Robert Jenrick
MP for Newark · Reform UK · United Kingdom
“Robert Steele was a beautiful four-year-old boy who died three weeks ago in Newark when he was thrown from an off-road bike that was being driven by a 24-year-old man. This is the culmination of a number of incidents in my town, and many others across the country, involving off-road bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters.”
“The Minister said that Governments are elected to lead. Most people would assume that means that Ministers are elected to lead, because they are accountable to Parliament and to the people.”
“There is an air of total unreality hanging over this debate. Successive Governments have run down our Royal Navy to its present enfeebled state, they have conspired to surrender other British sovereign territory and we have a Government who procrastinate about signing off a new oil field in the North sea—let alone about one in the south A…”
“I welcome the right hon. Gentleman to his position. I have known him for a long time—I wish him well. He has a huge task ahead of him. Earlier in the summer, the Prime Minister said that walking the streets of Makerfield lodged in his mind that so many working people want to see the personal allowance raised.”
“Imagine that you are a worker at JLR worried about your future, and you have the misfortune of watching the Chancellor’s speech, which contains searing economic insights like, “I want to see businesses make a profit.” There was nothing about scrapping electric vehicle mandates, bringing down energy costs by getting rid of net zero targets…”
“The sight of the Government escorting illegal migrants into Portsmouth harbour, the home of the Royal Navy, was a national humiliation. Sometimes I wonder whether Members of this House have no appreciation of the level of anger there is in the country at the rapes, the murders and the billions being wasted that should be being spent on th…”
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“Thank you, Mr Speaker. Yesterday, the chief inspector of prisons warned that the police and prisons service have “ceded the airspace” above two high-security prisons to organised crime groups. The result is that organised crime gangs can deliver drugs, phones and weapons such as zombie knives to inmates with impunity due to the absence of basic security measures such as functional CCTV, protective netting and window repairs. Across two visits in September and October, he described a damning picture of thriving illicit economies that jeopardise the safety of dedicated prison staff. In HMP Manchester, almost four in 10 prisoners have tested positive in mandatory drug tests, and in HMP Long Lartin the figure was nearly three in 10. Those two prisons hold some of the most dangerous men in our country, including murderers and terrorists.”
“The Lady Chief Justice has said that the courts are not operating at full capacity, perpetuating the record numbers in prison on remand, awaiting trial. There could be an extra 6,500 sitting days if the Government allowed them. Cases such as rape and sexual assault are being pushed into 2027. Baroness Carr warned the Justice Secretary that failure to maximise judicial capacity would actually cost the Government more in costly and limited prison places, yet the Justice Secretary failed to agree to her request. Why are the Government letting out criminals rather than hearing more cases?”
“Instead of increasing sitting hours, the Justice Secretary’s defining intervention in her five months in office has been to accidentally let out dangerous criminals from our prisons. Just last week, she rushed to Parliament to close loopholes that she created for stalking, for disclosing private sexual images and for murder. She could be signing deals with other countries to get new prisoner transport agreements. She could be using visa sanctions with foreign countries to force them to take back the 10,000 foreign criminals in our prisons. She is not doing so. Meanwhile, criminals are being released and are reoffending already. Will the Justice Secretary commit now to ending her dangerous and unnecessary early release scheme?”
“In London, there is a phone theft epidemic, and this time it is not the former Transport Secretary on the loose. Last year, more than 64,000 mobile phones were reported to the police as stolen in the capital alone. The small number of individuals responsible should be locked up for a long time, yet last month, a criminal who used a motorbike to steal 24 phones an hour was jailed for just two years. Enough is enough, so will the Justice Secretary commit to dramatically increasing sentences for career criminals, get them off our streets and slash crime?”
“Cousin marriage has absolutely no place in Britain. The medical evidence is overwhelming that it significantly increases the risk of birth defects, and the moral case is clear in that we see hundreds of exploitative marriages that ruin lives. Frankly, it should have been stamped out a long time ago. Will the Justice Secretary commit to ending this medieval practice, which is rearing its head once again in modern Britain?”
“We the competent, the capable, the informed sometimes must put the most vulnerable in society first.”
