Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats. What advice was the Foreign Office giving Ministers on this matter, and what advice were the security services giving about our national security interest before this decision was taken?”
“Question put (Standing Order No. 23) and agreed to. Ordered, That Alex Sobel, Jess Asato, John McDonnell, Afzal Khan, Dr Allison Gardner, Bambos Charalambous, Sir Desmond Swayne, Charlie Maynard, Manuela Perteghella, Ben Lake, Yasmin Qureshi and Wera Hobhouse present the Bill. Alex Sobel accordingly presented the Bill. Bill read the first time; to be read a S econd time on Friday 13 November , and to be printed (Bill 142).”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it. All I want to say is that a kind of unilateral disarmament on AI is not going to solve the international problem. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran: these are not respecters of international treaties or international laws, even if they were to sign such treaties or laws, and we do not want to disable our own industry. The jury is out on whether AI is an extinction-threatening phenomenon, but I really do commend the hon. Member for raising the topic. I hope he will forgive me for opposing the Bill because I want the debate to continue.”
“On the question of how the CQC leadership becomes conflicted, will my hon. Friend reflect on the fact that, in an Adjournment debate I held in July, the then Patient Safety Minister, the hon. Member for Birmingham Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), made it clear that the person responsible for deciding what safe space information might be released would be the chief executive of the CQC? If the chief executive of the CQC is to see all that information, how would he or she not be able to use it, or be tempted to use it, when he or she inspects hospitals for the purposes of the CQC? Would the safe space not then be hopelessly conflicted, and therefore lose public confidence?”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government. It raises all sorts of constitutional questions, but those are not for today. I will concentrate on HSSIB. I rise to support amendments 1 to 4, which would remove the abolition of HSSIB from the Bill. The Government have singularly failed to make the case for removing this crucial safety investigation function. It did not exist until recently, and now they want to scrub it out. I suspect that is because too many people in the health system do not like being held to account by an independent investigative body.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries. The EPUT—Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust—public inquiry, affecting my constituency, cost in its first year £5 million, and in its second year it is costing another £5 million. The whole budget for HSSIB was only £6.3 million a year, yet it does scores of investigations, not just one inquiry. The Ockenden inquiry cost £14 million. If we could save just a fraction of the cost of medical negligence, which is £3.6 billion a year, HSSIB would pay for itself.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham (Dame Diana Johnson), is not in the House today. I rather suspect that she is more sympathetic to this argument than the Minister sitting on the Front Bench today. In our earlier exchanges we discovered and once again exposed how the safe space will be brutally compromised by the fact that it will be housed in a regulator with, inevitably, other ulterior motives.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon. Member for Birmingham Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill), she could not answer the question of who would conduct independent safety investigations in the NHS after the abolition of HSSIB. She said that safety investigations would be conducted by the Care Quality Commission, but she could not actually claim that they would be independent; as my hon. Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) demonstrated, they would not be. If, as it seems, it is intended that safety investigations should be carried out by the CQC unaffected by the transfer, why make the transfer at all? How much is this transfer going to cost?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for her announcement, which, however she dresses it up, is in fact a decision about common sense and listening. I put it to her that, in Essex, most of the district councils, the county council and most MPs want to stay with two-tier local government. Is that an option? Will she acknowledge that and listen?”
“Indeed, there are a few of us, but what we are hearing is a group of aggrieved remain supporters who have never come to terms with their grief and remain ideologically committed to rejoining. To anybody who wants to have another referendum, I do not say, “Bring it on,” because that is the last thing the public want, but I say that we would win again. When it comes down to the crunch, the British public do not want to hand back control of our laws to the European Union, and all the polls show that. If we ask them in a poll, “Do you want Westminster or Brussels to control farming policy?”, or whatever policy it is, people always vote for Westminster to maintain control.”
“The fact is that since we left the European Union, Wolfgang Münchau, who somewhat reluctantly voted remain, has made it clear that leaving was an economic non-event. We were growing at about the same rate of France and Germany, and we still are. There has been no smashing disaster in the economy. There is a disaster in Scotland, where the SNP is campaigning against reopening the North sea and supports the high energy costs imposed by the ridiculous dash to net zero—the Government are doing that too—but the fact is that we are better off outside the EU in the long term.”
