Mr Toby Perkins
MP for Chesterfield · Labour · United Kingdom
“The hon. Member for Bicester and Woodstock (Calum Miller) is absolutely right to say that what is behind this is the deep unpopularity of President Milei; it is not anything actually that the UK has done.”
“In Chesterfield, there will be unmitigated despair at the statement we have heard today from my right hon. Friend. For the authorities for which she is doing a review—the 14 that thought they had got their decision in July—could she clarify the basis of that review?”
“It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I congratulate the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) on securing this debate.”
“The report spells out the link between degradation overseas and the impact here. The assessment lays out the consequences: food insecurity, economic insecurity, increased migration and refugees, increased interstate competition, conflict and geopolitical instability, all of which will threaten us here at home.”
“The Government are right to take their time and make sure that they get this right—we saw what happened when the previous Government did not do the work that was needed. This is a delicately balanced decision.”
“Thirdly, will the Minister consider bringing forward the fourth national adaptation programme? NAP3, published by the previous Government in 2023, was deemed ineffective by the Climate Change Committee. NAP4 is not due until 2028, but can we afford to wait two more years before we have an adequate plan?”
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“I could not agree more. Coronavirus has brought into sharp focus the need for a local response, given the extent to which local areas are experiencing a global pandemic in different ways. In London, coronavirus hit hard up front, and there were then regional variations as it went on, and differences in local responses. Local clinical commissioning groups responded differently regarding testing and the availability of personal protective equipment, and the public must be able to learn about such issues locally, and to scrutinise and question their politicians about that response. Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box and been asked to respond on a national basis, but politicians must also be held to account for what is happening in our local areas with testing, PPE, care homes, and all those sorts of things.”
“There is a perspective that is different from the national debate about HS2. If “Sunday Politics East Midlands” disappears, I worry about how the people of the east midlands will learn about the latest prediction from the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) as to when the scrapping of HS2 is going to be announced. I do not know how they would ever find that out. Every six weeks or so, the hon. Gentleman comes on to tell us that it is about to be cancelled. I worry how people would find that out without the “Sunday Politics East Midlands” programme.”
“I would not say that my constituents appreciate my appearances, but they certainly respond to the appearances I make and appreciate that local coverage. I noticed that the “Sunday Politics East Midlands” Twitter account has now been taken down. Someone at the BBC has made the decision, while the review is apparently still ongoing, to take down that account, to which people could go and see the coverage produced by the “Sunday Politics East Midlands” team. Recent such programmes have brought a local dimension to national stories: we hear a lot about HS2 on a national basis, but we have been able to debate what it means locally in the east midlands. Areas of the east midlands such as Chesterfield, Derby and Nottingham will be served by HS2, whereas in other areas HS2 provides a blight but will not provide a service.”
“I think that “Sunday Politics” does that, and it is important to ensure that in areas where one party is in the minority, that voice is still heard in a local dimension. As Member of Parliament for Chesterfield I have both the privilege and the slight irritation of being straddled between two areas. The majority of my constituents watch the Yorkshire version of “Sunday Politics” and regional news, but we are also covered by the east midlands region, and different people in my constituency watch different programmes. Because of that, when I have been on the two separate programmes, I have been minded of how different they are, and how they reflect the different issues that exist in West Yorkshire at one end, and Northamptonshire at the other end of the east midlands coverage. That gives me a strong sense of how different those areas are.”
“Once again, I absolutely agree. I think it was Tip O’Neill who was credited with the phrase, “all politics is local”, and in the last general election we saw that more strongly than ever before. I represent Chesterfield, an area that, as long ago as 2010 when I came to Parliament, was surrounded by Labour seats, but there has been a big change in our area. Similarly, in the cities there has been a change in the opposite direction. I am very conscious of that point, and as colleagues such as my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) know, in areas where there is perhaps less representation from one party, it is particularly important that people still get to hear a voice from the Labour party, or, in areas where Labour is strong, a voice from the Conservative party.”