“More important, there will be people who do not speak about these things at all. There will be imperceptible changes in behaviours. There will be the grandmother who worries about her grandchildren’s inheritance if she does not end her life. There will be the widow who relies on the kindness of strangers who worries—it preys on her conscience. There will be people—we all know them in our lives—who are shy, who have low self-esteem, who have demons within them. I know those people. I can see them in my mind’s eye. They are often poor. They are vulnerable. They are the weakest in our society. And they look to us, to Parliament, to represent them, to support them, to protect them. In their interests, I am going to vote against the Bill today. Sometimes we must fetter our freedoms.”
“It may be on either side of the debate, but it will happen. If passed, the Act will be subject to activist judges in Strasbourg. They will change it fundamentally and we have to be prepared for that. I do not want to see that happen. My last point is not about how we can improve the Bill; it is about something that we can never resolve as a House. The Bill is not so much a slippery slope as a cliff edge. When we walk out of this Chamber, or out of the gates of this building tonight, we will, in a way, walk into a different country if the Bill passes. There will be different conversations around kitchen tables. There will be different conversations had by couples lying in bed at night, or on quiet country walks where people talk about difficult things. They will not be conversations that make our country a better place.”
“There is no right of appeal, which is extremely unusual in English law, and the process is conducted in secrecy. It could be done on papers alone. Transparency is critical to the law. It is one of the oldest principles in our English legal system. As Jeremy Bentham said more than a hundred years ago, evil can arise in secrecy, and publicity is at the heart of justice. This is not a transparent process and that leaves it woefully open to abuse. Secondly, all of us in this House want to believe that the laws that we pass are final, full stop, the end. That is not the case. I worry—in fact, I am certain—that as night follows day this law, if passed, will change; not as a result of the individuals in this Chamber or the other place, but as a result of judges in other places. We have seen that time and again.”
“I want to talk about two aspects of the Bill: what it could have done in terms of safeguards but does not; and what it does not do but could never resolve. On the first point, the safeguards—in particular the legal and judicial ones—are grossly inadequate. Bad law on trivial things is bad enough—I have seen a lot of that in my time in the House—but bad law on matters of life and death is unforgivable. We have spoken about the role of doctors; let us think about the role of judges. The test to be applied is a low one: the civil law threshold, which is a balance of probabilities. This means that a judge could see real risk of coercion and still sign off an individual for assisted death. If the threshold of 50% or more was not reached, the judge would sign off the individual. The next of kin is not informed.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I belatedly congratulate the Government Front-Bench team on their appointments—I have been a little busy over the summer. The only group the Labour Government’s popularity has increased during that time with is criminals. How many domestic abusers and sex offenders released under their early release scheme have gone on to reoffend? Would the Minister like to apologise to the victims?”
“There were exemptions in the previous Government’s scheme, but the key thing is that we need to get on and build more prisons. Prison works, and we need to see more prisons being built. The last Conservative Government built more prison places than any prior Labour Government in living memory, but we clearly need to go further. What funding has the Lord Chancellor secured to build prisons over and above those secured by the previous Government? Does the Minister agree with the other junior Minister that fewer people should be sent to prison?”
“Police firearms officer Sergeant Blake was a hero and we all want to see individuals like him, who put themselves in the line of fire, respected. What work is the Lord Chancellor doing, alongside the Home Secretary, to review the threshold for prosecution for individuals such as Sergeant Blake, so that they never find themselves in the invidious position that he did?”
“I thank the Lord Chancellor for her answer. Jonathan Hall KC, the reviewer of terrorist laws, has said that the authorities should put as much information as they can in the public domain to maintain public trust in terrorist cases, which have the highest public interest. In the void, misinformation takes hold and that diminishes public trust. While of course respecting the judicial process and not commenting on the individual facts of the case, can the Secretary of State explain the reported two-week delay between the CPS making a charging decision with respect to the alleged Southport attacker and it being announced to the general public?”
