Hilary Benn
MP for Leeds South · Labour · United Kingdom
“As the right hon. Gentleman knows, the Irish Government published on 8 June their legislative outline, entitled “The General Scheme of the Legacy of the Troubles Bill 2026”. That is intended to fulfil the commitment that the Irish Government gave in the joint framework to co-operate to the fullest extent possible with the commission.”
“Northern Ireland is a society, as the hon. Gentleman knows better than most, that has been undergoing profound change since the signing of the Good Friday agreement 28 years ago. As the famous lines go, we have a shared history, but not necessarily a shared memory.”
“The right hon. Gentleman raises a really important point, and I am grateful to him for his question. We all have a responsibility—political leaders have a responsibility to call out what was witnessed for what it is and not mince our words, and as I have already indicated, social media companies have a responsibility to ensure that such m…”
“I hope the hon. Lady will recognise that the common travel area, which is more than a century old, is of great benefit to the citizens of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Many people in Northern Ireland live their lives across that border every single day.”
“I do agree with my hon. Friend. The attack on Mr Ogilvie was truly shocking, and there was no justification whatsoever for the racist thuggery we witnessed on the streets of Belfast in the days following.”
“That was, of course, an awful feature of what we saw. One of the things I learned in my discussions was that those from the far right had taken a list of houses in multiple occupation in Belfast—a list that, in the interests of openness, was properly available on the Belfast city council website; the council has now taken it down—and used…”
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“In recent months, we have seen how, by working together through our NHS, we have been able to vaccinate people in all parts of our Union to protect them. I ask the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), why does it require separation for Scotland to engage with the rest of the United Kingdom? This may be uncomfortable for some to hear, but I am struck by the similarities in the arguments put by those who argued for Brexit and by those who argue for Scottish independence. Both are based on the charge that one is somehow done down by the other. Both argue that sovereignty should outweigh economic self-interest.”
“I have often wondered whether a visitor from afar who knew nothing of the condition of our country might conclude that the people of Scotland were labouring under the terrible yoke of an English-dominated Parliament, but we all know that that is not the case. Indeed, I look at the success of devolution and the extensive powers, some of them barely used, as well as additional funding, that devolution has brought to the people of Scotland—some yoke, some grievance. As a Leeds MP, I dearly wish to have some of those things for the people I represent. I wish to see the benefits of this shared Union: the security that it gives us all, from whichever part of the United Kingdom we come, and the power of a single currency backed by the Treasury.”
“I declare my interest as someone of Scottish descent—a reminder, as is the case for many families, of our shared interest in these islands over centuries. There is, of course, a case that can be made for an independent Scotland, but I profoundly disagree with it, and in a brilliant speech my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray) exposed its contradictions and lack of answers. Let us be honest: the SNP has continued to argue for a second referendum ever since it lost the first. I have listened for many years as the SNP told a story about a nation disrespected and denied its rights by this Parliament. I have always found that story rather depressing because it seems to me that it undervalues Scotland but is told to nurture the grievance that all too often appears to be at the heart of the independence cause.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for his reply to my written question about whether works to remove dangerous cladding that are funded by the building safety fund will be delayed if insufficient funds are available to fix the other fire safety problems. A press report suggested that that could happen, but his reply implied that it would not. Could he clarify that in responding? The fact remains that until sufficient funds are identified, the costs will continue to drain the resources and the spirits of all the leaseholders caught up in this nightmare. The question to the Minister remains a simple one: he knows that leaseholders cannot afford to fix the other problems, so what is his plan for getting them fixed?”
“When the Secretary of State was pressed on that, he said that the taxpayer could not be expected to meet the cost of fixing any safety defect on any building of any height. That is a fair point, although successive Governments do bear some responsibility because they presided over the scandal. But the people who really should pay—the developers, the builders and the freeholders —should be asked for the money. The Government have created the means through the tax and the levy announced by the Secretary of State, so they should provide loans to fix the problem and recoup the money from those three sources.”
“The point I want to make is simply this: despite the steps the Government have taken, without something else happening, these so-called interim costs will continue to be demanded in the months and years ahead because the buildings will not have been made completely safe. Why is that? Dangerous cladding is only part of the problem. The other part is that wooden balconies and walkways, flammable insulation and missing fire breaks have been discovered time and time again as innocent leaseholders learn that their block was not constructed even to the building standards of the time. The Minister knows perfectly well that leaseholders do not have the money to fix those other fire safety defects.”
