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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“It is about being able to say that this sort of behaviour is holding too many back in our society. Let us look at the figures for sexual harassment of young women in our society: the figure of 50% of women experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace rises to 63% among 18 to 24-year-olds. It is a damning indictment of Britain in 2018 that a young woman cannot start her career without the fear that she might face groping in her workplace, unwanted sexual advances and being told that she cannot seek a promotion if she dares to say no. The #MeToo campaign in particular shows that that is widespread behaviour. The good news for all of us is that the public are with us. In surveys about sexual harassment, 80% of the public recognise that harassment.”
“We know that 400,000 women were sexually assaulted in our country last year. That comes from being in a culture not of sex but of power. It is about entitlement. It is about the concept that a woman’s body is the primary thing of interest about her and therefore what matters is how men respond to it. We should be very clear that this is #NotAllMen. What is so powerful about recognising misogyny as a hate crime is identifying that that is not normal human behaviour. It is not about men and women flirting with each other; it is not about men and women being able to banter with each other; it is not about men and women being able to ask each other out. Perhaps they exist in our society, but I have yet to meet a women who went out with a man who followed her down the street and tried to put his hands on her bottom.”
“But all too often, women know that as they walk past, they may be subject to touching; somebody may follow them; and somebody may try to engage them in a conversation, even when they have said no. The other night, when I left Parliament I was followed down the street by a young man who would not take no for an answer—he kept trying to put his arms around me and touch me. Sadly, that is a day-to-day experience for too many women in our society. The trouble is that women are taught to minimise that behaviour—to brush it off, to somehow find a way of avoiding it, to feel that perhaps they should not be out on the streets late at night or that perhaps they should scream. Sadly, it is part of our culture that someone feels they have the right to touch and to feel a woman at will. We need to change that.”
“Literally, women cannot go about their business. This debate is fundamentally about freedom—the freedom for women to be able to use the spaces and places in our society just as equally as men do. It is a sad fact that Hoe Street in Walthamstow is a gauntlet for women to walk down, especially on a warm and sunny day, and that in workplaces women do not always feel safe. As a society, that holds us all back. Half of women say that they have been sexually harassed at work; one in five regularly experiences sexual harassment on our streets. There is a day-to-day phobia of passing a group of men, although sometimes it is unfounded— I am sure that the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) wants me to point that out.”
“It is a pleasure to be able to contribute to the debate, Sir David, and I apologise for having been a little late, due to the vagaries of the Victoria line. My hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) made a powerful speech and has campaigned powerfully on this issue. Women in Walthamstow feel very strongly about the gauntlet that they too often have to run when they walk down some of our main streets where there are busy cafés and pubs, especially when the weather gets a little warmer. For many, it is a nightmare. As the first female MP for Walthamstow, I have received a deluge of emails from residents who say that they cannot walk down their streets and feel safe during the day time, let alone at night. We have campaigned about this problem for many years—I pay tribute to the Take Back the Streets group in Walthamstow.”
“We must be very careful when we talk about being “robust”, because we are putting this back on to women and how they manage these experiences, rather than challenging the behaviour. The Minister says that this is about being a minority, but the disproportionate balance of power in our society means that one “minority”—men—have disproportionate power over women. These incidents are about the abuse of that power, just as we see the abuse of people on the basis of their religious characteristics or ethnic identity. I do not think the Minister’s minority/majority point is robust enough to defend not looking at whether, if we were to categorise misogyny as a hate crime, that would recognise fully the protected characteristic that we are seeking to include.”
“I completely agree about the importance of getting sex and relationships education into every school. It is age-appropriate and sensitively done, so does the Minister share my concern that parental withdrawal might undermine the principle of giving every young person the best start in life and the best values about how we should treat each other?”
“I want to put on record my support for the work that the shadow Home Secretary has been doing on this issue and for the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Ruth Smeeth), who has fought tirelessly for her constituents. I am grateful that the Minister has listened and agreed to review the case. For many of us, the trouble with this is that we are talking about an environment where we know that two thirds of the women in Yarl’s Wood have experienced rape or sexual torture and that 85% of them are then released back, not deported. Does the Minister recognise that, rather than continuing to keep Yarl’s Wood open, there may be not only cheaper but much more compassionate and humane ways in which we can manage our immigration system that would speak to the best of British values?”