“Since the barbaric attack on 7 October, we have seen an explosion in antisemitism and extremism on the streets of our own country. Only on Saturday, we saw people flagrantly valorising Hezbollah in London. We must root out those who despise our country and our values. What will the Prime Minister do to revoke the visas, where appropriate, of those in the UK who are conducting themselves in this manner, to encourage the police to enforce our existing laws without fear or favour, and to further ban and proscribe organisations such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which do not support the UK, our values, and the way we wish to conduct ourselves in the world?”
“We have just handed sovereign British territory to a small island nation that is an ally of China, and we are paying for the privilege, all so the Foreign Secretary can feel good about himself at his next north London dinner party. In whose interests does he think he serves: those of the global diplomatic elite or those of the British people and our national interest?”
“They need to be made in a proportionate and effective way, and there are lessons to be learned from changes that we have made in the recent past. But when making those changes, can I urge him to look in particular at the status of the testing facility—the Building Research Establishment—and at the way it operates, which I think has failed significantly, as is laid out in the report? Finally, I concur with the broader point that the Prime Minister made today, which is that when one speaks to the victims and their families, one is left with a very strong sense that many people in social housing in our country feel that they are second-class citizens and that they are being treated with disrespect. That must end. Will he take forward the work that began with the social housing White Paper to ensure that that never happens again?”
“I thank the Prime Minister for his statement today. The Grenfell fire was an unimaginable tragedy but, as he rightly said, it was also a comprehensive failure by the British state, and in many respects that comprehensive failure persists today. I am grateful for the words that he said about giving all resource and support to the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, because clearly the victims, the survivors and the community of North Kensington want the insights and the answers that they have partly had today, but they also want justice, and that needs to be delivered as soon as possible. Equally, I fully support the effort that the Prime Minister is going to make to see if further regulatory changes are required.”
“The Chancellor is like a dodgy car mechanic. She says she has done all the searches, she gives you a fixed price, you hand in your car keys and then, a few weeks later, she has found all these new problems. The price has doubled, but it is too late—you have given her your car and you both know that this was her plan all along. Trust and credibility are critical to a Chancellor. Why has she been so careless and so quick to throw hers away?”
“Where they do not, I will fiercely challenge them.”
“The general election made a number of things clear to me. I am deeply proud of many of our Government’s achievements, which I will fiercely defend in the months and years ahead. We took a bankrupt country and righted our public services and public finances. We ensured a decade of good employment after inheriting high unemployment, particularly among young people. We led Europe in the defence of Ukraine. We reformed our education system, and we now outstrip countries all over the world in the literacy and numeracy of our children. We were one of the world’s greatest countries in tackling environmental challenges, decarbonising faster than any other G7 country. For those and other reasons, I will always defend the record of the last Conservative Government, but I will come on to some of the lessons I have learned from their failings.”
“I have a few more grey hairs now, 10 years on, and have just been through a difficult general election in north Nottinghamshire. I want to begin by saying a special thank you to my constituents for doing me the great honour and privilege of re-electing me, all the more so on what was clearly a difficult night for my party. During this Parliament, I will represent my constituents with all of my vim and vigour. Having served as a Minister under each of the last five Prime Ministers, I know what a special privilege it is to serve as a Minister, so I wish our successors in office all best wishes and good luck in the years ahead. As patriots, we all know that this Government’s success is our success, and we want them to tackle the great challenges facing our country. I want them to enjoy their time in ministerial office as much as I did.”
“May I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Kirith Entwistle) on her maiden speech? It is clearly a real achievement to be the first to make a maiden speech in this Parliament, and I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will join me in congratulating her and wishing her well in the years ahead here in Parliament. I welcome all new Members to this House, not least because some of them make me look older, which I have been looking forward to for some time. I remember when I was first sworn into the House. I entered at a by-election and so swore in on my own, in a class of one. There was a real heckle on that occasion from the beast of Bolsover. He asked if I was here on work experience and everyone laughed.”
“I do not think we come to this place to serve the interests of new quangos, commissions and reviews, the legal fraternity in contested notions of international law, or the new and worrying rise in sectarian politics, represented in this House for the first time in my lifetime, which again should worry us. We are sent here to serve the interests of our constituents. I choose them; I choose to ensure the working people of Newark and Nottinghamshire are always represented. They sent me here with a few clear messages: secure our border; reduce immigration; lower our taxes; stop the crime; build homes; build a more united country, cohesive and integrated, not riddled by the poison of left-wing identity politics. That is what I am here to fight. Where this Government do that and live up to that test, I will support them.”