“I do apologise. I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) on securing the debate and on talking so passionately, as others have, about the unaffordable cost to our constituents of waking watches and insurance bills. We all know that those costs are to pay for the symptom of the problem; they will never remedy the problem itself, but they will eventually end up bankrupting people. My constituent Hayley Tillotson saved up for four years to buy her flat. She called it: “The proudest moment of my life.” Just before Christmas, she had to declare herself bankrupt and hand back the keys to her dream home. Why? Because the waking watch fee was the same as her mortgage, and she did not have the money to pay it.”
“I support the aim of trying to minimise unnecessary and disruptive checks, but, on the method, can the Secretary of State tell the House under which article of the Northern Ireland protocol the Government have taken this decision, which he describes as “lawful”, to extend the grace periods? Is it article 16, which allows the UK unilaterally to take appropriate safeguard measures? If not, which other article is he citing as giving the Government the ability lawfully to take this step?”
“The Minister referred to the humanitarian aid that the UK has already given to Yemen, which we recognise, but I am afraid he has failed today to explain why the Government have now decided to cut that contribution by more than half. Doing the right thing in the past is not a justification for doing the wrong thing now. Yesterday, a Yemeni aid worker co-ordinating food aid distribution, said this: “Children are dying every day here. It is not a moral decision to abandon Yemen.” Why have the Government done this when for example Germany, which is also facing the same unprecedented economic situation—to use his own words—has managed to pledge twice as much as the United Kingdom?”
“Leaseholders are facing bills that they cannot afford now—waking watch bills now, insurance bills now—and they still face the prospect of being asked to pay to make safe homes that they bought in good faith. That is why we should take the first available opportunity to protect them from this great injustice.”
“Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland)—because the Government are completely unclear about what their policy is on who should bear the cost. It is clear to me that it should be the people who built the blocks. On the argument that leaseholders who are also part-owners of the freehold may walk away from their flats, that is a very fair point, but exactly the same argument applies to loads of leaseholders who will not be able to afford to meet these costs. What this tells us is that if we are to solve this we must deal with the whole problem, not just part of it. Secondly, to argue that this is the wrong Bill misses the urgency of the situation.”
“I am speaking in support of all the amendments before us that seek to protect leaseholders from having to pay. First, on the Minister’s argument that this will delay matters, I think that leaseholders are left perplexed by the Government’s position. One day Ministers say that the cost of fixing historical defects should not fall on leaseholders—the Minister said it again today—but on another day, they say that it should. The £50 a month towards the loans that the Government propose to give to buildings below 18 metres shows that that is their policy. I do not think that Ministers can criticise others who are trying to address the problem—I support the speeches we have heard from supporters of the amendment tabled by the hon.”
“Given the evidence that some of the new variants of covid are much more transmissible, the Royal College of Nursing and the British Medical Association have raised concerns about whether current PPE guidance is adequate. It has been reported that some hospitals are offering staff high-grade PPE, for example FFP3 masks, while others are not, which means unequal levels of protection depending on where staff work. Can the Secretary of State tell us whether the NHS has reviewed the guidance about the standard of PPE to be provided to all staff when treating covid-19 pathway medium and high-risk patients?”
“The right hon. Gentleman has just said that he would like to see the grace periods extended, but the Northern Ireland Secretary recently told the Select Committee on Northern Ireland Affairs that “we are not at the moment in a position where we want to be looking at extending the grace period.” Can the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster therefore explain what Government policy actually is on this? Given that UK supermarkets have expressed grave concerns about having to provide export health certificates for each food item in their lorries heading for Northern Ireland supermarkets, do the proposals that he will be putting to the Joint Committee involve doing away with export health certificates on such goods altogether?”
“More than anything else they just want to feel safe and secure in their homes once again, so that they can get on with their lives. We have a responsibility to make sure that that now happens.”
“This is a story of monumental regulatory failure and of flats being built as cheaply as possible—in many cases without even complying with the building regulations. Like the Minister, I applaud those freeholders and developers who have taken responsibility and sorted things out, but I deplore those who have tried to walk away and claim that it is nothing to do with them. Those who developed and constructed the buildings should pay, the industry as a whole should pay, and the Government should pay because they allowed it to happen. We all have a responsibility for that. The most important thing of all, however, is that we act now to bring this crisis to an end, because that is what the leaseholders I represent and Leeds Cladding Scandal, which has done such a great job, want.”
