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“When was the last time that an allotted Opposition day was withdrawn in the way that the Leader of the House is withdrawing this one?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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“Whether our military intervention there made the situation worse or not, history will be the judge. It again emphasises, however, that if parliamentarians are involved in the process, it is not so easy for us, having supported engagement in Libya, to turn around and say, “Well, it was an awful mistake.” At the time, with our eyes open, we thought it was for the best, although it might not have turned out that way. The Committee’s reports are important, and I look forward to hearing what the Minister will be able to add in value. In particular, we need to have an answer to the point that the hon. Member for Nottingham North started with: when will we get what the Foreign Secretary has said he wants us to have, which is an agreement in Parliament that is an effective guarantee for subsequent Parliaments?”
“I do not hear anyone now say that we took the wrong decision. That gives those of us who did not support the Government on that occasion considerable satisfaction. So far as Libya goes, we debated engagement in Libya. Everyone thought that it was the right thing to do, because it would avoid a massacre in Benghazi. That was avoided, but where we are now with Libya is not a pretty place. Next week, we will be debating in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe a report that references the fact that there might be as many as 800,000 people on the Libyan coast waiting to get into Europe, often risking their lives in ramshackle boats to get across the Mediterranean and make a new life. What they all have in common is that they are victims of armed militias, traffickers and so on. It is an unpleasant situation.”
“I am not even sure that the Government know what they are saying. As their response states, there is no public demand for a lot of these changes. Briefly, on Syria and the other report, which is on how we should be engaged in decisions on going to war or entering conflict situations, we have to pay proper tribute to how the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have brought Parliament into the process in a way that it never was before. That happened most recently with the Syria vote, which not only caused an enormous earthquake in our country, but had a ripple effect on the United States and France. I have no doubt that, if our vote had been different, the United States would have engaged in the conflict, and the French would have gone in with them. We were setting a lead for the west in debating that openly.”
“I have a question about Scotland. Perhaps the Minister’s constituents are not like mine, but mine are increasingly concerned about the fact that people living in England seem to have no say over the future relationships of the United Kingdom. There is a prospect that on a simple majority vote the Scots could become separate from the United Kingdom, so where does that leave ordinary people who live in England but want to stay in the Union?”
“Will my right hon. Friend spell out to us in the Chamber today what the criteria are for an urgent need to travel, so that everybody knows? Will she make arrangements to ensure that constituents who wish to express concerns can do so directly to their MPs, and that MPs can have a special hotline to communicate with the Passport Office?”
“As I came 17th in the ballot for private Members’ Bills, if I introduced a Bill to confirm that prisoners should not be allowed to vote, would it have Government support?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for that rather disappointing response. Will he explain why we are going to spend a fortune in taxpayers’ money speeding up the journey times between London and Birmingham when those journeys are already 50% faster than those between Southampton and London?”
“Will my right hon. Friend, in the oodles of time available, make sure that there is a Government statement next week on holiday pay? Does he know that there is much concern among employers about the interaction between European Union law and British law? It is causing confusion and leading people to believe that holiday pay will have to be based not just on basic salaries, but overtime and additional work? This is a complex issue, but at the moment the Government do not seem to have a clear policy.”
“It is very good that the Committee now has the benefit of lay members—that has been misinterpreted in the press—because they have equal responsibility and participate in debates in Committee. If we counted the amount of time that each Committee member speaks, I suspect we would find that the lay members collectively talk for as much time as all the others put together. That is no criticism of the lay members; I am putting on the record the fact that they participate to the full in the Committee’s work. It has been suggested—because, for technical reasons, they do not have a vote on the final report—that they are somehow second-class members of the Committee, but nothing could be further from the truth. It is really desirable to have their reflections.”