“I hope that when the Minister responds, he will give a really strong assurance that the strength of feeling in this debate will be conveyed to the BBC, and that it will be conveyed in the strongest possible terms just how crucial these programmes are to our constituents.”
“Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) about London having local news too, but for many of us who are more distant from London, there is a strong sense that what happens in London is given greater import than what happens in our areas. We are going to have the local elections in 2021, and we all know that what happens in London will be seen as national news. The London mayoralty is of course an important national post, but there are elections everywhere, and it is important that those elections are covered too. I do not think that will happen if these programmes disappear. I could say other things, but I shall end my speech there because many other Members wish to speak. I thank the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton for securing this debate.”
“Of course we are going to compete on a national basis with national programmes on a Saturday evening, but this is what is special about the BBC.” It will lose that at its peril: if the BBC loses programmes such as “Inside Out” and “Sunday Politics”—if it loses that sense of its ability to influence things locally—it will rue the day and we will all be the poorer for it. Other Members, particularly the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, have mentioned the extent to which there is a sense that if something happens in London, it is national news—that if there is flooding in London or riots in London, we should all care about that. We all know that when we have flooding in different areas, it gets much more difficult to get local coverage. I entirely accept the point made by the hon.”
“It absolutely is. I am conscious that local media—particularly radio—are very much under threat. I have previously mentioned Peak FM, which has been a great, small local radio station in my area. It has recently been taken over by Bauer and its programming is going to go to the east midlands. We are now told that a traffic jam just outside Corby is local news; that makes no difference to people in Chesterfield. As the local dimension of the private sector media increasingly diminishes, there is an opportunity for the BBC to say, “Look, this is what we are great at.”
“The right hon. Gentleman is right that the local context has been different. What is also different is local accountability, because councils have decisions to make about the local response to coronavirus, and politicians have to answer for those decisions, whether they be council leaders or Members of Parliament. That is the other dimension to the point he is making.”
“Given the statistics that the right hon. Gentleman has outlined about the success of this output, what does it say about the BBC’s priorities that it would even consider getting rid of these incredibly popular local programmes that are of such importance to people, at a time when it continues to make the other decisions that it does about the kind of output it has?”
“Let us try to make it better and work together, rather than say that it does not need any improvement at all.”
“I associate myself with the remarks that others have made about our colleague Jo Cox. The Chairman of the Treasury Committee, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Mel Stride), was right about those people who are missing out on the self-employed scheme. We recognise that the scheme was put together urgently. My hon. Friends and I on the shadow Front Bench were calling for the scheme, so of course we welcomed it. But alongside the 1 million people who are unable to work and are missing out on the scheme, people who continue to work and are unaffected because of their self-employment, are benefiting from the scheme, while others who need it are not able to. Would it not be sensible for the Government to accept the comments that have been made and scrutinise the scheme?”
“In response to the point that was just made by the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine) about the vote that we had a week ago, does the right hon. Gentleman agree that all those people who were having to shield were unable to vote in that Division? It was one of the biggest Conservative rebellions since Brexit, but lots of people were unable to vote. If those people had been able to vote, we might well have had a different result, so does he agree that it would be sensible for us to have another vote with everyone who has been elected to this House able to take part?”
“The right hon. Gentleman’s concern was that virtual debates were preventing the Government from getting on with their business, but the way in which debates took place was just one aspect; another was whether we needed to be here to vote. Even if we had wanted to get rid of virtual contributions to debates, surely we could still have had electronic voting, which would have been much quicker than queuing 45 minutes for a Division, as we did last week.”
“Like Conservative Members, I do not think that Parliament is at its greatest when we spend our time debating our own affairs, but if they feel so strongly that a debate about what happens here is a waste of time, could they not help this debate to finish quicker by not constantly interrupting the Leader of the House to tell him that we should not be discussing the damn thing?”
“We could achieve the Leader the House’s desire to see Parliament represented and to have interventions that are only possible in this kind of Chamber while retaining online voting, so that we will not have to go through the sort of performance that we saw last week. I will leave it there.”
