Ms Stella Creasy
MP for Walthamstow · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“I thank the Foreign Secretary for his clear-sighted commitment not only to talk about a two-state solution, but to actually try to act to achieve it, as the only foundation of a safe Israel and a free Palestine.”
“Could he reassure the House that we will not acquiesce and bend to such pressure, and that the only action that could ever be acceptable to us to make us contemplate reversing this ban would be a halt on the E1 development and a permanent end to settler violence?”
“I start by paying tribute to the new Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), for all the work she did on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee on these issues. I know that she will do a brilliant job in this role.”
“I do not really understand the technology, but I know that he does, and I understand and share his fear accordingly. We come here today to debate this Bill because we all know that trust is a bygone issue in our politics.”
“We would welcome her having that conversation, which might be more illuminating than whether she is concerned about Zach Goldmsith’s leaflets. I add my support to the amendments tabled by my hon.”
“From today, if we do not take a stand with this Bill to tackle the ways that money has infiltrated our politics, the risk is that they will think we are acting in the interests of our own back pockets.”
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“I am sure I speak on behalf of everyone in passing on condolences to the Member who has just spoken. What we are dealing with here is a failure of leadership, not of the military that served that leadership—we should never confuse the two. Both western and Afghan forces have served with great courage and are responsible for the successes achieved in the 20 years. It is a failure to understand Afghanistan and how the Taliban capitalised on UK and US forces’ counter-insurgency approaches, and the corruption of tribal leadership. The Pashtun saying, “You have all the watches, we have all the time” reflects the speed with which the Taliban have acted. They took their first city just 12 days ago and now they have Kabul. But just as this was not inevitable, or indeed unexpected, so it is not inevitable that all we can do is despair.”
“I thank the Minister for her work on this strategy. She will know that if somebody is subjected to abuse or attack because of the colour of their skin, we rightly ask the police to record that and the courts to prosecute it as a form of hate crime. Yet if somebody is subjected to abuse or attack simply for being a woman, they face no such protection under our current system. Will the Minister meet me and campaigners, who are waiting for the imminent report from the Law Commission about how to make misogyny a part of our hate crime rubric in this country, to look at how we can quickly close that gap and give equal protection to everyone everywhere?”
“Let us come together to come back with something that can make Britain proud of how we treat the persecuted, not an international pariah.”
“Einstein said: “A bundle of belongings isn’t the only thing a refugee brings to his new country.” Out there, the British public know that. They know that we need a system that can process people fairly and quickly. They know that but for the grace of God there they go. If the worst were to happen to them and they had to flee their homes, they would want a new home that saw them not as a burden, but as a benefit. Our past does not mean we cannot build a future in which we make that ambition a reality. This Bill will not stop the boats; it will encourage them. So let us not give the criminal gangs their latest recruiting tactic. I urge colleagues to vote this Bill down and stand up to those who want to demonise refugees.”
“Yarl’s Wood is a stain on our national identity, a place where victims of sexual abuse and rape in war are jailed. Not only does it cost more than community schemes to run, but it retraumatises those women over and over again. Home Office costs are spiralling, 40% of appeals are successful and more and more people are forced to live in misery and destitution as a result of the scheme we have. The Government’s solution is to try to house them offshore in a move that makes Yarl’s Wood look compassionate. Those who have lauded the Australians and their offshoring facility at Nauru would do well to read the horrifying accounts of the sexual abuse of women and children over the years, in addition to the hundreds of incidents of threatened and actual self-harm, and ask whether this is really the path we want to go down.”
“Ministers claim the legislation will protect women from trafficking when it will do the reverse, because it is not based on any evidence. Their own statistics show that the majority in detention referred to the national referral mechanism are then recognised as potential victims of trafficking and that 81% of reasonable grounds rejections that are challenged are granted a positive ruling, yet many of those women would fall into that group, too. Women repeatedly abused on their journeys here, who cannot find the words to speak about the hell they have been through, will be criminalised because they did not have all their paperwork neatly folded about their person for presentation during this time. Locking them up in detention centres reinforces, not removes, the abuse they face.”