“My constituency neighbour, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), may tell the Prime Minister that cherries are there to be picked and cake is there to be eaten, but however sweet it seems fudge is no way to run the country. So can she tell us straight? There are £400 million of public contracts that have full or partial EU funding and are due to expire in the next four months. Does she intend to renew or replace them, many of which are with education and skills facilities, or does she need to find a bus to write it on first?”
“Let us not make 2018 like 2017; let us make it the point when the sands shift, and that means keeping going and seeing these cases through, as difficult and awkward as that might be—because they might involve people we care about deeply. We owe the young women I spoke with today so much more, but that is at least something we can promise them.”
“None of us wants to send one of these young girls to see their MP, as would be their right, knowing that that person has behaved in a way that we would not countenance in any other workplace. My fourth point, simply, is that we know that this is yet another staging post. The shadow Leader of the House was so right when she said that this is the fourth time that we have debated this matter. We know that there is much more work to do. I pledge my support for the Leader and the shadow Leader in keeping going. I fear that some in this place, including those accused of things, are hoping that, after the tidal wave has subsided, this issue will go away and life will go back to normal.”
“We have heard questions today about where the standards board might come into this and whether there is a case for taking the initial decisions about sanctions out of the standards board altogether. Instead, it would be given information from an independent third party who would then advise lay members and MPs, so that we can take out any suggestion that political favour or fear of the consequences of recall would be part of the decision. If recall is the right course of action, it should be on the table, and it should be on the table because the transgression is serious enough that the local community that the person represents needs the right to say something.”
“This process will be only as good as those who are coming into political activism, and political activism will be only as good as the environment that we create for our volunteers and activists. One of my questions, therefore, is: how do we fit this in with the broader work on making sure that there is no hiding place for the people who seek to abuse power? My third point is about what happens when we find people who have behaved inappropriately. As the Leader of the House knows, I have persistently asked her about recall, and I am so pleased to see that it is now on the agenda. I believe that we have to have the sanction—the sanction that none of us wants to admit to, but know needs to be in the process—for when somebody is found to have behaved in these ways.”
“My second point to the Leader of the House is that this has to fit into the wider context. People do not end up as passholders here by accident. That is not just about Members of Parliament, but about our political parties and our political culture. How do people get involved in activism? How do they get employed? Although the Leader of the House has to look at the culture in Parliament, inevitably it is one piece of the jigsaw puzzle about how people become involved in public life. I pay tribute to the women who have come forward as part of the LabourToo campaign to give their stories. That tells us that we have work to do within our own political movement. I do not think that that is unique to the Labour movement; it probably goes across political parties.”
“Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) is coming from. For many years, we have been inspiring each other on issues of gender equality and feminism. I understand his point about catching more flies with honey than vinegar, but with something like this, it is probably the people who are most resistant who are the most likely to need to change. We need to recognise that we cannot simply keep asking nicely and then apologise to the people who have to deal with the consequences. That is why having sex and relationships education for every young person in this country matters, and I hope that all of us will renew our resolve not to backslide on that now, because we can see that breaking the culture, so that we do not have to deal with this, needs to start as early as possible.”
“We have let the idea develop that it is somehow about leading a horse to water, rather than recognising that some of those donkeys have no place in our political process. Now is our opportunity to say that we are going to make a stand, not just in Parliament but across public life, because it matters to those girls. It matters that they have the freedom that we would want for them all to realise their potential, without thinking, “This is the kind of workplace that I might go into.” In the run-up to International Women’s Day, I will mention four points that I hope the Leader of the House will take on board, bearing in mind that many us have been called shouty feminists today—I hope that this shout will come loud and full. First and foremost, on training, I understand where the hon.”
“It is a very sobering moment to think, “What do I tell the younger women of our country about sexual harassment in 2018, in the environment of #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar and what we have seen in our charity sector?” Each of us may be individually responsible for what we do today about the motion and for what happens next, but we have a wider remit for our young people that involves recognising that it is simply not enough to pay lip service by saying, “This shouldn’t be happening.” It is about asking, “What are we all doing to make sure that this never happens again?” The message that we send out from Parliament—we know that this work must continue—has wider ramifications, because it sets a bar for other agencies. None of us here can claim that Parliament has covered itself in glory. We have been too slow.”