“I pay tribute to the Chair of the Standards Committee, the right hon. Member for Rother Valley (Kevin Barron). He has a heavy responsibility and burden in chairing the Committee, which he does with tremendous interest and dedication. He and others of us who serve on the Committee have to undertake that unnecessary but unpleasant responsibility. In this case, it is awful that one of our colleagues fell so far below the standards that we hold dear. All I can say is that at least it is good that he made a fulsome apology and immediately resigned. I pay tribute to the Government for moving the writ for the by-election immediately, because that ensures that the constituents of Newark will be deprived of their Member of Parliament for the minimum possible length of time.”
“There is a genuine question over whether the Standards Committee, with the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, ought to start making recommendations on recall. Is that really what we want? I am not sure that it is. If we are to have recall, we need to work out in advance exactly how it will be triggered. I hope, therefore, that the Government will come forward with a further draft Bill or provide substantial pre-legislative scrutiny, because if we are to have a recall Bill, we must ensure that it serves the best interests of the public and the House, rather than being seen as a political gesture to appease people who are concerned, quite rightly, about the standards of conduct in public life.”
“Friend the Leader of the House said in his opening remarks that there is an interaction between this matter and the Government’s commitment to introduce a Bill on recall. I urge my right hon. Friend—indeed, I plead with him—not to bring forward such a Bill unless there is consensus in the House and it has the support of members of the Standards Committee. The draft Bill was heavily criticised by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee and members of the Standards Committee. Bearing in mind that we are reaching the end of this Parliament, I think that it would be better, if we are going to deal with recall, to do so properly, rather than as a knee-jerk reaction. We must always be nervous about Members of this House intervening in the decisions of the electorate.”
“My hon. Friend is right. That is an important point that should be emphasised. The lay members have not chosen to write a minority report on any of the decisions of the Standards Committee in which they have been involved since the Committee was set up and they became members of it. The lay members and the other members of the Committee are considering the issue of sanctions, partly because if there is a long period of suspension, it is as much a punishment of the constituents as of the Member of Parliament. If the Member had not resigned in this case, the long period of suspension could have been regarded as counter-productive. We will consider those issues. My right hon.”
“My right hon. Friend will recall that he put down a motion on the Order Paper last autumn to restrict Mr Speaker’s discretion to accepting only three amendments. I am glad, as the person who blocked that original motion, that he has had second thoughts and is now going to allow Mr Speaker to select up to four amendments. Can my right hon. Friend explain why he feels we need to inhibit Mr Speaker exercising his discretion in this matter?”
“If, after the next election, there were more official Opposition parties, would he recommend returning to the issue to allow for more than four amendments?”
“Let me draw out my right hon. Friend further on whether he thinks it is a good idea that Back Benchers should be able collectively to table amendments in the Queen’s Speech debates. It obviously struck a chord with the people when that happened—on the issue of the EU referendum—during the last Queen’s Speech debates. Were there no coalition after the next election and three Opposition parties with reasonable representation, Mr Speaker might feel that his discretion had to be exercised in favour of those Opposition parties. It is possible that, even with four amendments, the opportunity for Back Benchers to put forward amendments in the hope of their being selected by Mr Speaker would be excluded. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that he thinks it is important that Back Benchers have such an opportunity?”
“If the hon. Lady is so concerned about this, why did the Opposition not table a blocking motion to the original Government proposal, which would have gone through on the nod if it had not been for my blocking motion?”
“Amendment 39, page 29, line 36, at end insert— ‘(2A) Sections 8 and 9 shall not come into force until a Welsh Government Minister has laid a report before the National Assembly for Wales containing a statement to the effect that the Welsh Government, with regard to the Statement of Funding Policy, is content with the fairness of the arrangements for allocating funding from the UK Government to Wales. (2B) Sections 8 and 9 shall be suspended following any substantive reform, amendment or other alteration of the arrangements mentioned in subsection (2A), until the process under subsection (2A) has been repeated.’. Amendment 4, in title, line 3, leave out ‘a rate’ and insert ‘rates’.”