“You run, you grab your children, you flee with what you can, you try to save their lives—yes, many of them boys and young men—from certain death. What parent cannot understand that ambition? We all want to stop the traffickers, but the gangs will use these changes as a selling point to those desperate people. If we want to stop the gangs then take away the market, but there is no safe and legal route being proposed here, no new commitments made. The vulnerable persons resettlement scheme has stopped. If we think that the only place that people are running from is Syria, we do not understand what is going on in Ethiopia, Iran, Afghanistan, to the Uyghurs, to LGBTQ people in Myanmar, or to Christians and religious minorities around the world.”
“It is true that it was easier to quietly ignore those in danger when there were not that many of them, before the mass refugee camps in Sudan or the Syrian civil war, but just because the challenge is harder does not mean that our response should be, too; that we should be a nation that does not keep its promises to the 3,000 children we said we would take under the Dubs scheme; we have only taken 480. Turkey is taking 4 million refugees and we are quibbling about 26,000 applications. The vast majority of refugees end up staying in the areas they have run from, displaced and living in developing countries when wealthy ones like ours want to look the other way. Persecution does not happen in an orderly fashion. Wars are not run to a timetable to be able to make people make applications.”
“They want to penalise people for how they run, creating a third class of citizens who are at perpetual risk of being deported: because they did not queue properly and fill in the appropriate form, they did not travel directly to an island nation or present themselves immediately for a claim, they must be suspect, regardless of their story or why they fled, breaching the refugee convention. I hear this a lot: “Well, they came through France, Germany, Belgium. Why should we help them?” The convention is clear that there is no requirement to claim asylum in the first safe country. It was intended to get nations to work together to help make managing those at risk possible.”
“When it came to east African Asians, we introduced the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1968 to make it harder for them to seek sanctuary. Now we have orphaned children sleeping rough on our border with France and in Greece in overcrowded covid-ridden camps, and we say that they must be safe so they are not our problem. Let us stop re-writing the UK’s history to provide cover for legislation like this, which makes plain the Government’s disdain for those who find themselves with little alternative but to run for their lives.”
“In 1933, Einstein lived in Norfolk, guarded by local residents and a Conservative MP to prevent attempts to assassinate him by the Nazis. At the time, he said: “I shall become a naturalised Englishman as soon as is possible for my papers to go through.” He never did get those papers, though. Throughout this debate, I have heard Members laud our history of accepting refugees as if it somehow explains and justifies the Bill before us; as if our capacity as a nation to retrospectively see that we did the right thing means that we are doing so now. Yet even when it came to geniuses like Einstein, the term “asylum seeker” has always meant second-class citizen. There are no photographs of the parents of the Kindertransport children, the ones denied entry by Whitehall, only to be murdered by the Nazis.”
“They need us to deal with all these legal loan sharks, which are circling them and pulling them down—once and for all, in truth. The Minister will have my support, and I know the support of Members across the House, if he takes that robust, proactive approach, but right now all we can see is more fins in the waters ahead.”
“Some people are not going to get the compensation they are entitled to, but they are also being chased by the creditors of those companies because they owe the companies money. Something is fundamentally wrong in that balance. Finally, I again agree with the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys that we need to ensure that there are good credit options, which is why I urge the Minister to talk to his colleagues—not just in the Treasury, but in local government—about our credit union movement, which is on its knees as a result of the pandemic. As a proud Co-op MP, as well as Labour, I believe that social finance initiatives are critical to helping people out of this crisis. Minister, the people who are drowning, not waving, need us to offer more than a life raft such as Breathing Space.”
“Setting out a situation whereby we allow companies to pick and choose which regulations they abide by is not going to help our constituents. On that point, I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield that we need to review the FCA. The failure to act quickly enough on Wonga, BrightHouse and Amigo Loans is an example of why we need the regulator to be better. Too often, the Financial Ombudsman Service has intervened on behalf of our constituents, rather than the regulator, which has been working with the companies. It is right to review now the FCA and whether it is working effectively, when people are without the compensation they are due from those companies, many of which have gone bust.”
“One of the things I am extremely concerned about is hearing Ministers suggest that somehow these companies would not have to follow the same rules around credit regulation as other companies, as if they were special and as if they were not as bad as some others. There are two things about that. I hope the Minister will set out for us why he thinks there might be exemptions. What particular elements of our consumer regulation would he not apply to “buy now, pay later” industries? Why does he think that would not create a race to the bottom across the consumer credit industry, as companies variously tried to argue that they were not the bad guys ripping off our constituents? Has he spoken to the Competition and Markets Authority about this?”