“Abraham Lincoln said: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” What we have been talking about today is what happens when men—and it does tend to be mainly men—have power and how power can be misused. In that sense, I start by paying tribute to the Leader of the House, the shadow Leader of the House and all those who, in those 100 hours, looked at the issue in that vein, recognising that this is about the many different ways in which power can be abused, because this place is powerful and full of powerful people. I started the morning at a school in Walthamstow, taking part in an assembly on sexual harassment.”
“T8. Could the Chancellor set out the benefits or otherwise of the arrangements the Government appear to have for a customs union between Camden, Islington and Westminster?”
“Further to that response, the CQC says that it has seen limited or no improvement in the key concerns that it has raised in previous years. The problems are long-standing and they have been raised by the quality regulator in previous reports to Parliament. Does the Minister not understand, when she tries to tell us that sunlight is the best disinfectant, that all we are seeing in our mental health services right now is clouds?”
“6. How much and what proportion of the Government’s actual and planned spending on security in Calais will be allocated to anti-trafficking and child protection.”
“Border Force tells us that it is stopping around 1,000 people a week who are trying to get to the UK, a third of whom are minors, but those children are not being taken into care or asked whether they have family elsewhere—just like Mohammed Hassan, a teenager who had family in Bahrain but was stopped by our Border Force, sent back and died two days later trying again. What action are the Government taking to make sure that our Border Force people are not sending children into the hands of traffickers?”
“May I seek two points of clarity from the Foreign Secretary? He says that we must “bear down on Russia”. Can he tell us explicitly whether anyone from his Government has sought to contact President Putin directly about the situation in Ghouta? He also says that he has met his Turkish counterpart. Did he ask him explicitly about Operation Olive Branch, and did he discuss ensuring that, whatever the Turkish forces are doing, our Kurdish allies are able to receive aid?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. In the Foreign Secretary’s contributions, he suggested that in my contribution to the urgent question I had called for military intervention in Ghouta. Actually, I simply called for him to pick up the phone to the Russian president. I wonder if there is a way to correct the record to make it clear what I said.”
“One challenge that we face is that employers sometimes deliberately conflate fair pay with equal pay to avoid scrutiny of their conduct. A prime offender is the BBC. Seventy MPs wrote to the Secretary of State for Culture to ask him to use his power to ensure an equal opportunity for both men and women at the corporation to be heard on this subject. Given that he has refused to do so, will the right hon. Lady exercise her freedom of speech and have a word?”
“The hon. Lady has mentioned the power of numbers to be able to track progress. Obviously, new clause 9 is about the power of numbers to be able to track progress in tackling inequality. If she thinks that those numbers were so important in the battle to ensure that we did not leave young people behind, why does she not think the same when it comes to women and ethnic minorities?”
“Does she not understand that having the data—understanding where Government policy is either promoting or helping to deal with the situation—would help us all to make progress?”
“The hon. Lady is promoting the Government’s record. One reason why the Labour party wants to get explicit equality impact assessments—not the tax information and impact notes, which I think is what she has been told the Government do produce—is that the evidence is showing counter to what she suggests. For example, we know that the gender pay gap between women in their 20s and men in their 20s has actually started to grow under this Government. It is now five times what it was six years ago. I do not know where the hon. Gentleman from Scotland got his data. I got mine from the Office for National Statistics, if he wants to have a look. Can the hon. Lady account for that?”
“The hon. Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), as ever, needs clarification. There is data that shows us that the gender pay gap is growing. We are asking for analyses of the impact of Government policy so that we can understand it. We are talking about two different things. I hope that clarifies, for him and for the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean), why the new clause matters.”
“We are all concerned to see good schools, I think. Does the hon. Gentleman recall a former Prime Minister who argued that sunlight was the best form of disinfectant? Having the numbers to track why, disproportionately, young men from black and ethnic minority backgrounds do worse in our schools, for example, and whether Government policies are influencing that, or whether their parents’ income might be an issue, would help him to understand how he gets those better schools.”
“The Minister made that point the last time we tried to discuss this issue. Forgive me, but he seems to be presuming that a household is a man and a woman. Has he managed to get his head around single person households and single women, because women’s incomes are disproportionately hit by Government policy? At the very least, could he manage to measure the women who are affected by his tax and policy changes who do not live with a man who might confuse him?”
