hon. Friend’s speech. When the legislation was changed in 2009 to allow electronic records to be kept, safeguards were in place. Who could object to the establishment of electronic records if we were going to retain the hard copy written records? Now, just over 10 years later, we see that that safeguard, which was fundamental to the change then, is being removed and without, it seems, any justification. I hope that, in due course, my right hon.”
“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that assurance. We are talking about fraud and forgery. We know from our own constituency records that it is rife. Action Fraud is incapable of dealing with all the fraud cases that come before it. Most of our local police forces are incapable and under-resourced to deal with the fraud, which is rife. It never used to be part and parcel of British society that we assumed that people were fraudulent until proved otherwise, but we have almost got to that stage now. Elderly people are receiving phone calls and most of them seem to be to try to con the individual out of some money. There is every incentive for fraud where we are talking about birth certificates and certificates of registration, which give us our identity. What could be more fundamental than that?”
“Can my right hon. Friend tell the House the effect of the measure on dealing with people trafficking and modern slavery registration? Has it resulted in less of that illegal activity or has it not made any difference at all?”
“I asked on 8 October whether the Government would publish the evidence in support of the Secretary of State’s statement on 1 October that if the Government just let the virus rip “hundreds of thousands of deaths…would follow” —[ Official Report , 1 October 2020; Vol. 681, c. 503.] there has been no answer to that question—no attempt to answer it—nor has there been any justification for the arbitrary introduction of a 10 o’clock curfew.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Taiwo Owatemi), and I share very much her frustration at the impossibility of getting clear answers from the Government on so many of these important questions. “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves”— those words from William Pitt were included in an email from one of my constituents complaining about the way in which this Government are treating the constituents in Christchurch and so many other people in this country. What is the necessity for what the Government are bringing forward today?”
“It will not have escaped your notice, Mr Deputy Speaker, that since those regulations were brought in, there has been an exponential increase in the infection rate in this country. Have I had an answer to that question? Of course not, which suggests that the Government do not even want to face up to the evidence that face coverings are counterproductive and are leading to a false sense of security. In Sweden, two thirds of all deaths from covid-19 have been in the over-80 age group. That is similar to the situation here, and all the United Kingdom restrictions have so far given the average member of this country—the UK citizen—is an extra half-day of life. These new restrictions that are coming in will not even give that, because the collateral damage that is being caused will actually reduce life expectancy further.”
“Again, I have not had an answer, although the time when it should have been answered has long passed. This is intolerable—the arrogance with which the Government are treating us as elected Members of this place. Swedish common sense is to the fore. They have restricted gatherings not to six, but to 50. They allow nursing homes to decide their own visiting policies. They regard the rules about face coverings as simplistic and irrelevant. Again, on face coverings, I tabled a parliamentary question on 25 September asking the Secretary of State “whether the introduction of regulations requiring the use of face coverings was linked to an increase in infection rates of covid-19”.”
“I do not trust them at all. I shall refer to the evidence from Sweden, because the Prime Minister’s challenge to his critics was to put forward an alternative. The Swedish approach is clear and simple—it is to trust the people and make them responsible for their own health and welfare. I looked at the figures for Sweden for the first week of October. Only seven deaths were recorded in Sweden in the whole of that period and today, not a single death was recorded there. The Swedish Public Health Agency recommends that household isolation and quarantine should exclude those who have provisionally tested positive for covid-19 or have been confirmed to have antibodies in the last six months. I tabled a question asking why that category of people cannot be exempt from these regulations.”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that one way of bringing the Government to account would be to withhold our support until these important questions are answered?”
“Before we start this debate, may I remind Members that only those on the call list are able to participate? We have five right hon. and hon. Members in Westminster Hall at the moment, and that will be the maximum number who can participate in this debate. That means that even if the debate looks as though it is going short, others who are not on the call list will not be able to join us.”
“On that point, can the hon. Gentleman tell the House of the present state of negotiations with the official Opposition about a debate on the 10 o’clock curfew? The suggestion was that there would be a debate tomorrow on the curfew, but it is not going to be about that—it is going to be about what is happening in the north. Can the hon. Gentleman tell the House what progress there has been?”
“I am sure a Home Office Minister would have been able to do so, but what that underlines is that we are talking about draconian powers that are restricting the liberty of the British citizen. We should not be introducing draconian powers without the strongest possible justification, and I do not think the Minister has set out any justification in her remarks.”
“The justification given in the letter that was sent, as all letters have to be sent by the Secretary of State if the Government are ignoring the rules of this House, by the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care was that these amendments were so urgent that he had not had time to bring them in earlier, but he said in the last paragraph, “I hope you understand why we proceeded in this way, and I look forward to working with you to strengthen parliamentary scrutiny of these measures in future.” The Minister who has been charged with dealing with this debate, despite the fact that these regulations were actually—brought in by the Home Office the Home Secretary introduced them—could not answer my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) as to whether there were going to be powers of entry, arrest and so on.”