“That is why I urge the Minister, when he knows he has cross-party support and when he has the evidence, that there should be no further delay in regulating those companies on the issue. We need to tackle the way in which the companies see affordability. It is clear from the evidence that their definitions of affordability are not ones that we accept in other industries. We need to challenge the product design and how those companies are evolving so quickly to evade what is commonplace evidence about credit regulation—many of the things the Advertising Standards Authority has tried to pick them up on. However, they are moving quicker than Government. We need to make sure that we have a proportionate regulatory process.”
“Indeed, the Hastee Workplace Wellbeing Study showed that 59% of workers had applied for high-cost credit knowing that they would struggle with repayments, but feeling that they had little option. Yet over the past couple of months, rather than the industry recognising its responsibility to its consumers and recognising the support from across the House that the Government would have for regulation, we have seen it simply changing the wording. Such entities no longer call themselves “credit”. They call themselves “a money management tool”. They offer debt advice themselves. It really is turkeys talking to us about how going vegan at Christmas is a good idea. The industry is moving quicker than the Government.”
“If we consider the research from the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, which shows that 3 million people with mental health problems have found it much harder to control their online spending since lockdown, in part because of the design of online retail sites, the need for urgent action grows ever stronger. As I have repeatedly said to the Minister, we have to learn the lesson of the payday lending industry. We did not act quickly enough, so even now we are seeing millions of people who still have problems as a result of borrowing seven or eight years ago through payday lenders. The public know that we need to act because they do not believe the adverts. They know this is a problem.”
“I welcome the fact that, over the past year, the debate has changed from the idea that this is somehow just a new wacky way to use the internet to shop more simply to a recognition of the damage and the danger that this form of credit, which is unregulated—and still is unregulated today—represents. The FCA report was clear about that. We know from Citizens Advice that almost 40% of people who have used “buy now, pay later” did so without realising, as a lot of the retailers push people to use that as the first option on their sites because they are officially paying the fees for it. Almost the same number of people thought it was not proper borrowing and really did not understand what they were signing up for.”
“People are using “buy now, pay later” to access credit at a stressful and challenging time in their life—for example, when they face redundancy, or when they might not have been able to access help because they are one of the 3 million excluded in our country, in particular those who have children to keep clothed, fed and warm. Missing a credit bill or payment can be a major life event. The odds of using “buy now, pay later” go up by about a third when someone is made redundant, has a baby or has to move because they can no longer afford to live in their home. We know that, as a result, those people’s credit records are affected. We know they have been referred to debt collection agencies and that they have experienced mental distress. We know that it does not have to be that way.”
“It has even been suggested that £1 in every £4 spent last Christmas was “buy now, pay later”. Several years ago, few of us had heard much about that industry. It is now huge. As my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield said, the impression being given is that the issue is all about fast fashion and young women buying too many pairs of shoes, but the brutal reality coming from the research is that it is not about that at all. People are using the options provided by websites to make ends meet because there is too much month at the end of their money. In particular, families are suffering and having to use that form of credit. As my hon. Friend said, the Which? research is incredibly compelling.”
“Like others, I welcome the Breathing Space process, but I believe we need to have a much more fundamental rethink of how we help people to manage their finances and how we put consumers front and centre in what is often an unfair fight. I recognise the point made by the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys about not taking a whack-a-mole approach, but I hope he will forgive me if I take a bite out of some legal loan sharks that I have been concerned about and spoken about to the Minister for some years now—the “buy now, pay later” industry, which has been one of the overall winners in the pandemic. Since the pandemic started, there has been a massive increase in people using “buy now, pay later”, because they have been able to do online shopping.”
“With the eviction ban ending, with no end in sight for high rents and with no action taken on them, it is clear that people will struggle to manage the cost of trying to stay in the community where their children go to school and where they can be as close as possible to whatever work they can get, especially if they have experienced unemployment during the epidemic. Indeed, the Financial Wellness Group tells us that more than one in three customers to whom it has provided free debt advice have had negative disposable incomes—their priority living costs exceed their income. For many of those people, it is about housing costs.”
“We can see that when people seek help, they are already in a position whereby it is much more difficult to help them. In particular, they flag up housing costs. I recognise the point about incomes made by my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield, but I represent a community in London—supposedly an affluent area—that has the 10th-highest level of child poverty in the country due to the cost of housing and of keeping a roof over people’s heads. We must focus on the poverty that we see in our communities and on the impact it has on people’s spending.”