“I was very sad that people who had put in a tremendous amount of work to implement that system were unfairly criticised, because if we are going to have physical voting and we are going to have social distancing, then what we went through last week was probably about the best way that we were going to be able to achieve that. I do not blame those people for putting in place that great long queue that we had, but it was a ludicrous spectacle when we were walking up and down the steps of St Stephen’s Hall like marathon runners, going up one road and running back down the other, with people pushing in in front of each other because they thought they saw a chance to jump the queue. It really did not show this place in a good light.”
“Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper) said that we need to set an example to people out there. At the same time, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) pointed out, the Government’s own advice is, “You should work from home if you can,” and we had clearly found a way in which parliamentarians were able to make representations from home. We should have encouraged Members to come back and speak from the Chamber where possible, but allowed those Members who were excluded to continue making their contributions from home. We should also have kept virtual voting, which is much simpler than the charade that we saw last week.”
“The Government were very concerned that the Prime Minister was being exposed every Wednesday because he had not got those public schoolboys barracking behind him when he was being asked questions, and so the order went out, “We need people back in the Chamber so that this scrutiny—this forensic approach that the Leader of the Opposition is bringing forward—can be barracked at and shouted down; we must change the way that Parliament sits.” That is a tremendous shame. I have some sympathy with the argument that we need to be here in order to do our job. Frankly, I would probably be coming here for these debates myself anyway, although I recognise that there are colleagues who are excluded. However, there is a question about the message that we are sending. The right hon.”
“I have some sympathy with the comments of a couple of Conservative Members about the fact that at a moment of such importance in the nation, we are once again here discussing our own affairs and our own matters. None of us enters this place in order to spend many hours having these kinds of debates, and I do not intend to spend the whole of my five minutes talking about it, but it is an important matter: we all know what these changes are about.”
“I congratulate the Secretary of State on what he has said so far. This is an important Bill that we look forward to supporting. Does he agree that this legislation is needed all the more because of the huge backlog in the court system right now, and that, alongside the important measures that he is introducing, we really need some Government heft to support our legal system and clear away that backlog?”
“The Secretary of State is right about the conflict caused by the current system. Does he agree that the old adage is true, that it is a good man who can keep a wife happy, but it is an amazing man who can keep an ex-wife happy?”
“The state does not consider that it has anything like the same responsibility for deciding whether a couple get married in the first place—if they meet at 4 o’clock and decide at 8 o’clock that night that they want to be married, the state considers that none of its business. So why, if a couple come to the conclusion that they should no longer be together, should the state consider that it is its business to investigate whether they are right? I will leave it there, but I welcome what the Government and my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said and the spirit in which this debate is taking place. I hope that we will all keep in mind the need to ensure that couples who sadly reach the conclusion that they must separate are able to do so in as amicable a fashion as possible.”
“Herbert, was the original author of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937. Some unkind remarks may be made to the Minister in Committee, but A. P. Herbert would have thought of that as a very easy ride, compared with what was said in 1937 when he brought that legislation through. The Secretary of State was right to stress that wanting to assist couples to split in as amicable and blame-free a fashion as possible does not in any way undermine what marriage is all about, or fail to recognise the crucial role that that institution plays in our society. It is important to recognise what the current process does. It not only moves couples down the route of having to find blame and conflict, but includes the role of the court—the state—in deciding whether or not people should be married.”
“I very much enjoyed the speech by the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous), who gave us all food for thought, and I welcome entirely the spirit in which this debate has taken place so far. I do not know whether I ought to declare an interest, because after 21 years of marriage, I am sadly in the process of going through a divorce. The primary concern of everyone who has children and is going through such an unhappy incident is the impact that it will have on their children. I think that the current legislation does lead to unnecessary additional conflict and blame, so the Government are right to pursue this important legislation at a time when they are extremely busy. In speaking in this debate, I am carrying on in the family way, because my great-grandfather, A. P.”