“The impact on the mental health of my constituents is enormous, because every day they wake up and are reminded of this nightmare with no apparent way out. Today’s debate is so important, because we, together on both sides of the House, need to give them hope by calling on the Government to draw up a plan to sort the situation out. Ministers know that the building safety fund will not deal with the problem. Why? Because the cost of making every home safe is way in excess of the money allocated so far, and we know that Ministers are looking at a loan scheme. I am not opposed to a loan scheme in principle, provided that leaseholders are not required to pay the loans back. After all, they did not fail to put in the firebreaks or cover the blocks in unsafe cladding, so why on earth should they have to pay?”
“I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland), whose amendments to the Fire Safety Bill I have signed. I will speak on behalf of my constituents in Leeds—they include Hayley Tillotson, whose story has moved us all—who find themselves in desperate circumstances not of their making. They saved up. They bought what they thought was the home of their dreams. It has now turned into a nightmare as the outer layers have been peeled back on each block to reveal the full horror underneath. Their homes are firetraps. They are worthless. They cannot borrow against them. They cannot sell them. They are trapped by waking watch bills, trapped by rising insurance, and trapped by the fear that they will be told they must pay to fix this, even though they are not in any way responsible.”
“It is not as if we do not know what works to bring about change for the better. We do. We just need a lot more of it. The truth is this: we have always known that the natural environment sustains our souls, but we have now come to understand that it also sustains our very existence. That is why it matters and that is why we should do now what we know in our hearts to be right. I hope the House will vote for the new clause.”
“The problem is that the Bill’s timetable for setting targets does not fit in with the 2030 biodiversity pledge, so the new clause would place a requirement on Ministers to draw up, before the Conference of the Parties later on this year, a 2030 state of nature target to halt and begin to reverse the decline in species and habitats and to set out a plan to do so, including how the target would be measured. It would need to cover the abundance of species, their risk of extinction and the extent and condition of habitats, bearing in mind that widely accepted and reliable sets of indicators already exist to enable us to assess these things. I accept that the target is ambitious, but if we are not going to be ambitious now, when will we be ambitious for the state of nature?”
“This is a crisis caused by agricultural practices, pollution, urbanisation, habitat loss and climate change, and it requires action, and that is what this new clause seeks to do. I welcome the Government’s commitment to binding targets, but I think that it can be strengthened to make a good Bill better by including a target to halt and begin to reverse the decline of habitats and species by 2030. That should not be too difficult in principle for the Minister, because this is exactly what the United Kingdom called for in drawing up the leaders’ pledge for nature, which commits to reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. But, of course, to reverse loss, one must first halt it.”
“It is because we are destroying our natural world at an alarming rate. In the words of the Minister’s own Department: “Much of England’s wildlife-rich habitat has been lost over the last century…and there has been widespread species loss.” The latest state of nature report records a decline of 13% in the abundance of UK species since 1970. Some 15% of UK species are now endangered, including the red squirrel, the water vole, the ghost orchid, and the meadow clary. The number of moths has decreased significantly in the past 50 years and a third of British wild bees and hoverflies are in decline. A total of 97% of our wildflower meadows have been lost since the 1930s.”
“I wish to speak to new clause 5 on the state of nature target. There are few things that can lift our spirits as much as time spent with nature. Who does not feel a sense of awe and wonder at the astonishing biodiversity of our landscape, its creatures and its plants. As well as ensuring that that same sense of awe and wonder can be enjoyed by future generations, it should be self-preservation, frankly, that urges us to confront the threat of biodiversity and habitat loss. We should have respect for the soil from which we came—the soil that has given us everything that we can see around us: food, fuel, raw materials, medicines, and the ability to capture carbon. It is the soil to which we will, one day, all return—a reminder of our place in the natural order of things. The truth is that we can no longer take all this for granted. Why?”