“We must not be complacent—I know the Minister is not—and we must not encourage a consumer spending bubble. I urge the Treasury to change tack and be like the Grinch, but for good cause, owing to the problems in our communities. The debt advice services tell us that they have not yet seen hundreds of thousands of people coming to them, but we know it takes time for people to get to the point when they admit that they need help. The true impact of the pandemic on debt advice is yet to be seen, although we are already seeing some incredibly worrying trends. The Financial Wellness Group tells us that around 24% of the customers it has advised on utility debts each owed about £1,000 in arrears, but that has risen to £2,000 over the last year.”
“The truth is that this is not a new phenomenon in our country. We have always had an economy that was increasingly reliant on consumer debt, and we have always had millions of people for whom that reliance was toxic. As my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield set out so well, it is very expensive to be poor in this country. Credit cards and high-cost credit, whatever form it takes, are expensive for people on low incomes. Indeed, a sub-prime credit card costs around £200 more a year, and personal loans cost around £500 more a year. The issue is not just about the credit that people can access, but about the way utilities are sold. Being on the best energy pre-payment tariff could still be £131 more expensive than the best online-only tariff.”
“Understanding the nature of the credit tsunami that is coming towards us due to the debt that underpins our economy and underpins the response to credit is vital not only for people’s individual lives, but for our public sector. The reality is that research increasingly paints a grim picture for many of our constituents. Some 48% of consumers told the FCA review of high-cost credit that they had to cut back on other spending to make their loan bills, while 37% said they missed payments on their rent or mortgage or on utilities, with council tax the top payment that many are forgoing. Some 16% of customers reported that their most recent borrowing was to repay debt that they had already taken on. People were being drawn into a spiral whereby they were borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, from Paul to pay Sarah, and from Sarah to pay Peter.”
“In April, a quarter of mothers from black and ethnic minority community backgrounds reported that they were struggling to feed their children, and 32% of young women said that they were finding it hard to pay for essentials. So, the question for us all is, what are people doing to make ends meet? Some 26% of those affected by coronavirus have borrowed money to make ends meet, most commonly through credit cards or an overdraft facility, and a million of those people have used some form of high-cost credit product. Crucially, Citizens Advice research also shows that people from shielded groups are four times as likely as others to be behind on utility bills such as council tax.”
“The two previous speakers gave some excellent statistics on the debt in our country. I am mindful that StepChange tells us that more than 19 million adults have experienced a loss of income during the pandemic, while 11 million people have built up £25 billion of arrears and debt—not because they have been sat at home ordering consumer goods to entertain themselves, but to pay for essentials. As we know, those debts are not equally distributed within our communities. In particular, renters, those from minority ethnic communities, and women and mothers, as Women’s Budget Group research shows, have borne the brunt of the debt crisis that is building up in our communities.”
“It is a pleasure to take part in the debate, and I pay tribute to the work that my hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) has done on these issues for many years. I agree with every word from the hon. Member for Blackpool North and Cleveleys (Paul Maynard); I fear that consensus will break out in the House on the need to act. Whether we have different ideas on how we should act may be another matter, but I think the concern that debt has been the quiet winner of the covid crisis is widely shared across the House. The two excellent previous speeches reflect that. The talk of people saving more may well be true, but we know that, in our communities, many people are drowning, not waving. Frankly, they were already in deep water before the pandemic hit.”
“By resisting new clause 30 and saying that this has to go back to the Law Commission, when it is clear what could be done to make it a criminal offence, he is sending a very clear message to women, as he has done on rape, as he has done on domestic homicide reviews, as he has done on child protection, that their concerns are complicated and difficult, but statues and protests are not. I ask him to think again about the message that he is sending and to say, “We will make laws in this place that will support everyone to lead their lives without fear”, because it is fear that someone will feel if they think that somebody is following them with a camera when they just want to feed their baby. Minister, let us not just stick up for the unborn children; let us stick up for those who are newly born, too.”
“I urge Ministers tonight: whether it is in the other place or now, please do not leave the women of this country feeling that you do not understand the lives they lead. We have the lowest rates of breastfeeding in Europe and it is not hard to understand why, if women feel they are going to be shamed or attacked in public. As someone that this has happened to myself, I ask the Minister to think about what he would feel if it was happening to a member of his family: if somebody was taking photos or a video for their own gratification and he could not stop them.”