“Will it come out of defence or welfare, or will there be more taxation to generate the extra revenue needed once we start making increased contributions to the European Union? There is also the myth-making. There is a myth that there were no small boats until Brexit—what rubbish. The small boats started in 2018, before we left, and by 2020 there were more than 8,500 crossings. That is not due to Brexit. The Dublin regulation was useless. It was in place during those years and it was never enforced. I will finish on the question of forecasts, which are all conjectural. They are all based on what the British economy might look like compared with a basket of other economies, including the United States, which has had a huge fiscal stimulus and an AI boom, and has more free enterprise policies.”
“I totally agree. Defence is a reserved matter for member states in the European Union. The European Union does not have any troops. NATO is the forum through which we operate, and it is NATO to which we should be committed, rather than setting up a rival defence organisation in the European Union. I will also point out the contributions. According to a table from the House of Commons Library, we were making a gross contribution of £16 billion or £17 billion a year, but, with the rebate, the net contribution was £9.4 billion in the last year of membership. Our latest contribution was £103 million. To all those people who advocate for rejoining or for the reset, where will the money come from?”
“The referendum was in 2016, but all the legalities of membership of the European Union, including the Dublin convention, applied until 2021. The small boat crossings were rocketing before Brexit. They have nothing to do with it.”
“The question of scrutiny was raised by the Minister’s colleagues. In the absence of a European Scrutiny Committee, how is this stuff going to be scrutinised if he brings in direct applicability and direct effect of European laws?”
“May I refer the Secretary of State to Question 20 on the Order Paper? Can she explain when the A120 to Harwich will finally be upgraded? Is she aware that a community of some 20,000 people is served by this dreadful road, and that we dread another winter of subsidence and potholes as the existing road collapses, which is long past its renewal date? Given that this road is vital for growth in the east of England, as it serves the Harwich port and the freeport as well as this deprived community, when will we see some plans to upgrade it?”
“While we in the Conservative party have learned that lesson, and are determined to have a much more robust and secure electricity policy, why are the Government doubling down on the risks they are creating by rushing ahead with renewables, vastly expensive grid investment that would otherwise be unnecessary and, of course, these absurd and obscene constraint payments to wind farm operators that cannot feed their electricity into the grid and get paid for it anyway, costing customers billions of pounds?”
“Can I just point out that the very fact that the Minister is at the Dispatch Box answering this urgent question is itself an indictment of the confidence that not only the public, but people working in NESO, have in the resilience of the system? Can I also point out that commentators have been warning for a decade or more about the risk to the security of supply from the over-reliance on intermittent renewables?”
“May I draw the Minister’s attention to a poll conducted and published by YouGov? It shows that local government reform in Essex is really unpopular. What is more, the more people are questioned about it, the more unpopular it becomes. Why do we not have a referendum in Essex to find out whether we really want local government reform, instead of it just being imposed by politicians who think that they know better?”
“She was the one member of the shadow Cabinet who said, “We should oppose this”; members of our shadow Cabinet were saying that we should relish joining the ECHR. Her prescience has often invited derision from others, but she was right on that score. We in the Conservative party are learning the lessons that she left behind during her life; maybe other parties will learn them, too.”
“I shared 18 years of her parliamentary life, alongside my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). There were disagreements about Maastricht, and about women candidates—my goodness, she loathed me trying to promote women candidates in the Conservative party. I maintain that she was wrong about that, but she was right about many things. Her maiden speech, about the Trident nuclear deterrent, was made at a time when the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats were a bit wobbly on that subject. What an emblem of her patriotism, and her fervour for strength and clarity of purpose! I served in the shadow Cabinet with Ann when the Government were introducing the Human Rights Act 1998 and pressing for close adherence to the European convention on human rights.”
“I thank the Home Secretary for her statement, and her tribute to Ann—it was extremely moving, if I may say so. Can I also point out the unfortunate statistical fact that a Member of Parliament is more likely to meet a violent death than a member of His Majesty’s armed forces or a member of the British police forces? I ask you, Madam Deputy Speaker, to assure Mr Speaker that none of us doubts his personal commitment to our security, but this remains a very relevant problem. None of us wants our homes to be turned into fortresses, but maybe more people need to be encouraged to, for example, put security gates on the front of their houses, and to have security cameras recording what is going on, rather than just relying on the Ring bell that happens to be on their front door. Can I also pay my own tribute to Ann? Much has already been said.”