“The right hon. Gentleman has received a letter from the big supermarkets warning of the risk of further disruption to Northern Ireland food supplies from April, and this morning the Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union heard evidence from the British Retail Consortium that unless there are changes, the system will not be workable for supermarkets. Of course, he cannot guarantee that the current three-month grace period—in which, for example, export health certificates are not required—will be extended, because that is a matter for the Joint Committee. What will happen if it is not extended? What would that mean for choice and prices for consumers in Northern Ireland?”
“This means that the Committee that was set up specifically to examine matters relating to the negotiations on the future relationship with the European Union will now be prevented from taking evidence from the person who negotiated the agreement and from reporting fully to the House on its implications. As this is, to put it mildly, highly unsatisfactory, has the Leader of the House given any indication to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that he intends to change his mind and move a Standing Order accordingly so that we can take evidence from Lord Frost and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Committee on the Future Relationship with the European Union will cease to exist in five days’ time. On 10 December I wrote to the Leader of the House to ask for more time to allow us to complete our work so that we could scrutinise the trade and co-operation agreement that was eventually reached with the EU on Christmas eve. The Leader of the House replied on 6 January to decline the request. I then wrote to him the following day to ask him to reconsider in the light of the fact that we have asked Lord Frost and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster to give evidence to the Select Committee on the agreement, but neither of them is available this week.”
“Can the Prime Minister tell the House when every child in my Leeds constituency and across the country will have access to a laptop, when every parent who needs help will be able to afford the necessary broadband or phone charges so that their children can connect up to their lessons, teachers and classmates, and who they should contact if they cannot?”
“Today this Bill will pass, and tomorrow the process of leaving the EU will be complete, but the day after we will need to look forward, because a new question will confront us as a nation: what kind of relationship do we now wish to have with our biggest, nearest and most important trading partners and friends? The other reason why I will be voting for this Bill today is that, for all it has failed to secure, it at least provides a foundation on which, in the years ahead, we can build what I hope will be a strong economic and political relationship with our European friends. I hope, as we move beyond leave and remain, we will now be able, as a country, to come together to do exactly that.”
“The agreement offers no certainty yet on data transfer or financial services, which are so important to our economy. We did not get what was sought on conformity assessments, rules of origin, mutual recognition of qualifications, or reduced sanitary and phytosanitary checks. There is, as of this moment, no agreement yet on Gibraltar. Why has this happened? It has happened because from the start the Government were faced with having to choose between sovereignty, on the one hand, and the economic interests of the country, on the other, and however hard they tried to pretend that they could have the best of both, that was never possible—a trade-off would always have to be made. We see that in the agreement before us, which is long and complex, rather like Brexit itself, and the full implications of both have yet to be revealed.”
“There are aspects of the agreement that will be welcomed: the absence of tariffs, which has been referred to; the agreement on healthcare; the level playing provisions, which seem pretty reasonable to me; and our having access to some of the information that we require for our security. But we must also be honest about what is missing from this agreement and what that will mean. It does not deliver frictionless trade. It will impose checks, costs and red tape on British businesses that export to Europe. Frankly, I was astonished to hear the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster on the radio the other morning apparently praising red tape as a benefit because it will make British businesses get “match fit” to trade. That is certainly a novel economic theory and it does not reflect the Conservative party as we previously understood it.”
“I recognise that others in the House will abstain or vote against, but if we were in the position where every one of their votes was required in order to get this Bill, and therefore this agreement, through, I cannot believe that any of those colleagues would actually choose no deal, with all the damaging economic consequences it would bring, over a deal. That is why, in the end, the Prime Minister realised that he had no alternative but to get an agreement. This is not a vote about whether we support Brexit—I do not, but it has happened. This is a vote about making a bit better of a bad job.”
“May I draw attention to the fourth report of the Brexit Committee, on the agreement, which was published this morning? The Committee’s wonderful staff worked really hard over Christmas, but we have not had the opportunity, in three days, to produce a fuller report, and I did write to the Leader of the House about giving the Committee a bit more time to complete the task that was given to us just under a year ago. I will be voting for this Bill to implement the agreement today, because, quite simply, the alternative is no deal.”
“We all wish the negotiators well in this final stage, as they demonstrate that sharing sovereignty—gaining benefits by accepting obligations—is what will be required in order to reach the agreement that the Government say they want and which we all want. Can the right hon. Gentleman tell the House whether the legislation that will be required to give effect to any agreement will need to pass all of its stages in Parliament by 31 December this year in order to provide clarity to individual businesses about what they can do from 1 January next year, which is, after all, only 15 days away?”