“I pay tribute to his constituent, Julia Cooper, a valiant woman who was simply feeding her baby in a park when a man decided it was acceptable to take photos of her breastfeeding without her consent. When she sought the support of the law, the law said it was perfectly legal for the man to do what he was doing. Take a moment to think about that. We can simply and easily decide that we want to protect statues, but on that most natural and beautiful thing for a mother to do, to feed her child, the Government are saying no to protecting those women. Again, they are kicking the issue into the long grass. I served on the upskirting Bill. At the time, we raised concerns that, frankly, it only went below the knee, but we now need to make sure that the law ensures full coverage.”
“Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Dame Diana Johnson) spoke courageously to identify an anomaly in our law, where the women in Northern Ireland now enjoy better reproductive rights than women in England, Wales and Scotland. The amendments tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) to help to support our children and keep our children safe are vital. There is cross-party support for action against assault on retail workers and for action to address pet offences, which have been coming up in the pandemic. I urge the Government to listen to the message coming so clearly from women across the country about new clause 30, which has been tabled in my name but has been part of the work I have been doing with my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith).”
“In the last few weeks alone, we have seen the value of deciding what the difference between protest and harassment is. Surely that should be something that went to the Law Commission. Instead, in my short time this evening, I want to challenge the way in which the Government are approaching amendments that have come from across the House and which bring us many ideas on how we can improve confidence in our criminal justice system. I want to put on record my support for the amendments tabled by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), who has been a diligent activist for human rights all her life and whose ideas about rape should not be let go again. My right hon.”
“This is a Bill that shows us that the Government have yet to understand the value of debate and discussion. As a result, they are missing out on some key amendments, many tabled for discussion in this debate and many for the earlier debate, that could have made the Bill a moment of progress on issues that many of us agree on. Instead, by the way in which the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor and the Government are approaching the Bill, we see exactly where their priorities lie. Every single time proposals have been put forward to keep women safe, they get kicked into the long grass, with the suggestion that they go to the Law Commission. Yet the Government think it is simple and easy to define what is “annoying” when we all know that is a very difficult one.”
“The Secretary of State will be aware of the evidence that women who contract covid during their pregnancies are twice as likely to experience a stillbirth or a premature birth. He will also know that the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation decided in May that it was not worth prioritising such patients for the vaccine because the “low infection rates” made the “absolute risk” to pregnant women “very small”. Given the data that has been presented today and the evidence of the high risk of infection rising throughout the country, will the Secretary of State now rethink that decision and ensure that all pregnant women, at any age, and especially those in their third trimester, are fast-tracked to have both doses of the vaccine, so that we can protect not just them but their unborn children from harm?”
“I hate to add to the Secretary of State’s busy diary, but will he meet me to discuss what we can do to ensure that such companies stop making major profits from our NHS services and that benefits such as a toy library are not lost due to their antics?”
“This week, the Prime Minister praised the major benefits of the private finance initiative companies that are part of the LIFT—NHS Local Finance Investment Trust—initiative running GP services. That is why I am sure that the Secretary of State will be disappointed to learn that here in Walthamstow, Community Health Partnerships, a PFI LIFT company that we estimate has made several millions of pounds of profit from the deal on top of its service charges, and which the Secretary of State is ultimately in charge of, has just handed our local toy library a business rates bill of £30,000 for during the pandemic.”
“Here is a very clear example of where removing red tape could really help to support our constituents and make sure that people are not being ripped off, if only we have the political will to do so. I genuinely hope that the Minister will listen to this cross-party call for action and respond accordingly.”
“They are trying to pass on money—they are trying to help small businesses with their costs—yet, because of the practices of these companies, they can inadvertently end up charging them more, because the bill comes for the fact that the relief has changed. I hope the Minister will listen and be not just sympathetic, but proactive, in calling to account the Insolvency Service, asking for an investigation into RVA, and helping to shut down this awful company once and for all, as well as in learning the lessons from this situation on how we can best support small businesses when it comes to regulation. We cannot have a debate in this place without talking about the B word, Brexit, and I always thought the concept of red tape and how much more of it might be coming was ironic.”
