Sir John Hayes
MP for South Holland and The Deepings · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On the subject of keeping land habitable, the hon. Lady will be familiar with the fact that the Lincolnshire fens, and particularly South Holland and The Deepings, are entirely flat, without even the undulation equivalent to the Mendip hills.”
“They have shown by their example that carelessness, and only when they have been prevented from doing harm have they ceased to do so. I am delighted that the Government are now taking steps to prevent children from accessing social media and mobile telephones; I would like to go much further, actually, and I hope the Government will.”
“What has occurred is the distortion of public discourse, the enabling of widespread fraud and the provision of the means for every imaginable form of harm, from hardcore pornography being available to children, to internet gambling addiction, suicide sites and much more. Now, the prospect of AI will make all that still more chilling.”
“I absolutely agree. That is why I began by describing what has occurred over the last quarter of a century and the misunderstanding—a pervasive one that affected all political parties and Governments of all kinds—that a dangerous fascination with novelty was more important than the certainty that I have just outlined. The hon.”
“Gentleman is right, and of course it is true that there will be the advantages that he describes, particularly in the research field. My fear is that they will obscure, in the eyes of those who have the power to make a difference, the points that the hon. Member for Poole made.”
“I know from my dealings with the hon. Gentleman that he is a good and effective Member of Parliament who takes a very responsible view of these things, but we must not let the virtues that he describes blind us to the vices. That is what happened with the internet.”
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“We need to recognise that the provision of food as locally as possible provides economic security, cements and secures communities, and shortens supply lines and therefore, apart from anything else, has immense environmental benefits by cutting food miles. That is the kind of economy that we can have, because there is nothing inevitable or pre-ordained about fewer and fewer food suppliers dominating the food chain. I have spoken about the impact on consumers of reduced choice and the impact on producers of not being able to trade their goods fairly and freely. Now, I shall talk about the changes we could make.”
“We might say, “Well, surely the supermarkets need to obtain their goods to sell them,” but we know where they then go; they import goods from countries that produce those goods at standards we cannot imagine in this country, thereby putting even more pressure on domestic producers. Do we really want that, or do we want a country that cares about food security and becomes more economically resilient because more of what we consume is made here? A Labour Prime Minister once spoke of British jobs for British workers. He was right. We indeed want British jobs for British workers and we want British goods for British consumers, too.”
“That might affect their terms of trade and the prices they are offered, which is why the relationship between farm-gate prices and retail prices is, again, distorted in this broken food chain. It often involves sharper practice still, where supermarkets cancel orders quickly; even when a farmer is tooled up ready to provide goods, they will find that in the next season they no longer have a contract to do so. In the past, supermarkets have lumped all kinds of other costs on to the supplier, such as marketing and transport costs. That is unacceptable, and it is ultimately unsustainable, as those businesses make too little profit to reinvest and therefore become less competitive.”
“Lincolnshire grows 30% of the UK’s vegetables, 20% of the sugar beet, 18% of the poultry, 20% of the potatoes, and it processes 70% of the kingdom’s fish. In total, my county produces 12% of all the food that fills the shops and shelves, pantries and fridges of our country. Given that, one can understand the particular concerns that farmers and growers in my constituency have about the way those big retailers treat them. The picture I painted, of an open economy where people can sell in a variety of places, has long gone. Most of my primary producers have very few options, and therefore often have a gun put to their head by their customers, the supermarkets.”
“Happily, I still have some of those small family businesses selling food in my constituency, and thank goodness for that, but their number has shrunk. The nation of shopkeepers is now a nation of very large shops, and those are corporate entities rather than the kind of shops that I imagine Napoleon had in mind. This huge problem has affected our high streets, where supermarkets have become more ubiquitous and the only grocers one can spot is a Tesco or a Sainsbury’s—or perhaps an Aldi or a Lidl—rather than the variety once seen up and down our constituencies. It has also affected producers, as I will come on to in the second part of my speech, because my constituency is disproportionately responsible for the production of UK food.”