“The people of Chesterfield were incredibly happy when Derbyshire clinical commissioning group set up a coronavirus testing unit in the car park of the Proact stadium in Chesterfield, but weeks after it was set up, the vast majority of people from Chesterfield are unable to get a test there, because it is only for key workers, meaning that Chesterfield residents have to travel 30 or 40 miles to get a test. I have been attempting to pursue this, but it seems to be a local example of the national failure. All this testing capacity is going home after an hour every day and people are unable to get a test. Can we have a debate in Government time on the Government’s entire testing strategy so that people can bring local examples and help the Government to really get on top of testing?”
“That should disappoint all of us who believe in democracy. I shall make one final point. The likely outcome of the Bill will be that a city like London, where we have seen huge growth in population size but which has a transient population that is less likely to register than the population in some other areas, is likely to see a reduction in its number of seats. That cannot be right in a democracy if we actually want constituencies to reflect the number of voters. I would really like the Government to consider that issue in Committee.”
“It is all about how narrow the constituencies are, so that we retain the importance of that constituency link, and how regular the boundary changes are, because if voters move into different constituencies from one election to the next, it takes quite a long time to educate people about who their new Member of Parliament is and for Members to build up a relationship with new communities and to understand the issues in those communities. The principle of whether we have boundary changes is not at stake; what is at stake is how we operate. If many of the things that the Labour party argued for when we discussed parliamentary constituencies in the 2010 Parliament had been supported, the Government would have got the boundary changes they wanted, rather than finding 10 years on that they were never actually introduced.”
“Members of Parliament are taking their constituencies and communities in their hands when they propose and vote for this narrow tolerance level, alongside the removal of any element of parliamentary scrutiny. The hon. Member for Dartford said a few moments ago that there should not be any disagreement about the overall principle that we need boundary changes, and of course there absolutely is not. I recognise that boundary changes are an integral part of reflecting the fact that our communities change in size and that there is population shift over any period of time, so I absolutely recognise that the process needs to happen.”
“There are many other constituencies where it is much more opaque, and the more narrowly we draw the plus and minus tolerance level, the more difficult it is for the Boundary Commission to put together proposals that take those things into account. When we remove the parliamentary scrutiny, many of the people who are speaking up for absolutely the right reasons now may come back and say, “I still think I was right to vote for that Bill, but it is the Boundary Commission that has come up with these proposals. If only they had done it different in my constituency and given me this ward, it would all have been okay.” But it is the domino effect of all the other different constituencies that makes this very difficult to achieve.”
“All of us who have been Members of Parliament and have gone back to ask for votes on second and subsequent occasions—and know how important the work that we have done for our constituents has been in that regard—will recognise the importance of the link between a voter and the place that the Member seeks to represent. I am very lucky. I am the Member of Parliament for Chesterfield, and what Chesterfield is is very clear. The vast majority of people in my constituency are in the Chesterfield borough. Two wards of the Chesterfield borough are in the North East Derbyshire constituency, but most people in my constituency are very clear about where they are from.”
“The work at one end of the region was quite neat, but by the time the commission had got to the last few seats there were really odd constituency boundaries, because of the narrowness of that plus and minus 5%. The hon. Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) spoke about the importance of every vote being equal. He ought to be careful; the way he was talking, he sounded like a bit of a proponent of proportional representation, and I am sure that that was not quite what he meant. There is a reason why some of us are against that, and it is that precious constituency link.”
“I enjoyed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). If he had been here in the 2010 to 2015 Parliament, he would have heard many of the arguments that he has made today in the debate then. We heard from the right hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Sir David Evennett). I presume that back in 2010, in spite of what Labour was telling him, he voted for the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill, which proposed reducing the number of seats down to 600, and he now says that it was actually that reduction which meant that communities got split up. But actually, from looking at each individual region in the Boundary Commission’s proposals, it was very clear where it had started its work and where it had finished.”
“What plans the Government have to provide additional funding to local authorities to replace funds spent on the response to the covid-19 outbreak.”