“Amendment 6, page 12, line 37, at end add— ‘(2) The Secretary of State shall review the impact on the Exchequer effects of the provisions in this section on residents who live within 50 miles of the Wales/England border and the impact on the prospects for tax competition within the UK, and place a copy of the review in the Library of the House of Commons.’. Clause stand part. Amendment 41, in clause 9, page 13, line 8, leave out ‘10’ and insert ‘15’. Clause 9 stand part. Amendment 1, in clause 11, page 16, line 20, leave out from ‘Wales’ to end and add ‘where a Welsh rate resolution specifies more than one rate of income tax.’. Government amendment 19. Amendment 38, in clause 28, page 29, line 34, after ‘except’, insert ‘sections 8 and 9 and’.”
“With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Amendment 2, page 8, line 36, leave out ‘only’ and insert ‘more than’. Amendment 3, page 8, line 36, leave out ‘only one rate’ and insert ‘up to three rates’. This amendment is proposed to implement the recommendations of the Silk Commission that the Welsh Government have the power to set different rates of tax for different income bands. Government amendments 22 to 28. Amendment 16, page 12, line 34, after ‘Assembly’, insert ‘and each House of Parliament’.”
“That could be considered. I have always been keen that we should allow the minority to express their opinion in the Chamber without having it suppressed.”
“Order. The Minister is not giving way to the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies). We must have some order. There are not many Members in the Chamber, but they seem to be making a mockery of the rules of order. I think that the Minister is giving way to the hon. Member for Pontypridd (Owen Smith).”
“I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. What evidence is there that young people do not access illegal drugs as much because they are sold in plain packages?”
“T3. Will the Deputy Prime Minister, in the interests of transparency and accountability, publish details of all the policy proposals that Liberal Democrat members of the quad have vetoed?”
“So why does the United Kingdom not move to expel Russia from the Council of Europe? My right hon. and learned Friend has said in the past that if we do not give prisoners the vote we will be expelled from the Council of Europe, so surely on the issue of proportionality it is important that we spell out to Russia that it should leave the Council of Europe, and if not, it should be expelled.”
“Does my right hon. Friend appreciate the important role that independent schools play in raising education standards in this country, and does he applaud the enormous contribution that fee-paying parents make in investing in our education system?”
“Will the hon. Gentleman tell me how expenditure of some £7 million on what will be a temporary building can possibly be justified? Would it not be much better to put the education centre into the space that is currently occupied by the loss-making day nursery overlooking Parliament square?”
“My right hon. Friend has not yet mentioned the Council of Europe. Will this Government move to expel or suspend the Russian Federation from membership of the Council of Europe for this most blatant breach of the 1949 statute?”
“There is no time limit, other than the self-restraint that I know hon. Members will exercise, recognising that a lot of people want to participate in the debate. Although there is no requirement that the debate must finish after one and a half hours, I hope that it will, so that we have an equal amount of time for the second debate. I hope that that helps the right hon. Lady.”
“The hon. Lady says that her all-party group—an organisation that has already made up its mind that something is wrong—will be carrying out a non-independent inquiry that will be addressed by a select group of people. How will it ever be able to produce an objective response?”
“If there is great demand, is not the best thing to sell tickets by auction? They could all be launched for sale by auction, and that would find the market-clearing price.”
“Sources close to Mr Duncan Smith stressed he was expressing an aspiration for the future, rather than spelling out a policy.” That is the problem. Senior politicians, whether it be the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions or even the Deputy Prime Minister, can beat their chests and say, “The present state of affairs, with EU migrants coming here and sponging off our taxpayer-funded benefits system, is unacceptable”, but when one looks at the detail, one sees that despite their huffing and puffing, they cannot do anything about it, except perhaps for the first three months that somebody is here, which is no big deal. Once someone from another EU country has been here for more than three months, they effectively have as much access to our benefits system as you or me, Madam Deputy Speaker.”