“Burke said that tyrants seldom need a pretext; this is a kind of economic tyranny. To have a circumstance in which a near cartel of supermarkets can determine the price of products and then foist them on to a consumer base that has little other option is, in commercial terms, about as tyrannical as can be imagined. You can tell from all that, Dr Allin-Khan, that I am not a great admirer of the large retailers, and not just for the reasons I have given. I doubt, for example, that supermarkets are particularly careful—by that, I mean they are careless—about the circumstances of their customers and employees. I am not confident that a supermarket chain has quite the sensitivity to a locality, to a community or to a group of people who become their customers and employees that a small family business has.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right. His endless good will, known in this House for some time, encourages him to emphasise that supermarkets do deal with their waste products, but inevitably, as well as the waste products that over-consumption produces, supermarkets throw away many of the things on their shelves because of sell-by dates. It is hard to get a handle on, because quite a lot of it is disguised, but supermarkets themselves are actually contributing immense amounts of food waste. It is true that some communities have found settlements for that, in the way that the hon. Gentleman described. Some supermarkets have at least paid lip service—I say at least, because it is occasionally more than that—to redistributing some of the waste food from their shelves into communities, but we should not be gulled by that.”
“The double lock—in some cases, it is now a triple lock—that we put in place in the IPA holds firm and ensures that this material is available only as needed, and the bar to access it is very high. I am sure that the Minister and the shadow Minister will want to reassure people about that. As they know, the way that this is perceived publicly matters a great deal to the security services, the National Crime Agency and others who might take advantage of these powers.”
“Secondly, on the codes that relate to part 7A of the IPA, on bulk personal data, it would be helpful to have a further word about datasets with a low expectation of privacy. That is what the changes to the codes deal with, and it is what the amendments to the original Act addressed. As detailed in the explanatory notes, the public consultation to which the Minister referred was disproportionately focused on exactly that matter. A further word from him about that might be helpful. Finally, how this is understood more widely is critical. There is still a lot of misunderstanding about the original Act, the 2024 Act and, I guess, these codes, too. This is not about collecting everyone’s data and making it widely available. As the Minister and other Committee members will understand, there are strict restrictions on how it can be accessed.”
“First, that Act, to which this statutory instrument gives life, as it were, changed the process whereby warrants are issued, inasmuch as it enabled the Prime Minister to appoint five Secretaries of State, the assumption being that they would include the warranting Secretaries of State—the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, the Foreign Secretary, the Home Secretary and, I presume, the Deputy Prime Minister, as well as the Prime Minister himself. Will the Minister say a word about that? It is not that I have an objection to it—it is important that these things are dealt with practically—but it would be good to hear the Minister’s views on that, as it is before us today with these codes.”
“I am pleased to be able to contribute briefly to this important Committee. As the Minister suggested when he nodded to me during his brief contribution, the original legislation received Royal Assent when I was the Security Minister, and I was proud to take it through the House with cross-party support. I took a profound interest in it at that time and have continued to do so since it became law. I worked with the last Security Minister in the previous Government, the right hon. Member for Tonbridge (Tom Tugendhat), on the 2024 Act, partly in my capacity as a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. I have a couple of questions for the Minister.”
“I forgot to say what a pleasure it is to see you in the Chair, Dr Allin-Khan. My hon. Friend identifies a fundamental issue. In commercial transactions, there is always risk, and that risk needs to be balanced. At the moment, all the risk is taken by the farmer or grower and none of the risk is absorbed by the retailer. We need to adjust that balance to ensure fairness, in the way that has been articulated by so many Members across the Chamber.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for that remark, but the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) is right: the important thing is co-ordination. The previous Government did a good job in establishing the basis for the “fair dealing” obligations, but it is really important that the work being done—outside the Minister’s Department in some cases—is co-ordinated, and the Groceries Code Adjudicator, in exactly the way that the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland suggested, has a purview that extends across the whole process. I hope the Minister will give a commitment to that now.”