“The Secretary of State told councils to spend what it takes and expect reimbursement— [Inaudible.] From the money that the Secretary of State announced, they received just £59,000 of his initial £1.6 billion— [Inaudible.]”
“What recent assessment he has made of the financial effect of the covid-19 outbreak on professional football; and what steps the Government are taking to support football clubs during that outbreak.”
“I am sure that many people will be delighted to hear what the Secretary of State had to say about football getting going again, particularly with Sheffield United’s ambitious European campaign in full flow. He is absolutely right about the impact on the professional game. Many lower league clubs and clubs across the football community have done incredibly important work in their communities over this time, stressing the extent to which they are community assets rather than simply businesses. Can the Secretary of State say anything about what can be done to protect those lower league and national league clubs, which face unprecedented problems at this moment in time?”
“A YouGov poll showed that 67% of fans who watch football felt that VAR had made watching football a “less enjoyable” experience. Can anyone imagine any other industry introducing, at great expense, an innovation that its paying customers said made its product worse, and then, instead of scrapping it, reacting by doubling down on it and claiming that it was progress that we all had to get to enjoy? I do not like the principle of VAR. I hate the implementation of it. It professes a precision that it does not deliver. It makes the game our children watch a different sport from the one they play. It changes the way that football’s rules are refereed and it makes obsolete or unworkable rules that made sense with on-field referees in the pre-VAR era. The beautiful game is diminished by VAR, and I say “Scrap it.””
“In cricket, there is “umpire’s call”, which means that a degree of latitude is given, meaning that they stay with the original decision to allow for the uncertainty in the technology and the decision that is made. That should be adopted in football so that fewer hairline decisions are overturned and fans can once again celebrate a goal, knowing that unless there is a clear and obvious error, there will be no change to the decision. I am pleased to have brought this important matter to Parliament. The title of the debate refers to the effect that VAR has on football attendances. That was partly because the Table Office considered football attendances to be a matter that the House was allowed an opinion on, while the rules of football were not, and partly because the evidence is that VAR is reducing football fans’ enjoyment.”
“That is not what the offside rule was designed to outlaw and it needs rewriting, because it is spoiling the sport’s simplicity, which is so important. We need to return to the original principle that if the majority of two players’ bodies are basically level, the striker is considered to be onside. Secondly, fans must be involved in the process, as other sports manage, with the pictures that are being viewed by the referee also available for fans in the stadium. Thirdly, the referee is the referee and he should view the original pictures. If he is certain that he has made a clear and obvious error, only at that moment should the decision be altered. Finally, a clear and obvious error should mean precisely that. If it takes someone three minutes to work out whether something was an error, it was not clear and obvious.”
“When I think about the difference between the fan experience in the Premier League and the Championship, I almost envy you, Mr Betts—but perhaps I would not go that far. If VAR is to continue, changes are needed both to the rules of the game and VAR’s operation if it is going to be anything other than a drag on the appeal of a hugely successful product. Most crucially, the offside law needs reviewing. New referees and linesmen were always taught that if a player is level, they are onside, as the rules state. In real time, that made sense, but in the VAR era, there is no such thing as level. It now means that if, at the moment that the screen is frozen, one player’s toe is a millimetre beyond another player’s shoulder, the goal is disallowed.”
“It is changing the decision making to the detriment of the fairness of the sporting contest. Linesmen are instructed not to flag for offside unless they are absolutely sure, even if they believe it is offside. A linesman in an EFL Championship game who would flag for offside, because he thinks it is, will in the Premier League allow the game to carry on because it was close, giving an unfair advantage to the attacking side. This can lead to a load of football that is a waste of time, because ultimately a goal is disallowed or to an offside player winning a corner or a free kick that then leads to a goal that should never have happened, because the linesman thinks that he was probably offside anyway but did not give it, because he was correctly following the edict not to flag for a marginal offside.”