“Those were the words of the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who was quoted in the article as saying: “Britain should be able to say to a migrant: ‘Demonstrate that you are committed to the country, that you are a resident and that you are here for a period of time and you are generally taking work and that you are contributing… At that particular point…it could be a year, it could be two years, after that, then we will consider you a resident of the UK’”. Unfortunately, what my right hon. Friend says does not accord with EU law, so it was no surprise to read the brief on my Bill produced by the policy research unit, which referred to the quote from the Secretary of State, but then said: “However, this is not Government policy.”
“I beg to move, That the Bill be now Read a Second time. It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship for the first time on a Friday, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is one of a series of Bills presented, and for every week that has passed since it was first printed, it has become more relevant. There is tremendous public concern about this matter. The Bill would make “provision to restrict the entitlement of non-UK citizens from the European Union and the European Economic Area to taxpayer-funded benefits.” Last week, the front page of The Sunday Times carried a big headline reading, “Ban migrant welfare for two years”.”
“He wrote that “although the great majority of east European migrants are entrepreneurially seeking the much higher wages available in the richer nations, a proportion will be welfare tourists.” He then referred to the “point made many years ago by Milton Friedman, who believed in open borders: he asserted that you can have a generous welfare state or open borders, but not both…There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state, it is a different story; the supply of immigrants will become infinite.” Indeed, that is the concern of people in this country—that the supply of immigrants is becoming infinite. We look in the Government statistics for the numbers, but again we find that they fudge the figures and do not even collect the raw material.”
“I certainly agree that it is about being sensible, but I am not sure the solution lies in trying to change our benefits system. Surely, we, as a sovereign country, should be able to decide what benefits system we want for our own people and should not have to try to tailor it so that it cannot be abused under EU rules. The bigger problem was referred to by Dominic Lawson also in an article in last week’s edition of The Sunday Times .”
“As my hon. Friend knows, I have never been an enthusiast for the minimum wage. Indeed, further down today’s Order Paper is my Employment Opportunities Bill, which would enable people to opt out of it. I am glad to see the Front-Bench spokesman agreeing with that.”
“The whole concept of a national minimum wage ignores the fact that we have different labour markets in different parts of the country. What might be a reasonable wage in London might be a totally unrealistic and unaffordable wage in some of the more remote parts of the country. I do not know what my hon. Friend thinks the position is in Hexham, but if the national minimum wage is designed to ensure that people in London and in Hexham are treated equally well, it is likely to have the result of reducing the employment opportunities in his constituency.”
“I am sorry to disagree with my hon. Friend, but as soon as he resorts to the expression “progressive” and subsequently refers to the university of Essex, he has lost me. I think that the level of wages should be set in a private arrangement between the employer and the employee, and that it is not for the Government to intervene. We hear all the current talk about whether the minimum wage should be increased, but it is open to anyone currently on the minimum wage to go to their employer and say, “I would like to be paid more”, while it is open to the employer to pay their workers more. The fact that they are not being paid more suggests to me that the labour market is such that if they were paid more it would result in either them or their colleagues being put out of work.”
“Perhaps we will get a chance to discuss the Employment Opportunities Bill later. As the name suggests, it gives employment opportunities to people who would not otherwise have them. I hope that my hon. Friend has looked at the Bill. To assert, as he has, that the minimum wage cannot have any impact on jobs is to ignore the level at which the minimum wage is set. That is why the Low Pay Commission was set up to look at the level and make recommendations on the minimum wage. I know that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, will be concerned if we start discussing the Employment Opportunities Bill in detail at this stage—”
“You know as well as anyone, Madam Deputy Speaker, that, ultimately, each Member of Parliament has to be held accountable for his own actions. If I am still speaking at 2.30, I will obviously not expect this Bill to get its Second Reading.”