“With that pledge that I can continue to communicate with the Minister, I am delighted to thank all colleagues who contributed to this debate. It is perfectly possible to feed the nation at a fair price without fuelling the excessive profits of greedy plutocrats. To do that, we need to extend the power of the adjudicator in the way that has been set out by a considerable number of Members from across the House. It is vitally important the food chain is relinked, to make sure that all those involved in the production, distribution and sale of food can act in a way that is commercially viable but fair. It is not fair now. Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).”
“As a result of the Division in the House, the debate’s revised end time is 4.44 pm. I will call the shadow Minister and the Minister to wind up at 4.06 pm. I know that we have two speakers to come and that Terry Jermy is coming to the conclusion of his speech.”
“We are moving ahead with alacrity, and I am grateful to all hon. Members for allowing us to do so. Without more ado, I call Sarah Dyke, the Liberal Democrat spokesman.”
“I will call Susan Murray to move the motion, and then the Minister to respond. I remind other Members that they may make a speech only with permission from the Member in charge of the debate and the Minister.”
“I intend to begin the winding-up speeches at 5.50 pm, and we have two more Back-Bench speakers, so it would be lovely if I could get you both in.”
“I apologise for arriving late, Mr Dowd, and it is a pleasure to see you in the Chair. My hon. Friend makes a salient point about the ethical issues around extinguishing the life of the unborn. There is another salient matter: the assumption on the part of the advocates of this move that individual autonomy—we see the same with the debate about the end of life—trumps all else and that personal interests, dressed up as rights, are more important than the obligations to others and society along with duties to the country and those greater duties to God. Would my hon. Friend like to comment on the philosophical rather than the theological aspect of that?”
“Someone once said that the general rule in politics is never to apologise and never to explain, and I am certainly not going to break that rule now. The truth is that the hon. Lady is arguing for co-operation, and we all affirm that. Britain has co-operated with its neighbours, and with countries more widely, over the whole of our history. We began co-operating with Portugal under Edward III, as the Minister will no doubt confirm and speak about in some detail. It is not about co-operation; it is about governance. There is a fundamental difference between collaboration and co-operation, and government from abroad.”
“I can confirm that I have never met an Australian or a Canadian in Boston or in Spalding. Leaving that to one side, is not the real threat even more sinister than the hon. Gentleman suggests? We have, stubbornly, a huge number of young people who are not in education, employment or training—in fact, the trend is slightly up. It is a tragedy that those people are either trapped without jobs or not learning to get them. They will inevitably be competing with people from abroad for their early opportunities to work. We need to back young people. I fear that, unless we get absolute clarity on the length and character of the scheme, it will threaten those young people’s chances.”
“If I may say so generously, I choose to go for my holidays in north Norfolk and Whitby; I do not need a passport to go to there. It is very pleasant. I think the hon. Lady would be enriched by that kind of experience.”
“Edward Heath was so desperate to join the European Union that he was persuaded at the last minute, as we were about to enter it, that he needed to trade off our fishermen’s rights. Fishing is certainly a concern, but so too is this issue of regulation, because—”
“We wait to see the detail, because it may be that the Government share my view; I hope they do, but I can understand entirely the reservations of my neighbouring MP, the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness, about it. Indeed, as I have said, they are reservations that I share. I will not speak about fishing, because others already have, except to say that fishing is always a bargaining chip in these negotiations. It was Edward Heath, allegedly a Conservative Prime Minister, who sold out the fishermen when we first joined. You will not remember that personally, Ms McVey, because of course you are a very young person—we are back to talking about young people, as the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) and others did earlier—but you will know of it, and know that that too was a last-minute deal.”
“That was bound to damage productivity and make us less competitive. What we needed to build was a high-skill, high-tech economy to compete internationally, and free movement damaged that prospect. The fear about the youth mobility scheme or the youth experience scheme—it keeps changing names, which in itself leads to a certain degree of scepticism; I will not put it any more strongly than that—is that it will bring people here who will want to work and to compete with our young people in Lincolnshire and across the constituencies represented in this Chamber today. That may be in seasonal jobs, part-time jobs or first jobs for people getting into the labour market. So I have profound doubts about it.”
“Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice), other than on this basis: the exact figures for his constituency show 13,596 people living there who come from eastern Europe, central Europe or further afield—Bulgaria, Romania and so on. The influx of those people over a short period of time has had a dramatic effect on the character of that part of Lincolnshire. On immigration more generally, free movement had a devastating effect on this country. It displaced investment in domestic skills, without doubt, and it also changed workplaces—I think it drove down wages, for example, because many people who came were not unionised and were not able to make their case to their employers with the same confidence that domestic workers rightly do. It also stultified our economy by fixing it in a labour-intensive, low-skill profile.”
“Of course, much of the governance of the European Union was not done by people who had been elected, for the character of the way rules are made there rests on a very different connection between bureaucrats and elected people. The sovereignty secured by the referendum result is something precious, something that should be valued by every single Member of this House, regardless of their party. What does this deal do in respect of that sovereignty? I have reservations about the youth mobility scheme, not because I do not think that there are people in Lincolnshire who want to take advantage of it— [ Interruption. ] I did not say that, by the way; I did not say that. I will not defend the hon.”
“That matters, as we all know, because our legitimacy is afforded to us by the choice that people make to send us here, and the fact that we are answerable to them in a way that those who exercise power in the European Union are not—they have never been directly accountable. It is true that we elected MEPs, but almost no one knew who they were. I did not know who the Tory MEPs were, let alone those from other parties. Former MEPs will often say that they had little contact with the people in their constituencies and that their postbag overall was a fraction of what we receive in a single week, let alone over a longer period. Interaction is at the heart of the legitimacy that I have just described, but with MEPs it just was not there.”
“Joseph Chamberlain, one of my great political heroes, said that in “great deeds, something abides”. Perhaps the greatest deed of my parliamentary lifetime was our decision to leave the European Union, made greater still by the fact that it was a decision taken by the British people against the advice of most of their political leaders from across the spectrum. Suddenly the people spoke—and they spoke clearly—about their intentions, contradicting the long-standing prejudices of most of the British establishment. What endures of that deed is our right to self-government, which lies at the heart of our short debate today. It is the affirmation of parliamentary sovereignty.”
“How things have changed. I know the hon. Member for Walthamstow welcomes that change, because she fought the Brexit referendum result in an honourable, but none the less stubborn way, if I might say so. I wonder whether she is as stubborn now.”
“For a long time, many of those who favoured European governance pretended that it was a matter of logistics rather than principles, of details rather than essentials and, as we heard again in this debate, of co-operation rather than governance. Fundamentally, however, it is about the difference between supranational Government and collaborative measures—treaties and so on—between sovereign nations. That is at the heart of this debate. It is unfortunate that when we joined the European Union—as you will remember, Mr Vickers, because you were a campaigner against it even in those distant days—it was labelled the Common Market. There was no sense there that we would be giving up our sovereignty—no sense that it would have any effect on our political structure or system of Government. It was just a trading association.”
“Never has it been clearer that Britain needs to become increasingly resilient, and that means protecting our industries to some degree. It certainly means manufacturing more of what we need and growing more of the food that we consume in this country. Shortening supply lines will have many benefits, environmental and other but, fundamentally, it is about taking a national view of our economic interests. Of course Britain co-operates and collaborates with others; but, as I said to the hon. Member for Walthamstow when she opened the debate, there is a world of difference between co-operation and governance. In a sense, that has permeated considerations of this subject since we started them back in the late 1950s.”
“I wondered whether the hon. Member for North Somerset (Sadik Al-Hassan) was going to finish my speech for me, Mr Vickers, but I am not sure it would have been quite in the same vein as that in which I intend to continue. We have talked a bit about the youth mobility scheme, or the youth movement scheme or the youth experience scheme—call it what you will. Of course, it is true that some young people want to go abroad, but many more young people from abroad will want to come here, and we spoke a little before you came, Mr Vickers, about the consequences of that. Things have changed since we left the European Union. The principal change internationally has been the greater need for national economic resilience, epitomised in the covid pandemic and then the European war in Ukraine that followed.”