“Where is the evidence that jury trials are causing the delays? In the south-east and other parts of the country, the backlog is already falling. The Government should be commended for that, but what are the other causes of delays, and are they not much more significant than any delay caused by the fact that they are jury trials?”
“I ask this question in all sincerity. Throughout this conflict, the Government have pleaded for de-escalation, but if Iran is gratuitously escalating, should we not give unambiguous support to the Americans for retaliating? Who else is going to retaliate against gratuitous escalation by Iran if it is not the Americans? Rather than hedging our bets, can we not give more unambiguous support—if not military support, then political support—for the United States’ efforts to resolve this conflict? It has already given so much ground in the negotiations. We cannot complain that it has not tried to be as reasonable as it possibly can.”
“The Leader of the House did not mention in the forthcoming business that the House is about to be asked to decide on whether to issue a writ for a farcical and unnecessary by-election. [ Interruption. ] Have we had it already? I beg your pardon; I was not in the Chamber. What opportunity do I have to raise the question of how the by-election should be paid for? Many of my constituents live in the tendering district and will be inflicted with the cost of the by-election. It seems most unfair that this political stunt should cost council tax payers in my constituency or in Clacton.”
“Could the Foreign Secretary say anything about the bilateral discussions between President Trump and President Zelensky, and can she shed any light on the discussions they had about the United States sharing its Patriot missile production licences with Ukraine? What can the Government do—apart from welcoming that, as I hope the Foreign Secretary will—to facilitate that exchange and ensure that it happens? It could be crucial.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. During business questions, I mentioned the interests of council tax payers in Tendring district. I probably should have drawn attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, where it says that I am a council tax payer in Tendring district.”
“The SDR promised a national conversation—where is that national conversation?”
“Our inability to escalate is the greatest danger at the moment.”
“Will the Minister point out to the European Union that, because we have a common travel area with the Republic of Ireland, and because the Republic of Ireland is not applying any of these checks on British citizens going to and coming from Northern Ireland or direct from the United Kingdom, there is actually an open border between the European Union and the United Kingdom, so they might as well allow the same access through Dover rather than trying to impose all their rubbish on the United Kingdom? On the suggestion that this is all the fault of Brexit, this did not exist when we left the European Union; this is a result of a decision that the dysfunctional European Union is inflicting on travelling British citizens for its own reasons, not for any practical benefit.”
“May I help the Minister answer the question he was asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith), who is on the Opposition Front Bench? The answer is that the law is an ass and the law should be changed, as the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said. How can it be that the law is interfering in a perfectly happy relationship between coastguard volunteers and the MCA? The law is an ass, and that is quite clearly the view of the coastguards I met last week in West Mersea in my constituency.”
“There are plenty of people in Government who get the urgency of this, and I met some of them with Lord Robertson earlier this week to be briefed on national resilience, but there is a deep reluctance in the Government to recognise that to mobilise for war is not about the armed forces and a few branches of Government. Armies may fight battles, but nations fight wars. If the whole nation is not galvanised to do what is necessary, to be ready for what is going to happen, and to make the sacrifices and suffer the pain of diverting resources to less popular things than the popular things that Governments tend to spend their money on, we are not ready for war.”
“This is a very low level of war, but we have certainly been under attack from the way that Russia rations gas to western Europe as a weapon. Turning energy into a weapon, turning food into a weapon—Russia is doing the lot, and the writing is on the wall. The Government still have not woken up to the fact that the head of NATO, and even the Prime Minister at Munich, has said that we have to be ready to fight a war—a shooting, kinetic war—against Russia by 2030. There is no sign in the implementation of policy that the Government understand the urgency of that.”
“It is an honour to succeed the hon. and gallant Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) in this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) who opened the debate—a very timely debate it is, too. I particularly commend the point that the former Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. and gallant Member for Birmingham Selly Oak, made about this being a whole-of-nation approach, because we are preparing for war. We might actually be at war in some senses, because Russia is knowingly saying that it is conducting a war against NATO, and we are certainly subject to a hybrid war against our national infrastructure—hacking our hospitals, closing down Jaguar Land Rover and harassing our shipping.”