“They must have been drafted over a period of weeks, I would suggest, but after the Prime Minister made his statement to a press conference on the Wednesday and the Secretary of State made a statement on the Thursday, I raised a point of order on the Friday to ask, “Where are these regulations, because they are coming into effect on Sunday evening?” In the end, they were not laid in this House until 10.30 am on the Monday morning. That is absolutely intolerable.”
“If I had had the chance to speak to Professor Lockdown, I would have said that actually what he should have been saying was that our Government should be trusting the people. I think the Swedish Government are trusting the people and the people of Sweden are responding positively, enabling Sweden to have a much more thriving economy than ours because they have not got so many arbitrary restrictions imposed upon them. I hope the message that the Minister will take back is that we should be looking at this in terms of trusting the people and applying common sense, and a lot of these regulations manifestly do not achieve that objective. These regulations were brought in on a whim.”
“It is also inconsistent with the advice even coming from Professor Lockdown, who on the radio this morning was absolutely clear that the risks from the virus were much greater in an indoor setting than in an outdoor setting. So these regulations are arbitrary, unfair, unjustified by the evidence, unenforceable and counterproductive in undermining public confidence in Government and in the rule of law. In the interview on the “Today” programme this morning with Professor Lockdown, he was asked about the contrast between what we are doing and what people are doing in Sweden. He said that, of course, there was not much difference in the issues about social distancing and compliance, but what was important was that in Sweden the people trusted the Government, and that is why they have been able to manage with far less in terms of regulation.”
“Big Brother Watch has quoted human rights barrister Adam Wagner, who said that these are “the most complex and convoluted set of lockdown regulations on England yet.” That is hardly simple regulation, is it? We know that the Home Secretary herself was caught out and unable to give a convincing answer to the question of what was defined as mingling. In the time available, I am going to say that I agree absolutely with the criticisms that have been made about the definition of families and young people, but I want to concentrate on another big anomaly in these regulations, which is that they apply equally to gatherings inside and outside. Why do they do that, because that is completely inconsistent with the Government’s own advice to themselves?”
“The logic of what the hon. Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Justin Madders) has just been saying is that the Opposition should be opposing the regulations and calling upon the Government to come back with a fresh set of regulations that overcome the shortcomings he has so articulately identified. I, for my part, certainly hope we will have an opportunity to test the will of the House on the regulations, because this is the first freedom we have been given on such regulations for months. I hope we can then get the Government to go back to the drawing board and come forward with regulations that are consistent with their other policies elsewhere in the country. These are complex regulations.”
“That was common sense—but we are not allowed to look at it now. I was much taken by the article in today’s Times by Clare Foges, who talks about the approach in Sweden—not just the technical side of it. In Sweden, they think of public health not just in terms of death and awful problems in hospitals but in terms of living life to the full. That is why I believe that the Government must now make it their strategy to enable us to live with the virus and without fear.”
“Thus, discussion of impacts is largely focussed on unmonetised considerations.” However, it says that each individual case brought forward “would require judgement on the specific impacts at that time.” That has not been provided, and it means that we have had a whole lot of unintended consequences. When I was at university in Scotland, closing time was 10 o’clock. I could have told somebody that if we returned to a 10 o’clock closing time in a Scottish university city or town, it was likely to result in the consequences we have seen. Why were the rules in relation to early closing in Scotland changed? Because that restriction was leading to people coming out on to the streets having got themselves totally drunk, and to a lot of violence. Extending the opening hours well beyond 10 o’clock mitigated that violence.”
“They say, “Oh, we need to keep it just in case.” That is why, in an Adjournment debate on 2 September, I demanded that if the Government were going to keep the regulations, it should be on the basis that there were proper regulatory impact assessments for them. We do not have those regulatory impact assessments. It is all most unsatisfactory. I quote again from the introduction to the original notes on the Coronavirus Bill, which states: “For many of the clauses, it is difficult to predict how a power would be used in a specific context, and therefore what the monetised costs would be.”
“You will recall, Madam Deputy Speaker, that when we were told six months ago that it was necessary to rush legislation through, it was on the basis that we wanted to prevent our NHS from being overwhelmed, with people dying from covid in hospital corridors and not being able to access the care that they needed. Fortunately, as a result of the emergency measures that were taken, that scenario never arose. People were taken to hospital, and they received the very best treatment in hospital and continue so to do. The original objective of the legislation has been achieved, but, as so often happens with regulation brought in by Governments, they want to keep it.”