“It is about how one sees the nationhood, and how one regards the national interest. There are those on the left—although I do not say that they are in this Chamber—who are affected by doubt about nationhood, and some even afflicted by guilt about our past who do not see the national interest in the way I do. I do not think that that includes the Minister, by the way, as we will no doubt hear when he speaks. But in the end, we do have to come to the logical conclusion of Brexit and all that has happened since: the national interest ought to be the supreme consideration of any Government.”
“However, it is also true that there is a risk that that will encourage us to import more food at a time when we need to export less. We need to grow, make and consume more of our own food. Yesterday I was at a meeting with the all-party parliamentary group on the UK fresh produce network, which I chair, and a major haulier, farmer and grower said that he feared that that was the problem with this deal. I meet farmers, growers and hauliers in my constituency every single week, such is my diligence, and they are most concerned about the possible impact of that additional ability of the Europeans to flood our markets with foreign food. I will end with this: Joe Chamberlain also said that we should “carry on even to distant ages the glorious traditions of the British flag.” In the end, this is about just that.”
“That is the core security partnership but, of course, we co-operate with other countries across the globe. To be frank, that is not really about governance, is it? That is about exactly the kind of collaboration that, as I described, has always been part of the way that this country has dealt with its affairs internationally. [ Interruption. ] I am not going to take another intervention because I know that even you, Mr Vickers, are beginning to tire—even of me. I will therefore move rapidly to my concluding remarks, which concern this issue of trade and regulation. It is undoubtedly true that, in my constituency—I think a Member who is no longer in their place asked me to offer a balanced view of this—exporters in the horticultural sector will benefit from smoother transitions at ports.”
“I say to the hon. Lady—not in a way that is patronising or pompous at all—that I can speak with a bit more authority about that than she can, because I am a former security Minister, currently a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and I was once responsible for countering serious organised crime in Government, so I came across a lot of the need to co-operate and share data. The hon. Lady will remember that we were never part of the Schengen arrangement, although we did have access to the Schengen database. We were never part of European governance over security, although we did share information with European partners. She will also know that the key security relationship for us is the Five Eyes relationship with countries beyond the European Union—America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”
“Many of us on these Benches were not happy with the direction of travel of previous Conservative Governments—let us put that on the record. We did not support the EU. I have never supported the EU; I first campaigned to leave it when I was a student, when we had only just joined it. The hon. Gentleman is right that we did not agree with that situation, and this deal perpetuates it for 12 years. If it was bad then, it is worse now.”
“The National Crime Agency and the security services work co-operatively with our neighbours in Europe, and always have. That co-operation has perpetuated since Brexit, as it did before. A lot of it, of course, happens under the radar by its very nature, but it is not true to say that we do not have that kind of collaborative relationship with other nations where our national security—and theirs—is concerned.”
“To illustrate that point, looking at the figures the UK is the EU’s biggest export market. We receive about €51 billion of goods from the EU and return about €15.4 billion, so there is no doubt about where the balance lies. To emphasise the point made by my hon. Friend, the problem is that so much of this is smoke and mirrors. When we hear about realignment being dynamic or about subsidiarity, as we used to hear, those are terms that are used to disguise exactly the kind of pernicious detail that he set out.”
“The hon. Member is right that there are all kinds of existential threats that face this country and other countries too, but the Government’s job is to deal with the effect of those threats as they alter life here in Britain. Co-operation is part of that, but in no way does it absolve national Governments from taking responsibility for those threats in relation to national and local priorities. Mass migration is a good example; I regard it as the greatest existential threat, among many. That has to be dealt with in this country.”
“I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger) to talk about the imbalance in food exports and imports. The EU sells us far more than we sell it. Are we not moving to a less globalist age—a post-liberal age—in which countries will need to be more economically resilient, as I described earlier? We need to shorten supply lines and so on. On that basis, why would we want to make it easier for people from abroad to sell goods to compete with our farmers and growers?”