“Since the recent national lockdown began, the infection rate in Leeds has fallen from over 400 cases per 100,000 to less than 140 today, and the number of covid patients in hospital has declined by 45% in the past month alone. The Secretary of State will be aware that the city has on balance recommended that Leeds should move from tier 3 to tier 2, because businesses have been terribly affected. I realise that he cannot give an answer today, but does he accept, having assured areas that where they are placed in the tier system will depend on the efforts they make to get the numbers down—Leeds has done a great job—that the credibility of that statement needs to be reflected in decisions about where the areas are put when they show a dramatic reduction?”
“We all want a deal, but UK businesses—let us be frank—are looking at the prospect of no deal with utter dismay. In the political declaration, the Government signed up to common high standards “commensurate with the scope and depth of the future relationship” and agreed to robust level playing field commitments to “prevent distortions of trade and unfair competitive advantages.” What proposals has the UK made in the negotiations to maintain common high standards in the years ahead, given that it is inevitable that these standards may change on both sides of the relationship?”
“How exactly are businesses going to be able to prepare when they have not yet seen the detailed arrangements, because the Joint Committee is not going to meet for a couple of days, and when those details may well change yet again in a few months’ time?”
“I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s statement, because it shows what can be achieved with political commitment, and I do hope that we will see more of that later today. However, he seems to have brought back not a permanent arrangement but a series of grace periods, and I want to ask him about that. For example, it has been reported that food products coming from GB into Northern Ireland will be exempt from export health certificates for a period of at least three months, and that chilled meats—the right hon. Gentleman referred to sausages—will be allowed for a period of time, pending a review, after which they might be prevented any more from moving from GB to Northern Ireland. What is going to happen after those dates?”
“We all wish the negotiators well, not least—as my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds West (Rachel Reeves) pointed out earlier—because of the assessment of the Office for Budget Responsibility that no agreement could reduce real GDP by a further 2% in 2021, on top of the adverse consequences that will come from Brexit anyway. Does the Minister agree with that assessment? If so, can she explain to the House why, in the middle of the worst economic crisis for 300 years, the Prime Minister still appears to believe that no deal would be a good outcome? British business certainly does not.”
“In conclusion, since German car makers, as was once rather fancifully suggested, are not going to turn up late in the day to rescue the negotiations, a bit like Blücher at Waterloo, we have to save ourselves. That is what we have to do at this point. Whatever the bluster, I simply say to those on the Front Bench that the country will not forgive this Government if they impose no deal upon us.”
“Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) knows only too well, the WTO has a dispute resolution body that gives other countries, if they win a case against the UK, the ability to impose countervailing measures upon us, including tariffs. How could that be acceptable to a sovereign country that claims complete sovereign control? The truth, of course, is that sovereignty is not absolute. It is what we choose to do with it that matters, and we cannot avoid that choice. We cannot avoid that choice in these negotiations, because the only way out of this mess, in the interests of the country, is for both sets of negotiators to grasp the heavy responsibility that they have at this moment to make the choices that will secure the deal that the country desperately needs.”
“If a country is in the process of negotiating a new international treaty, it does not do wonders for its credibility if it is busy preparing to tear up part of the previous treaty that it negotiated with the same partners and signed just over a year ago. The other issue is sovereignty, about which we have heard an enormous amount today. If sovereignty is absolute, and if we were to take it to its logical and absurd conclusion, for example, why should we be negotiating on fish at all? Would not giving any of “our fish”, as some people describe it, be a betrayal? If sovereignty is absolute, what are we doing in the World Trade Organisation? As the right hon.”
“The question now for the House and for the negotiators is, how do we get out of this? It is clearly not by the clauses that the Government are seeking to put back in the Bill. One of the reasons why the Government are having so much trouble with the level playing field negotiations is the existence of those clauses. Let us think about this for a moment. Why do Ministers think that the EU negotiators are so keen to tie down commitments that both sides will be asked to give in the negotiations? It is for the very simple reason, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) made clear in another brilliant speech, that we have shown that we are not to be trusted to keep our word.”