“Its headteacher is now desperately struggling to balance her budget in the face of this Government’s swingeing cuts to the schools budget, but the one repayment she cannot cut is the PFI one. Barts, the biggest PFI in our NHS—with a £1 billion capital build, and £7 billion repaid—is paying £150 million a year, of which £74 million is interest alone. It is no wonder that the hospital is in such persistent financial difficulty.”
“The Centre for Health and the Public Interest has gone through the accounts of the few hundred companies running schools and hospitals to identify just how much money is involved. It found that they will get £1 billion in the form of pre-tax profit from NHS deals alone, which total just 125 of the 700 PFI projects. For example, the company holding the contract for University College London has, alone, made £190 million in the past decade out of the £725 million the NHS has paid out. In short, it has made enough in profits to build and run an entire hospital. We have to talk about the human cost. I became interested in PFI when I saw the damage it was doing to my local hospital, Whipps Cross in Walthamstow, and to schools such as Frederick Bremer School in Walthamstow.”
“On average, these projects are 2% to 4% more expensive than Government borrowing at the time. In total, with charges and fees included, they are now, on average, 40% more expensive than having worked with the public sector. The interest rate matters because the costs are not necessarily about the management of a project; they are about the profits being made. Every single MP who is being lobbied about their schools and hospitals needs to recognise that 20% of the extra money the Government say they are giving to schools and hospitals will not touch the sides of emergency wards or go into the budgets of teachers to pay for the books and classes our schoolchildren need. It will go straight out of our public sector into pure profit for these companies.”
“These companies are truly the legal loan sharks of the public sector, charging an excessive rate of interest in comparison with public sector borrowing for building and running services for us. Conservative Members may say that the cost I am talking about includes services, so it is worth breaking down the charges. Last year alone, this country paid out £10 billion in PFI repayments, over half of which was for interest and charges. The money we are paying for PFI is not paying for schools and hospitals to be run; it is paying the profits of the companies we borrowed from to be able to build them in the first place. The National Audit Office has done absolutely sterling work uncovering just how bad a value-for-money calculation it was to go for PFI.”
“Absolutely, the last Labour Government used PFI to fund things, and it was not an ideological decision; it was a very simple one about keeping borrowing off the books. However, we know now just how costly these decisions have been for this country. Every single school, hospital, street lighting system and motorway built was needed, but we know now that the consequence of these costs is that we may not be able to build such things in the future. I am in the Chamber today to propose a way in which Parliament can now act to get money back for our public services, because everyone of us has one of these projects in our constituencies. We can talk about the numbers involved: £60 billion of capital building, on which we will pay back £200 billion.”
“I rise to support the amendments tabled by the Opposition and to speak to my amendments 1 to 4. I was into PFI before all the cool kids were. These amendments speak to a long-held concern of mine, which is that it is not enough for us as politicians to identify when something has gone wrong and to shrug our shoulders and say, “It’s complicated.” The consequences for the communities we represent and for this country’s public finances are so toxic that it is vital we act. George Bernard Shaw said: “Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.” Let me be clear that I am not seeking to blame anyone. Governments of all colours used PFI. It started in 1992 and has gone on to the present day.”
“It will owe £240 million to just five PFI deals in the next two to five years, of which £77 million is interest payment. Surrey Council is also in financial difficulties. It has £386 million of PFI commitments that it will not be able to reduce, of which £51 million alone is interest.”
“My hon. Friend—my next-door neighbour MP—pre-empts my argument. My amendments relate specifically to the 700 existing contracts, because I believe—I am glad my Front Benchers support this—that we can and must do something urgently about the damage these 700 contracts are doing every single day in schools where headteachers are having to consider sacking people but cannot cut the repayments, and in hospitals that are having to cancel operations but cannot reduce the repayments to their lenders. There is a sixth-form college in Haywards Heath with no sixth form, because nobody will take on the school’s PFI debt. We keep talking about Northamptonshire Council, which is selling its own buildings because it is going bankrupt.”
“My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech about a lot of very complex issues. Before she sits down, will she tell us what role she envisages for non-governmental organisations and human rights organisations in some of the discussions that she thinks the Government could have with the Israeli authorities? She has talked a lot about the research they have done, but does she see a role for our human rights organisations in practical matters such as prison visits?”