“I believe in British jobs for British young people. Should the hospitality industry not first be looking to employ the very large number of young British people who are not in education, work or training?”
“My hon. Friend comes to the nub of the issue, which I described as the debate about governance —it might be said to be a debate about jurisdiction. There is a kind of schizophrenia on the Government Benches: some Members want to say that this is a fundamental change, and a step back towards where we once were—that is clearly what the Liberal Democrats want—while others say that it is a matter of detail and simply a different kind of agreement. Essentially, however, the issue of governance and jurisdiction lies at the heart of this debate. I simply invite my hon. Friend to affirm the fact that on the Conservative side of the Chamber, whatever we have said in the past, we are now absolutely clear that the national interest will always be the supreme consideration of this party and a future Conservative Government.”
“Let us save Joseph Chamberlain’s reputation, if we can. Joe Chamberlain was an almost legendary figure in the city of Birmingham. In the first half of his life, he gave that city slum clearance, clean water and unparalleled welfare standards. Later, when he came into Parliament, he began as a radical and ended up as a supporter of the Tory Government. In his age, Chamberlain represented was the defence of what he saw as the national interest. I cited him because, as I said, I believe that the national interest should be supreme. May I say to the right hon. Gentleman that I suspect that is what the vast majority of his constituents and mine think, too?”
“The Lord Chancellor will know that for a very long time in this country, the prejudices of the establishment, poisoned by liberal thinking, have been at odds with the preoccupations of the vast majority of law-abiding people. Will she acknowledge now that the principal purpose of prison is retributive? It has other purposes, too, but its principal purpose is punishment. In that spirit, will she confirm when she will bring forward the further legislation on sentencing that she promised? Given what she has announced today, will she also confirm that violent sexual offenders will be excluded from early release?”
“The right hon. Gentleman knows the regard I have for him and for the Foreign Secretary. He knows, too, of my interest and involvement in national security matters. There is no debate across the House about the salience of Diego Garcia. It is absolutely critical to our national interest. The debate is about the legal advice. Will he, in the interests of scrutiny, provide, where it does not compromise national security, all the information and advice given to him and previous Ministers on the subject of that legal advice? We suspect that that advice could have been challenged, and I suspect that many previous holders of his office and others will have received similar, if not the same, legal advice and resisted it.”
“Without a common language, there can be no currency for learning about one another and there can be no means by which we can share what makes us British. We have to promote the English language and we should abolish any attempt by any authority to translate things into foreign languages: let us make that a rallying cry from today. Finally, the population of this country is growing at an unsustainable rate. We have heard already that successive Governments, beginning with the Blair Government, then the coalition Government, Tory Governments and now this Government, I am sorry to say, have failed to recognise that if we increase net population by 700,000 to 900,000 people a year, a number that equates to the combined populations of the five cities of Cambridge, Norwich, Hull, Lincoln—”
“Essentially, vacancies are being filled rather than providing opportunities for the vast majority of those Britons who cannot get a place in the labour market. Mass migration has certainly damaged social cohesion by undermining our shared sense of belonging. We simply cannot import that number of people—many of whom do not speak English as their first language—without significant investment in integration; yet even if we were integrating at pace, the sheer volume would make it impossible to hold many communities together. We have seen social fracture, with a risk of complete fragmentation, in many communities. Hon. Members from across the House will have visited schools where the headteacher has said proudly, “Of course, the children here speak 15 different languages,” as though that were a cause for celebration.”
“It has essentially created an economy that is low-skilled and dependent on the provision of relatively cheap labour, and is therefore unfit to compete in a high-tech, high-skilled world. That is what mass migration has done to our economy. For evidence, one has only to look at the House of Lords Committee on Economic Affairs report, which says: “we have found no evidence for the argument, made by the Government, business and many others, that net immigration—immigration minus emigration—generates significant economic benefits for the existing UK population.” The reason for that is that 70% of migrants are in low and medium-skilled roles. They are not the brightest and the best; they are not the people who we need to fill the vacancies that cannot be filled otherwise.”