“In their introduction to that, they said that there would be “safeguards to ensure proper oversight and accountability” by Parliament. There has not been that proper oversight and accountability, and now, two days before a crucial vote on the renewal of the Coronavirus Act 2020, they come forward with this welcome debate. I will support the amendment to the motion on Wednesday tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) if it is selected. If it is not, I still hope that the Government will respond positively to the spirit of that amendment. However, even if the amendment is carried, I am not yet persuaded that I need to support the continuation of the Coronavirus Act. Why am I not persuaded of that? Because the Government are guilty of covert mission creep.”
“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mike Hill), and I am sorry to hear about the problems afflicting so many of his constituents in Hartlepool. It was great to be in the Chamber when my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) addressed us earlier. I am privileged to be one of his constituents, and I can tell you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that when he speaks in this Chamber in the way that he did today, he speaks for tens of thousands of his constituents, not to mention hundreds of thousands elsewhere in the country. I welcome this debate, but I note that it has come almost as a panic measure by the Government because they suddenly looked at the promises that were made at the time they introduced the Coronavirus Bill six months ago.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that what he has just said applies particularly to the university environment, where this year more university students will probably die from meningitis than from covid-19?”
“Following up on that point, is it right that the regulator already has problems with codes of practice and conduct? The annual report refers to the fact that there has been a delay in publishing issue 5 of those codes but that it will be published in early 2020. Has it now been published? Why are those non-statutory codes not sufficient?”
“The Home Office, which funds the regulator, also funds the police service. If the Home Office talks to the regulator, why has the Home Office not been successful in persuading 12 police organisations to comply with the codes prepared by the regulator? I do not understand what is going on. I hope that when the Minister responds he will explain why there is this dichotomy: the Government say that they support the Bill because we need a statutory regulator, but at the same time they seem to have been doing nothing to try to bring the recalcitrant police forces into compliance.”
“It is one thing to say that the regulator has the powers, has been using them and has not been able to make them work so needs them to be put on a statutory footing, but is not clear to me that the existing regulator has been using the available non-statutory powers. Let me give an example. In her annual report, the Forensic Science Regulator says, in paragraph 2.1 on compliance with the regulator’s codes of practice and conduct: “The number of organisations that have demonstrated compliance with the Codes has now risen to 42. This leaves approximately 17 organisations in England & Wales that hold accreditation to ISO 17025 but not the Codes and are regularly practising forensic science in the CJS”— the criminal justice system. She goes on: “Of these, 12 are in policing”.”
“What a pleasure it is to follow the hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), whom I congratulate on introducing the Bill and addressing this subject following his success in the private Member’s ballot. I am sure we all agree that we want a fine, good-quality forensic service. The hon. Gentleman made the point that we need the regulator to take action to improve quality. I am sceptical, because we have had a regulator in place since 2007 and it has the powers to bring in codes of practice and, in essence, to encourage, by one method or another, people to comply with those codes. The Bill refers to the introduction of statutory codes of practice that would have to be subject to consultation, but it is not clear to me whether the existing powers have been used sufficiently.”
“I am fascinated by my hon. Friend’s response. The chief constable of Dorset is the lead chief constable on this very subject. Perhaps following today’s debate I will be able to have a conversation with him on this matter; but I still despair, really, that it is necessary for this House to intervene to get the police to do what we and an independent regulator think is the right thing for them to do.”
“How does that compare with the estimate given when my hon. Friend the Member Bolton West (Chris Green) introduced his Bill in the 2017-19 Session? The explanatory notes for that Bill said: “An impact assessment has been conducted by the Home Office. The Home Office estimates that the statutory powers of the Regulator will cost an average of £100,000 per year in addition”. How is it that in the space of just two years the Home Office’s estimate of the cost of this legislation has quadrupled? And how, on that basis, can we rely on any of its promises about what the costs will be? I do not know whether in due course we will have a separate debate on the financial side of this Bill—I imagine that we would need a money resolution—but perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister can answer that point now.”
“Obviously police forces face constraints, but ensuring that the best quality forensic evidence is presented in the court system should be the top priority. Why should that be relegated as a lesser priority? My view would therefore be: yes, it is very important, but chief constables should be addressing that issue. I am slightly sceptical about the need for this Bill, and my scepticism was increased when I looked at the regulator’s annual report and saw that her budget, supplied by the Home Office, runs to only about £400,000 in total admin expenditure for a year. What will be the costs of this legislation, which the Minister is supporting? We are now told in the explanatory notes that it will add about £400,000 a year to the costs of the Home Office, so the admin budget for the forensic regulator would be doubled.”
“I am very grateful to my hon. Friend, and I look forward to hearing the outcome of his further enquiries. His strategy seems to be to suppress my scepticism by using charm and flattery, which I am sure are important weapons in his armoury. I am conscious that lots of people want to participate in this debate. I hope we will be able to get on to some of the later debates on the Order Paper, so having expressed some of my scepticism, I will now sit down.”