“Yes, and I think the Government have plans for that, but they keep pulling back because it is a difficult thing to talk about. The spin doctors and spads will tell their political masters, “Oh no, don’t talk about that—the polling says it is terrible.” I am afraid that we have to confront the polling. We have to confront the population with the ugly truth: this country is at far greater risk than it has ever been since the height of the cold war.”
“If the next war starts in the Balkans, the Baltic states or Poland, it will be about drones. The Government are moving some way on that, but we are so slow. The Ukrainians were way ahead of us in helping to protect the Gulf states while we were still sending multimillion-pound aircraft that cost £25 million an hour to fly to shoot down a drone that cost £150,000. We must adapt our industry to produce cheap, numerous capability so that we have the scale to deal with that. We need that whole-of-society mobilisation. We need much more adaptable governance.”
“We have to protect our national technology from being spied on by people sent to this country to go to our universities in order to collect that information, steal it and give it to our enemies. The context of the document, which is almost old hat even though it is only a few months old, is the changing geopolitical situation, the withdrawal of America from European security, the collapse of the rules-based international order, the failure of democratic governance models to rise to the challenge, the unpreparedness of most western democracies to be ready to confront the hybrid warfare that we already face, and our lack of adaptability. I commend the point made by the former Armed Forces Minister: there is no point in ordering a whole lot of kit that will be out of date as soon as we get to the next war.”
“In this paper entitled “Understanding the UK’s Transition to Warfighting Readiness” that I am just about to explain briefly to the House, we refer to Norway’s concept. Norway’s total war concept is being embedded in its national life and embedded across Government policy through all branches of Government. For example, we refer in the report to the need to galvanise our universities to be ready for war, so that research and development programmes are directed towards suitable and useful capability, creating sovereign national capability and protecting those research programmes from foreign infiltration. I love having foreign students in our universities—it is good for the economy and for our universities—but we cannot have Chinese nationals at the heart of chip manufacture and design, robotics or AI systems.”
“We need resilient financial systems. We need sovereign defence capabilities and sovereign critical national infrastructure. I am glad that we have stopped handing over so much of our CNI to foreign owners, but an immediate, radical transformation is required. This document is 19,000 words drafted for me and for my friend the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg), who serves on the Defence Committee and is a renowned expert on defence in the House, by Chris Donnelly, who used to be a Soviet expert at NATO, worked in the Ministry of Defence and finished up teaching at Shrivenham. He is a wise defence guru. If hon. Members want to know how much really needs to be changed, they should just read through these 19,000 words of analysis and recommendations. There is a huge task, but to carry it through we need to carry the people.”
“The circumstances are changing as we speak, and I am afraid that a lack of urgency is being shown by the whole House, apart from, say, the Defence Committee and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. This is how we get into wars—by being unprepared for them. We need to change our whole concept of deterrence from the old concept that somehow just having a nuclear weapon keeps us safe. No, we must have a much more flexible ability to respond to changing circumstances. What will happen when the Russians move into a Russian-speaking town in one of the Balkan states? What will we do as our soldiers start being killed? Will we start letting off nuclear weapons or will we have analogous, appropriate, flexible military capability to be able to respond and escalate at pace?”
“There is a national conversation about who will be the next Prime Minister or whether there will be a by-election in Clacton, but there is no such national conversation about the existential threats to our freedom and democracy. It is democracy across the western world that is failing this challenge. The autocracies are winning at the moment. We are facing circumstances where Russia may well be struggling in the Ukraine war, but that makes it more unpredictable. What will Putin do as he feels that his political support is slipping away and Russia’s vulnerability is increasing now that there are petrol queues in Moscow and explosions in Russian cities? There is a growing awareness—it has even been said in the last 24 hours by a serious propagandist for Mr Putin—that this is no longer a special military operation; it is a war.”
“I happen to agree with the hon. Member about the failure of the coalition Government to make progress with the deterrent, but there were many of us complaining about that at the time, including my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). Indeed, as shadow Defence Secretary in the early 2000s, I was complaining about the cuts in defence spending that were then being made as we went to war in Iraq and as we went to war in Afghanistan. I very much welcome the hon. Member’s bipartisan approach, but rather than pretending to be bipartisan, and making oblique references to what happened under previous Governments, he should be bipartisan, and then we would all get on much better.”