“It has taken him on quite a journey—it has taken him through the door of 10 Downing Street, which I am sure was his hope, but there is just one problem: it is not entirely clear he knows how to get off the tiger in order to secure a deal. He is the prisoner of the fateful decision that he made. It is not that he was not aware of the consequences, because thanks to Tim Shipman, we now know what he wrote in the other article, which was not published. He said: “Almost everyone expects there to be some sort of economic shock as a result of a Brexit. How big would it be?” Well, we know the answer, because the Government have done their own economic assessment, and we saw what the Office for Budget Responsibility reported a couple of weeks ago: the economy is hit either way, but it is much worse if no agreement is reached.”
“The offending clauses are nothing more and nothing less than a piece of negotiating leverage, which we now know will be dropped the moment a satisfactory resolution is found to the questions that the Joint Committee is properly considering. That was confirmed in the Prime Minister’s statement this afternoon. The Prime Minister’s dilemma with this Bill and, indeed, with the talks is best explained in this way. Four and a bit years ago, he famously decided to publish the second of two articles that he had written about Brexit. One of them was for leaving the EU, and the other was against. When he made that decision, he climbed on the back of what I would describe as the Brexit tiger.”
“Who would have thought that we would be here on 7 December—there are 24 days to go—with the Government wanting to put these international law-breaking clauses back into the Bill and the Brexit negotiations still going? I have always thought that there will be an agreement, but I must confess that in the last few days I have felt a bit gloomy. I do not know whether the announcement in the last 20 minutes that the Prime Minister and Ursula von der Leyen are going to meet later this week to pore over the areas of disagreement should raise our hopes or not. What do they say? It’s the hope that kills you. Anyway, the truth about this Bill is out.”
“But it is also a fact that there are people who have genuine questions and concerns. It is important that we provide as much information as possible, so that people can weigh up the facts, talk to their GPs and make a decision. I welcome the decision that vaccination will not be compulsory—it should not be compulsory—but we should not forget that it is both a fact and the truth that the more of us who are vaccinated, the better chance we have of defeating this disease. So, subject to the regulators saying that the vaccines are safe, I for one will be queuing with my sleeve rolled up when the time comes.”
“That study was eventually discredited and the doctor responsible struck off, but the damage had been done. The anti-vax conspiracy theorists are still touting their lethal wares around the internet. The fact is that vaccination has saved millions and millions of lives since Edward Jenner developed the first successful vaccine in 1796. In the last 30 years, vaccination against polio has almost eradicated that terrible disease. There are just two countries in the world where it still exists, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is in part down to some people who have killed brave health workers who were only trying to save the lives of children. Therefore—I say this to the Health Secretary—anything and everything that can be done to take on those who spread falsehoods will have the full support of this House.”
“But that, too, is disputed by some people, although I think it is really important that we distinguish between the conspiracy theorist anti-vaxxers on the one hand, and those who have genuine questions and concerns on the other. It may seem incredible to every single one of us that there are people who believe those conspiracy theories, one of which, apparently, is that Governments wish to inject us all with microchips. Given the problems that there have been with handling other aspects of the epidemic, I do not think any Government in the world would have the capability to do that. It is of course complete nonsense but, more seriously, we remember the huge anxiety that was caused by the false claim that autism was caused by the MMR vaccine.”
“We have seen our local businesses suffer and, from time to time, we have lifted our eyes to the horizon in the hope of glimpsing something that is a bit better. Well, something has now appeared. To use a seasonal analogy, in the dark winter sky, three new stars have appeared, and they are the three new vaccines that have been developed and are awaiting approval. As has been said, every single one of us owes an enormous debt of gratitude to the scientists and the volunteers who took part and to all the people in the NHS, local authorities, our forces and others, who, as we speak, are making preparations for the mass vaccination programme to come.”
“I would say to the hon. Member for Altrincham and Sale West (Sir Graham Brady) that this debate is indeed about freedom, but it is also about the balance of risks and cost—the risks to life and the cost to business and families—which are both substantial and deeply worrying to every single Member of this House. It is also a debate about facts—what are the facts? We know that our debate in this country, and indeed across the world, about how to handle this epidemic is disputed by some. It is a dispute in which the truth and the uncertainty—because some of this is all about scientific uncertainty—wrestle with the plainly false. It is about the impact of that on vaccination that I want to say a few words today. For months now, we have lived through restrictions. We have seen people die.”