“I hope the reforms I started, to reduce the number of people coming into this country legally, are taken forward, and that we further reduce those numbers. We could have used the King’s Speech today to implement a legal cap on net migration, embedded by Parliament in law. We have not done that, which will mean further pressure on housing, public services and the pace of change. Let me close with this: the Prime Minister has said he wants this to be a new era, in which politics is defined by service. I think we will all agree on that point—it should be—but the question is who do we serve.”
“I also hope that the Government will take legal migration seriously. We have to accept that the public in most parts of our country have been voting for 20 or 30 years, in elections and referendums, for Governments that promise to control and reduce the level of legal migration, only for Governments of all political colours to do precisely the opposite. That is immensely corrosive to public trust and confidence in politics and in democracy. As one of our colleagues said earlier, about the rise of far-right parties around the world, if we centrist parties on the left and the right do nothing about this, we will see the rise of far-right parties in this country. That would be a great mistake.”
“And I worry about immigration, because we live in an age of mass migration. I have been honest—painfully honest—about the failings of the last Government on this topic, but I worry that the same or worse mistakes are about to be made again. What we are seeing in the channel is a national security emergency. We are seeing tens of thousands of people about whom we know next to nothing crossing into our country, breaking into our country, in flagrant abuse of our laws. Some of them are subjects of interest being followed by our security services. This has to stop. Scrapping the only known credible deterrent, with nothing else to put in its place, is going to surrender to the people smuggling gangs. That is wrong, it is a mistake and I worry that we are going to rue the day that we did that.”
“We should all be working to find ways to do that and to make that possible. I worry about the message we are hearing on the economy. We want economic growth, but economic growth is founded on harnessing the entrepreneurship of our people. It is about creating a start-up country and helping small business people to found businesses around their kitchen tables, like my parents did. It is not a statist vision of this country. It is not about using new quangos or a national wealth fund, which is an oxymoron because it is going to borrow the money it seeks to invest. It is not about changing our employment laws, which will make us less competitive and drive the kind of higher structural levels of unemployment we see in Europe that we have mercifully avoided over the last 10 years.”
“We are trading dependence on Russian hydrocarbons for dependence on Chinese electric vehicles, smart meters and solar panels that will despoil our countryside. New quangos, such as Great British Energy, will spring up, serving no apparent purpose and taking inspiration from predecessors such as Robin Hood Energy in Nottingham, in my part of the world. That failed project wasted £50 million of taxpayers’ money. I worry that 200,000 jobs in the oil and gas sector have been put in danger in the first few days of this Government, at a time when they are rightly saying that they want to fuel our economy, create jobs and change the dynamics that the country has seen since the 2008 financial crash and after 20 or 30 years of low productivity growth and unsatisfactory economic growth.”
“I worry that this King’s Speech falls short on some of those great challenges. There are undoubtedly Bills that I welcome, and I am delighted that the new Government are taking forward the Bill for a Holocaust memorial, a project in which I have been involved for many years. Some of the Bills are radical, such as the changes to our energy policy, and I worry that they are radical for all the wrong reasons. Despite having decarbonised faster than other countries, and despite being responsible for only 1% of global emissions, we now find ourselves with a Government pursuing, for ideological reasons, a net zero policy that will make it harder for our own consumers to afford their bills. The policy will further erode our industrial base and leave us in hock to Chinese technology.”
“On those counts, we did not deliver the public services, the lower taxes, the economic growth and the migration system that we promised and the public rightly expect. The baton now passes to this Labour Government. Where they succeed, I will welcome and support them; and where they fall short, I will challenge them. We want to ensure that the great issues facing our country are properly addressed. We live in one of the greatest times to be alive, but it is a time of immense change. There is a power shift from west to east, and new technology, like artificial intelligence, is upending old industries. It is an age of mass migration, which is challenging the pace of change in our country, creating huge pressures on housing, public services and integration, and making it harder to build the united country that we all want to see.”