“In attempting to justify the success of VAR, the English Premier League’s note to me in advance of the debate informed me that a decision was overturned in only one in every three matches, as though that should show me how little it was intervening. Far from it. If VAR is correcting so few decisions, what problem are we trying to solve? It has ruined a lot more goal celebrations for me than that, and not just those that are overturned. Even the celebrations that ultimately are not in vain are not the same because fans wonder whether what happened was something that will be called into question. The spontaneity that is so crucial and endemic to football is lost as a result of VAR. VAR is also changing the way that football is played, refereed and watched.”
“That thirst for perfection in decision making—a product of the pundit era and the enormous investment in technology by Sky Sports and others, designed to improve our enjoyment of the game—has driven us to the soulless VAR experiment. For years, the coverage of every match, and of every post-match managerial interview, has included a section on the decisions that the referee made or the manager’s view of whether the referee was any good. It turns out that managers whose teams lost usually thought that he was not. We all became used to that as part of the background music to every match. Now the focus has shifted from whether the referee was right to whether VAR was right. Every week, the football headlines are not about the performances of the players but about the decisions made and the technology.”
“A camera that is not in line with the offside line is used to overrule a decision by a linesman who was, accepting that arbitrary lines drawn on a screen provide an accurate description of who was furthest forward by a millimetre. I guarantee that if VAR, this dreadful stain on the beautiful game, continues long into the future, fans will look back in 20 years and laugh at the technology on which we currently rely to determine whether someone was offside. VAR has exposed the gap between our expectation of players’ performances and those of referees. When a striker skies a shot over the bar or a goalkeeper lets the ball slip from his grasp, fans on his side are willing to view that error in the context of the overall performance, but no such allowance is ever given to the referee.”
“I must confess that that last-minute disallowed goal brought me momentary pleasure, but even as we celebrated the goal being disallowed a part of me mourned what we had all lost. I have explained why I do not want VAR in football, but even if it must be tolerated, so much is wrong with how it is being delivered. First, the technology is applied to offside decisions on the basis of where one player’s most prominent limb is in relation to another player at the specific moment when the film is frozen. A millisecond either side of that, however, and the player might have been onside. The technology is imperfect in terms of the exact moment when the ball was kicked. VAR is overruling goals on hairline decisions with a technology that is not good enough to deliver the level of precision that it pretends to offer.”
“If VAR offered flawless decision making, I would still say that it was not worth it, but it does not even do that. When VAR was introduced we were promised that it would overturn clear and obvious errors, but it has become a farce. For a toenail offside, 30 seconds before a goal was scored—and after a three-minute delay—Sheffield United’s goal at Tottenham was ruled offside. Arsenal scored a goal at Old Trafford that was uncontested by the Manchester United defenders because the linesman’s flag had gone up several seconds before the goal was scored. West Ham fans celebrated their last-minute equaliser at Bramall Lane for a full 45 seconds before there was even a suggestion that it might be called into question.”
“We are robbed of that moment of simple joy or despair by a faceless man sitting in an industrial estate in south-west London, miles away from those who really care. All the fans can do is wait for his dreadful, often imperfect, verdict. The wild, breathless celebrations are halted by the dreadful, purple appearance on the big screen of the words “checking goal”. Sometimes celebrations that have been under way for 30 seconds or more are placed on pause as two sets of fans stop and stare at a screen that offers them nothing but the fact that uncertainty now reigns. In a sport that thrives on being played without delay, that uncertainty can last for three minutes or more. The chant about VAR is so commonplace that there is not a single premiership fan who could not instantly sing it.”
“A goal can be a thing of beauty—a thrilling movement that builds to a crescendo with a thrilling release—or it can be workmanlike and brutal, with the ball forced over the line. It can be fortunate, freakish or amazingly simple and, sometimes, it can even be comical and farcical. The goal can be controversial, a moment to delight in and bring a nation together in a shared explosion of joy; or it can be tragic, as an entire ground and nation clasp their heads in their hands in perfect unison. No other moment in any other sport is so special as the moment in football when a goal is scored. However that goal is scored, it is rare and important, and because of its rarity and importance, it matters and it is celebrated. That moment, which is the fundamental ethos of what it means to love football, is the moment that VAR interferes with.”