“Dash gets facts wrong and misinterprets the law, either through a failure of understanding or because the recommendation to abolish HSSIB somehow reflected the desired outcome of the review, regardless of the facts. I will set out some specific questions, most of which the Minister has had in advance. If she does not have enough time to respond, I look forward to discussing them at a future meeting that we discussed having.”
“The Minister now has a list of key recommendation impacts produced by HSSIB. A lot of them may seem small or piecemeal, but so far it is only a small body. After a boy suffered an avoidable death from cancer, HSSIB recommended to NHS England a new community language translation and interpreting services framework so that non-English speaking patients would get appointment letters for their children that they could read and understand. HSSIB recommended a protocol between prisons and ambulance services to avoid wasting ambulance time and new guidance for non-accidental injury of babies in emergency departments where no specific guidance had existed before. The Dash review shows no understanding of HSSIB’s purpose and no comprehension of coherent safety systems management.”
“I am grateful for this opportunity to evaluate the Dash review of patient safety, and I thank the Minister for the meeting with her this afternoon. I hope that the House and Penny Dash will forgive me, but in the interests of brevity and clarity, I shall be direct. Whenever asked to justify the abolition of the Health Services Safety Investigations Body, Ministers refer to Dash, but Dash fails to make the case for what it recommends. This new clinical incident investigator was established less than three years ago. HSSIB is a new concept in healthcare, conceived to challenge the culture of denial and blame in the NHS. It is proving itself, even with its very limited budget. One early report on aortic dissection led to 300 more people receiving lifesaving treatment.”
“It is telling that in the report, the words “including safety” are added merely in parentheses, as though safety is ancillary to quality, but that becomes justification for rationalisation while actually compromising safety. Safety system management is intrinsic to safety and public confidence in other safety-critical activities, such as aviation, but this is alien to NHS culture. I therefore ask the Minister again: without HSSIB, which independent body will promote a coherent understanding of safety system management in health, and who is to hold the NHS and Government to account for safety failures?”
“Dash complains about there being far too many recommendations—yes, there are—but, as Dash itself enumerates, it is the 30 public inquiries that, in its language, have “cluttered” the “landscape” with some 1,400 recommendations over recent years. HSSIB is therefore not the source of those recommendations. In HSSIB’s first 34 months of operation, it has produced only 56 recommendations. How can Ministers use that reason to justify HSSIB’s abolition? Dash refers more than once to “quality (including safety) of care”. That elides quality of care with safety. In any other safety-critical industry, safety is seen as a distinct, separate and overriding priority.”
“Over the years, inquiries have proved to be a chaotic means of investigation, assembling expertise from scratch, which is then lost after the inquiry, and failing to command public confidence or to fix the system. That is why, after the 1999 Paddington rail crash, the Ladbroke Grove inquiry in 2001 established the rail accident investigation branch. Since then, despite many fatal rail accidents, there has been no public inquiry into a rail crash—nor has the public felt the need to demand one—and rail safety has improved. Given that HSSIB is expert, full time, and can conduct much cheaper and quicker investigations than public inquiries, how can Ministers accept the Dash recommendation to abolish it? Why not consider expanding HSSIB to avoid the need for so many costly public inquiries?”
“I 100% agree with my right hon. Friend. He will note that I will pick up on those points during my remarks. I come back to the questions that I want to put to the Secretary of State. First, if HSSIB’s investigations are intended to continue unaffected by the transfer to the CQC, why bother with the expense of the transfer? Are Ministers simply using Dash as the pretext for what people in the Department or elsewhere in the NHS would like to have? HSSIB was deliberately started very small, but the intention was that over time it would take over more investigations in health and replace the need for wasteful, lengthy, inexpert ad hoc public inquiries.”
“Just ask the clinicians, patients, families and patient safety organisations what they think about trusts marking their own homework. None of them has confidence, because providers are keen to protect themselves from litigation and reputational damage. How can Ministers accept the Dash recommendation that we should rely on investigations conducted by provider organisations?”