“Small businesses, especially in the post-covid environment, have really struggled over the past 18 months and are getting back on their feet, and they will desperately want help and advice about how best to navigate the new environment that they are operating in. It is entirely reasonable for the FSB to call for those companies to be licensed. We should be thinking about licensing business service companies so that we can stop what the FSB itself calls cowboy practices. This is a matter for Government, not least because it is changes in Government policy that these companies are exploiting. When changes in business rates relief happen, these companies make their money; they make their money in a way that undermines the very policy of the Government. Governments of all political persuasions have tried to support small businesses.”
“Many moons ago I scrutinised the Consumer Rights Act 2015, where we talked about providing a reasonable service at a reasonable timescale for a reasonable price. None of this is reasonable. I am at a loss to understand why we cannot have stronger enforcement. We have not seen stronger enforcement, which is why this debate is so important. I hope the Minister is open. I know that he, like me and the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton, would be aggrieved at seeing people ripped off. My constituent asks for a simple solution: she says that the small business rate should be automatic. Actually, the Federation of Small Businesses has been talking about licensing those companies, partly because, as I say, I do not think the rip-offs are restricted just to companies talking about business rate relief.”
“RVA claims that my constituent agreed to a seven-year contract, when they only had a five-year lease on the premises. It does not make any logical sense. My constituent has had years of torture, causing real distress, through the court case and the impact on their ability to run their business at all. When people come to us—I am sure the Members participating virtually have had the same experience—we want to help. I thought, surely, this is almost a police matter if fraud is involved. To find that this company is able to continue to operate to this day, ripping off businesses around the country, is deeply distressing. Like the hon. Gentleman, I have pursued this issue with trading standards in the area where the company operates, but I am told that they cannot act.”
“I am sure that if the Minister gave us all a test on it, I would wager that the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton would beat me, but even he would not know everything about this scheme. To expect our constituents who are setting up a business to know all that information is simply unreasonable. That is why I completely agree with the hon. Gentleman when he uses the term “carpet-bagging”. There might be some more choice terms, but I am very conscious that they would not be not parliamentary language. My constituent is now part of a long-running legal battle with that company—I will limit what I say to ensure that there is no issue for them but, like the hon. Gentleman, they have issues with the documents that appear to have been falsified and claims about signatures.”
“For a small business, particularly a sole trader, having someone help them to get their head around them seems like a blessing. Unfortunately, it was anything but a blessing. The stories are very similar, which is why some of us have been exasperated by the lack of reaction to the company —it has been going on for many years. My constituent was contacted and told that they could reduce their business rate cost; RVA visited the office and took measurements—allegedly on behalf of the council, as though it was part of a public service—and then billed the company for the savings on small business rate relief. But those savings would have been automatically due to the company anyway. My constituent, not unreasonably, did not know the ins and outs of business rate relief.”
“They have a small business with one or two employees—not a large multinational—and are trying their best to understand and navigate the range of regulations and rules that they have to abide by, and to understand what they can do to give their business the best fighting chance. Six years ago, like the hon. Gentleman’s constituent, my constituent was contacted by RVA and offered what appeared to be assistance. There are many different companies that would offer assistance to small businesses that seem, on the face of it, to be helpful. It is not just about small business rate relief; often it can be about recycling or rubbish collection—all sorts of areas where there are different rules for businesses than for individuals.”
“When we see companies preying on and exploiting our constituents, who are trying to do that most basic and important thing of setting up businesses and being successful in our local communities, selling a wide range of goods and services to those communities, it inspires anger in all of us and frustration that we cannot do something more quickly to help. I recognise that we may not be the box office hit this morning that we would want to be, but I agree with the hon. Gentleman—consensus is breaking out—and I hope that we can make progress today on something with a longer lasting effect, because in some sense this should be a simple open and shut case. Like the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton, I was contacted by a local resident absolutely at their wits’ end dealing with RVA as a company.”
“It is a pleasure, as ever, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), who has been a doughty campaigner on this issue, and rightly so. He said that 13 of our colleagues are affected. I suspect there are many more but that they have not felt able to raise the issue. Let us be honest: we recognise that we may not be the main event this morning in Parliament, but these issues are our bread and butter as MPs. They cut across the political parties because a rip-off is a rip-off.”
“Although the Minister may feel that it is relatively straightforward, for a new business, the idea that there might be some things that do not have to be paid and others that do adds complexity. Is there a case, perhaps, in the absence of the further consumer protections we are talking about, for requiring local authorities, when they send a bill, to say, “Most small businesses would be entitled to rate relief, and therefore it is worth your time investigating”?”