“Individuals actually owe more than the Government, with total household debt standing at £1.23 trillion. Most of that total is mortgage debt, but £117 billion of it is from credit cards and loans—a 15% increase in the last couple of years alone. The average UK household now has £14,000-worth of debt, and that is expected to rise to £19,000 of unsecured personal debt by the end of this Parliament. It is little wonder that the number of people going bankrupt in this country is soaring. Indeed, the number of people taking out individual voluntary arrangements is also soaring.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered regulation of the cost of credit cards. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I hope that by the end of the debate we will actually have done more than consider the cost of credit cards. This is a familiar place for me to come to raise concerns with Ministers about personal debt in this country. However, I hope that I get a better hearing today than I did several years ago, when I came here repeatedly to warn the Government about the dangers of payday lending, because I believe that we are again on the cusp of another massive personal debt crisis in this country. There are proactive things that we can do to tackle that, one of which is dealing with credit cards. We have to be honest: this is a nation in debt up to its eyeballs.”
“Too many people live on that edge now. It is worrying that, unlike in previous years when insolvency rates have increased so much, unemployment rates are still dropping. That tells us that people are in full-time work, but are still unable to pay the basic costs of living, such as utility bills and rent. Combine that with inflation increasing at about 3% a year and stagnating wages, and it is not hard to see why personal debt is booming in this country.”
“I appreciate that the hon. Gentleman has a particular concern. I hope I can convince him that the regulation of credit cards that I am interested in is about their cost to the consumer in the first instance. I do not think the reason we have such a personal debt crisis in this country is rocket science. There is simply too much month at the end of the money for too many people. We now know that economic insecurity is the new normal, with at least 70% of Britain’s working population defined as “chronically broke”. Some 32% of UK workers have less than £500 in savings, and 41% less than £1,000. Almost 30% are desperately concerned about their debt, because it is not just about everyday living costs; it is about the financial shock that might come because someone loses their job or their relationship breaks down.”
“The hon. Gentleman prefigures much of what I will say about who I believe are the new Wongas in our society. It is not possible to make the argument that the millions of people on zero-hours contracts and in temporary work can manage their repayments and can be confident about the amount of money coming into their households. With millions of people now self-employed, and more people in England likely to be employed in the gig economy than working for the NHS in a few short years, it is clear that insecure, precarious work and precarious finances are the new norm for millions of people in our country.”
“It is debt on basic payments—on food, rent and travelling to work costs. We know that 25% of the UK population now struggles with debt. Not everybody is in trouble, but enough are, and the reason is the nature of the products they use to deal with their debt, particularly credit cards. I hope the Minister will understand why we need to act, because credit cards are the acceptable face of modern debt for people. All of us have one; I am sure if Members were to open up their wallets and purses, they would have, if not one, then maybe two or three with them. There are 30 million cardholders in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the Financial Conduct Authority has been investigating the credit card market.”
“I completely agree with my hon. Friend. The idea is that this is just a problem for a few hundred thousand people, but debt, worrying about debt and the causes of debt are mainstream concerns in this country. Debt management, debt advice and the work of Citizens Advice is very important, but I also believe that, when we see these problems growing again, there is a role for us to step in before they get any worse. I made a call to action several years ago about payday lenders. We did not listen then until it was too late. I hope the Government will listen now. We know that not everybody is struggling, and that Britain is a nation of contrasts, where some people have seen their wealth balloon because of property and pension rights. However, we also know that there are too many for whom debt is just everyday life.”
“I see Vanquis in my town centre in Walthamstow, preying on people.”
“Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan) pointed out, the zero balance transfer deals have been lengthening, but what is happening is that the credit card companies are making up for competing to get people to switch, by increasing the interest rates. And that is before we get on to the credit cards for people who are in bad credit—the new Wongas: the Vanquises, the aquas and the Capital Ones, which offer interest rates of 30% to 60%. The Minister will point me to the research by the Financial Conduct Authority that shows that about 45% of people borrowing on cards for those with bad credit have found them useful for building up a credit history, but let us think about the other 55%—those who, as the FCA has identified, are in severe or serious arrears as a result of getting these cards.”
“Bringing in a cap on the cost of credit saw a 45% reduction in the numbers of people going to the citizens advice bureau in difficulties with payday loans; indeed, there has been an 86% reduction since 2016. These credit card companies are truly loan sharks pretending to be the good guys. We know that what matters is in the small print. Many of us may have looked at our own credit card interest rates and seen that they vary from between 0.8% and 2% a month, but we also know that those basic interest rates on credit cards have been rising over the past 11 years, from an average of 15% to 23% now. As the hon.”