“I cannot quite hear the hon. Gentleman. If he is asking whether the electorate were wrong, the answer is no. No politician should ever doubt the electorate, but it is right that we defend the things we did well in government so that there is a proper diagnosis of what we got right and what we got wrong. I think we did get some things wrong. We promised to get Brexit done when we stood in 2019, and we did. We got Brexit done and restored our sovereignty as a nation, which is a great and lasting achievement, but we also promised that we would secure our borders and that we would ensure a strong economy, lower taxes and a strong NHS and public services, which the public rightly expect.”
“Would my hon. Friend consider changing that in future, particularly for the new county devolution deals? Unlike most prior devolution deals, they have not been accompanied by any local government reform, so our council tax payers could be paying precepts for the town, the district, the county, the PCC and the new combined authority. Value for money is questionable in such a case.”
“Hamas are a terrorist organisation that hate the United Kingdom and everything that we stand for. It would therefore be deeply unwise for the UK to commit British servicemen and women, whether on the ground or on the pier in Gaza. It is for precisely that reason that the White House has categorically ruled this out. Will the Minister take the opportunity to do the same, so that we can reassure our constituents that we do not make an inadvertent mistake, and that British troops will continue doing what they should be doing, which is facilitating the complete eradication of Hamas?”
“That is simply unfair and exactly what my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has campaigned against—an over-zealous application of net zero, which turns the public off.”
“My hon. Friend knows that I am the last person to be a nimby, and Nottinghamshire’s heritage is among the richest for industry and energy production—it dates back centuries—but the point that our right hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Philip Dunne) made could equally be applied to the situation in Nottinghamshire. We are not opposed to solar farms. The issue is the scale of the applications and their aggregate impact on the landscape, which is profound. Were the three applications in my constituency to go ahead—I know that one borders the constituency of my hon. Friend—they will stretch from the South Yorkshire border all the way down to the Vale of Belvoir, peppering thousands of acres of land and impacting more than 60 villages. The landscape of that part of Nottinghamshire will be changed for a generation.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. I want to re-emphasise the point she just made about the height of the solar panels. I wonder whether the proponents of the schemes and those considering the applications in Government actually understand the scale of what is being proposed. For the application that my hon. Friend and I face, the panels are as high as a house, and some of them will be placed within just a few metres of a home. Imagine if that were your home, Mr Henderson. That is not a solar farm of the sort one might have thought of in the recent past. It will have a profoundly detrimental impact on that person’s quality of life, and we have to consider that when we look at these applications.”
“Last month, Niyak Ghorbani was wrongly arrested for holding up a placard saying that Hamas are terrorists. He was later de-arrested. Yesterday, just yards from this place, the same man was once again arrested for holding the same sign. He was then de-arrested again. Hamas are terrorists, and we should all say so and defend freedom of speech. Will my right hon. Friend organise a debate in Government time on how we can end two-tier policing and restore public confidence in the Metropolitan police?”
“We now have to take forward other areas, particularly on William Shawcross’s superb recommendations with respect to the Prevent programme, on revoking the visas of visitors who do not share our values—that appears to have stalled—and on ensuring that the police vigorously and fairly implement our existing laws so that everyone can have confidence that there is not, and will never be, two-tier policing in our country.”
“My right hon. Friend has, for a very long time, been consistent and clear-eyed about the threats that we face, for which I applaud him. He has faced personal threats and responded with bravery and resilience, which we all admire. First, I fear that the definition, though well intentioned, lands in no man’s land. It does not go far enough to tackle the real extremists, and it does not do enough to protect the non-extremists who are simply expressing contrarian views and who might find that this definition is used against them, perhaps not now but possibly in the future. What reassurance can my right hon. Friend give to me and others who are concerned about that? Secondly, does my right hon. Friend agree that this is not the totality of our anti-extremism strategy, important though it is?”