“My hon. Friend makes a good point about public relations; the Government have to be seen to be doing something, but they are constrained by the current state of European Union law, which will prevent them from being able to take any action against people after they have been in this country for more than three months. That is why the Government are making a great virtue of saying, “We are going to get really tough on people in the first three months they are here.” However, they are not emphasising that once those people have been here for three months the world is their oyster and they have free access to all our taxpayer-funded benefits.”
“As I shall go on to discuss, the problem is that EU law in this area is evolving and changing. That is largely being done through regulation, but it is also occurring through decisions taken by the unelected judges in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. They are, in effect, giving an interpretation of what was originally a free movement directive—everybody would have gone along with that, because one core element in the European Economic Community was that people should be able to go from one country to another and take up employment there. Following the successive treaties, directives and regulations, the interpretation now is of people having a right to go to claim benefits in any country in the European Union once they have been there for more than three months.”
“The ECJ involves a very long-winded process, and because it is so long-winded, the French Government, for example, will deliberately defy EU law in the knowledge that any sanctions arising from their defiance will not be apparent until many, many years later.”
“It states that he “added that reforming benefits was part of a wider move towards no longer automatically accepting rulings from the European Commission and courts.” He welcomed the comments by Lord Judge, the former lord chief justice, that ‘we shouldn’t always assume straight away that anything that comes legally out of Europe we have to impose’ and said he was optimistic that there was the ‘beginning of a twitch with the Supreme Court”. My Bill is designed to go a bit further than a twitch; it is designed to ensure that we change our law. If we suffer infraction proceedings in the European Court of Justice, one thing is certain: they are unlikely to reach a conclusion until you and I are in our dotage, Madam Deputy Speaker.”
“My hon. Friend makes a good point. Indeed, he will see that clauses 2, 3 and 4 of the Bill state: “Notwithstanding…the European Communities Act 1972”. In other words, the Bill would ensure that we were able to decide these things for ourselves, as a sovereign legislature, and override European Union law. My hon. Friend’s point was, in a sense, echoed by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in an article in The Sunday Times to which I referred earlier.”
“I hope that the Minister agrees that is a good idea. Clause 2 of my Bill says: “Notwithstanding the provisions of the European Communities Act 1972, no non-UK citizen who is a national of a member country of the European Union or the European Economic Area shall be eligible for housing benefit or council tax benefit in England and Wales unless the benefit entitlement arises by reason of having the status of a spouse or dependant of a UK citizen.” In other words, the clause would close down access to housing and council tax benefit for people who have come to this country to work or to play.”
“The labour force survey estimates that the number of A2 nationals living in the UK has increased by 25,000 a year in the six years between 2007 and 2013. However, the Government’s figures, which are based on passenger surveys carried out at ports and airports, suggest that there were fewer than 10,000 new people from Bulgaria and Romania a year. As we do not have a way of measuring people’s nationality when it comes to national insurance numbers or benefit claimants, the Government have to rely on passenger surveys to find out how many people have come from Romania or Bulgaria. The Office for National Statistics has been critical of the cavalier way in which the UK collects those statistics. Clause 1 of my Bill would make it much easier for us to have a proper public debate on these issues, based on the facts rather than on conjecture.”
“The first provision in the Bill would ensure that national insurance numbers were issued only after the applicant had declared their nationality, and would not make it possible for anybody to claim benefit without declaring their nationality. In that way, we could at least gather some statistics about the use of our benefit system by nationals from other countries, which we certainly cannot do at the moment. There is a big problem and I fear that it suits the Government not to give the people the full facts on this issue. They have statistics measuring net migration, for the purposes of meeting a commitment they made at the last general election to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. However, there are different ways in which net migration is calculated.”
“] I hope that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning), who is on the Front Bench today, will tell us what has happened in the subsequent year regarding recording nationality and immigration status, because if we do not even have basic information about the nationality of migrants or people claiming benefit, and have no means of finding that out, how can we ever have the tight controls that the Government keep talking about to ensure that migrants from other EU countries do not abuse our benefit system in their first three months here, or ensure that they are genuinely seeking work?”