“If freedom of the press means anything, it means the freedom to criticise and to oppose. That freedom is in danger if we become the first democracy in the world to allow a foreign Government to buy a national newspaper and media organisation. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House may be aware that the noble Baroness Stowell has tabled an amendment to the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill with cross-party support in the House of Lords to prevent that from happening. Will the Government support or at least not oppose that amendment in the House of Lords? Were it to come to the Commons, I certainly would support it, and I encourage all right hon. and hon. Members to do the same. We must prize freedom of the press in this country, and that amendment is our opportunity to do so.”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that the real issue of the events of the last 24 hours is not the party political shenanigans suggested by the shadow Leader of the House, but that this House appears cowed by threats of violence and intimidation? The mother of Parliaments appears weakened and diminished as a result. We have allowed our streets to be dominated by Islamist extremists, and British Jews and others to be too intimidated to walk through central London week after week. Now we are allowing Islamist extremists to intimidate British Members of Parliament. This is wrong. It has to stop. Will my right hon. Friend organise a debate on extremism and how we tackle this challenge, which is one of the central issues facing our generation?”
“My right hon. Friend said that the Foreign Secretary has asked Israel to think again about any further military offensive or incursion into Rafah. I think we would all urge Israel to think carefully about how that would be conducted. However, does he agree that our support for Israel on 7 October, when we said it should be able to eradicate Hamas, was clear, and that there is a danger that our emerging position—certainly that of other parties—would leave Hamas’s terrorist organisation partially intact? That is an intolerable situation for Israel: it would send a clear message that using human shields works and that we will not allow Israel to fully defend itself. How would he answer that question?”
“A first responsibility for Government is to fix the housing crisis that young people did not cause. Three years ago, we dragged house building in this country up to the highest level since 1987, after the last Labour Government left it at its lowest level since the 1920s. But house building is weakening and we need to do more. Will my right hon. Friend consider using the Budget to do as he and I did together during the pandemic: cut stamp duty to boost housing starts, reignite the economy and support thousands of businesses across our country?”
“] She now has her clip for social media, so the rest of the debate is largely irrelevant.”
“I beg to move amendment 11, page 3, line 21, after “Act” insert “, and of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 insofar as they relate to the removal of persons to Rwanda”. This amendment is intended to ensure that the relevant provisions of the Human Rights Act 1998 are fully disapplied for both this Bill and for the Illegal Migration Act 2023 in relation to removals to Rwanda – including by ruling out the use of sections 4 and 10 of the HRA.”
“What we are discussing here is whether we believe it is appropriate for a foreign judge in an international court to impose a late-night judgment, often without the United Kingdom being able to give its own arguments or to hear the reasons for that judgment; whether we think that that really accords with the rule of law, particularly in relation to this policy; and whether we are willing to see the same thing happen again that happened in the summer of 2022, when a judge did just that, grounding the flight and preventing the policy, leading to months, indeed years, of legal action and tens of thousands of illegal migrants breaking into our country, costing our taxpayers billions of pounds, imperilling lives in the channel and perpetuating this challenge for years to come.”
“Let me say at the outset of this debate that I do not believe that our membership of the European convention on human rights is sustainable. I think that that will become clearer and clearer to the British public in the months and years ahead, but that is not the purpose of my amendment today and it is not the subject of this debate. That is a discussion for another day.”
“I know that the Minister for Countering Illegal Migration, my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Michael Tomlinson), said that he did not watch box sets, but here we are once again for the next episode of this drama. It is also the most important one of all, because this is likely to be the final opportunity for this House to consider the Bill. Does it work? Will we be able to stop the boats? Can we secure our borders? As Members in all parts of the House know, I feel passionately that illegal migration is doing untold damage to our country, and we have to make sure that the Bill actually does the job. I want to speak to two amendments, but one in particular, and that is the one with respect to rule 39.”
“No one signed up to the Court being able to make binding injunctions. In fact, quite the opposite: it was considered at the time and rejected. The UK, like all other signatories to the European convention, expressly declined to give the Court the power to make binding interim measures. This was created by activist judges in 2005, in response to the Mamatkulov and Askarov v . Turkey case, whereby the Court conferred upon itself a power that was not given in the treaty. It is a mistake that the United Kingdom has for many years, by convention, gone along with the approach the Court has taken to itself.”