Simon Hoare
MP for North Dorset · Conservative · United Kingdom
“The hon. Lady is making a principled argument that the House must listen to and respect, but she has spoken about choice and dignity, and the one thing I have never understood about this Bill is the importance of the specific time period—that it would apply to adults who have six months or fewer to live.”
“I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way a second time. This is the democratically accountable House; I think we would all agree on that point.”
“Against a backdrop of realism—things just go wrong, no matter how much money is invested in them, or how up to date they are—does it not seem slightly ludicrous that NATS has put all its eggs in one basket? There is no shadow, back-up or secondary scheme that can be used.”
“This creates a situation where important issues risk being overlooked and where residents feel they do not have a sufficient voice.” I have had a number of emails from across the country and from other constituents that effectively mirror and echo that point.”
“I agree with my hon. Friend and with his constituent, Alex Roll, who has been in contact with me via Facebook. I take the point that my hon. Friend makes on her behalf, and that she makes on behalf of countless others, which is that these companies are inclined to effectively hunt with the hounds and run with the hare at the same time.”
“The issues that Peter has raised with me on behalf of those residents, which are echoed by others, is the absence of management transparency—a key and important thing—and accountability of the companies involved, as well as a lack of clear communication that sets out in easily digestible form information that residents require and opennes…”
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“In essence, the hon. Gentleman has described what we on the Conservative Benches would have called the big society some years ago. Does he share my concern, however, that that huge bank of volunteers who often prop up and form the supports for the organisations he has described are likely to drift away as their organisations come under pressure? Not only will there be a financial pressure, there will be a pressure on the resource of people who are volunteering, because they will just say, “If the Government are not prepared to help us this one little bit, why should we help?””
“In Dorset, we became a unitary authority, and no sane person would ever want to go back to a two-tier system, but we benefited from the excellent skills of Paul Rowsell, who died earlier this year and is much missed. Will the Minister ensure there are expert teams within his Department to work alongside those councils that wish to make that important change, which will deliver savings and better services to local people?”
“There is much to commend in the White Paper and, broadly, the Minister is to be congratulated. However, he knows as well as I do, as welcome as the multi-year settlement announcement is, it is predicated on an outdated and effectively broken funding system. I understand the Treasury is not keen to revisit that in any meaningful way, but may I urge him to consider a rural-proofing mechanism to the funding formula, to ensure that the additional costs of delivering local services in rural areas are recognised? Change is scary, but I do not recognise the picture painted by the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade).”
“I appreciate that it is outside the Minister’s brief and he may need to write to me, but can he provide some assurance to the House that the contract that the Government give to Royal Mail will be honoured in full by the new owners to ensure that our democracy can still function?”
“As many have mentioned, many rural communities will be concerned to know how this could affect them. I spoke to postal workers in Blandford Forum in my constituency on Friday; they can be the best advocates, so can the Minister ensure that they are well primed to explain to their customers—who they are very proud to serve—what this means for the universal service obligation? Likewise, the Royal Mail has such a crucial job in delivering elections, particularly but not exclusively with postal votes. There is growing concern about the resilience of Royal Mail to meet the growing demand.”
“The Minister continually refers to tax breaks. They are not tax breaks. Why can he not just be honest with the House and admit that this is the first time that any Government in a civilised democracy has imposed a tax on learning and education?”
“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way a second time, and I am so grateful for the public finance lesson. Surely he has to accept that as no tax is placed on learning in any sector in the educational landscape across the United Kingdom, this measure is not a tax break. It is not that there is a tax break for one sector while others have a tax imposed. This is an imposition of a new tax in the educational sphere. It is not a tax break because no educational establishment pays VAT.”
“Given that there are many on the Government Benches who had almost as their life’s work the destruction of the private school system, is my hon. Friend as shocked as I am that for this flagship policy, which the red flag has so often demanded, the Government Benches are so underpopulated? I thought that they would be there to cheer the Minister on.”
“This point of order is spontaneous, unlike that intervention. [ Interruption. ] I am Mr Spontaneity. Mr Speaker, you are entirely right that many right hon. and hon. Members read their speeches almost verbatim, but surely it is just rude and discourteous to the House for the hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume) to read a supposedly spontaneous intervention as if it had just come into her mind. She managed to find a typewriter and a printer in order to write down two pages of intervention.”
“My right hon. Friend is right to highlight the devastating effect of this policy and to highlight the incredible rounding-up exercise on the Treasury account books of the contribution that it will make to NHS expenditure. With the Labour party having a serious foothold in rural constituencies for the first time since 1945, does she not find this rather inept politics, which is perhaps not surprising from such a London-centric Front Bench? The policy shows a wilful ignorance of rural life and a deliberate attempt not to understand the pressures and is, in essence, selling those rural Labour MPs down the river.”
“I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. He has just referred to his analysis of four years of data which led him and the Government to this position. That is an incredible thing to ask the House to believe, because just a few months ago his right hon. Friends the now Prime Minister and Secretary of State were specifically ruling out these policies to audiences of farmers and landowners. If the data of four years’ standing told him that this was the right policy, why were those now Ministers economical with the actualité when they spoke to the farmers themselves?”
“claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36). Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put. Question agreed to. Question put accordingly (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.”
“I thank the hon. Lady for giving the House the time to debate the Bill this morning. She references coercion, and I understand her point about the two medics, but medics will not be able to see or hear everything at all times. People will not be put beyond challenge, because subsequent to the death, if a relative claims coercion of another relative, investigation will remain. I am entirely unclear how, without peradventure, two clinicians can claim that there had been no coercion at any point.”
“The thrust of the Bill, as I understand it, is to ease suffering and pain in a patient who has a diagnosis and will die of the condition that has been diagnosed. But that right could only be exercised within a six-month period, and the pain and discomfort could last a lot longer than that. Has my hon. Friend heard—because I have not—what the importance of six months is? Why not eight, 10 or 12? What would stop people challenging it on the grounds that the dam has been breached, the six months is entirely arbitrary and it could, and indeed should, be extended by negative resolution in a statutory instrument?”
“As a former state school pupil with three daughters in a state school, let me assure the hon. Member that, despite the caricature that sometimes he and others like to paint, not all Conservative Members are privately educated. I say to him quietly that it is not a choice of either/or; we want to see excellence and choice in education right across the board. It is not one against the other.”
“If only proof of age was still asked of me. The Secretary of State knows that I support the Bill and will vote for it this evening, but he will know that rural pubs are increasingly marginal in their operations. He has referred to further powers, post consultation, that may stop smoking outside in particular places once the Bill is on the statute book. Will he put the minds of rural MPs, from across the House, at rest by saying that he does not envisage at any point, either now or post-Royal Assent, the inclusion of a ban on smoking outside rural pubs? That would be a further nail in their business model at a time when we need them.”
“Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend’s point, I remember hearing a presentation from British American Tobacco, and a point that resonated with me was that there are legal vapes, the ingredients of which we know and are listed, and then there is a huge black market for vapes, principally from China, and nobody knows what the hell is in them. I think an awful lot of parents think that those vapes are just producing steam, and have no idea about their dangerous chemical composition. I think too many teachers and headteachers also thought that, and the learning curve has been steep.”
“That is entirely not what was envisaged, so I support fundamentally the robust approach that the Bill takes to the vaping sector. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s response to the concerns raised about smuggling. One can make something illegal, prohibit it or narrow access to it, but that does not necessarily, in the first instance, choke off market demand, and people will seek it. There will clearly have to be some robust empowering of His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agents and others to ensure that we do not see a burgeoning black market in tobacco products. On the hon.”
“The Government are not going down that route, so those who are going about a legal business should not be made to feel like criminals or societal pariahs for selling what is still a legal product to those who are legally entitled to purchase it. I disagree almost fundamentally with the assessment of vaping from the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and Wallsend (Mary Glindon). I have three kids at our local high school, and too many of their cohort have got entrapped into vaping, brought in by the colours, the flavours, the smells, the packaging and the novelty factor. I understand entirely the intention for vaping to be a passport away from tobacco, but for too many, it seems to be an entry to smoking, and then moves them on to tobacco.”
“Their businesses are very marginal, as the Minister knows and as the Secretary of State recognises, so I am grateful to them for that. The licences that the Bill envisages will be useful for providing a record of who is doing what, where, for the benefit of officialdom in its many guises, but I urge the Government—and local government, if this gets passported down to it—not to see those licences as a cash cow. They should not be a profit centre, and the requirements to secure a licence should not be onerous. The constraints of the Bill are clear. Hon. Members have asked why, if smoking is so bad, we do not just stop sales completely.”
“As I said in my intervention on the Secretary of State, I welcome the Bill. I was grateful to him and to the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, the hon. Member for Gorton and Denton (Andrew Gwynne), for a brief conversation we had today about the Government’s intention not to include within the scope of this Bill—or, indeed, in any future consultation—a prohibition on smoking outside a hospitality venue. I entirely take the Secretary of State’s point that it is not just the rural hospitality sector that would be affected, but a number of publicans in my constituency have said to me that it really would be the death knell for their business if smokers were not allowed to have a cigarette and a pint outside the pub, in the designated smoking area.”
“I do not know whether they are still made, but it was my job every morning—I obviously had a trustworthy face—to trot up Wyndham Crescent, go round the corner into Severn Road, go into Tony’s, the newsagent, and pick up either 20 or 40. I knew it was going to be a bad day if my headmaster needed two packets of 20. It is amazing that a nine-year-old schoolboy could be given cigarettes, but so trusting was Tony, the newsagent, that we did not have to pay. We did that on Fridays, and there was always 10p left over, which would allow me to have a comic, two packets of crisps or a bag of Chewits. When I say this to my children, who are either in or approaching their teenage years, they look at me with glee but also as though I am talking about a different age, which of course I am. What on earth can we buy for 10p these days?”
“Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley), my late father-in-law was an ENT surgeon, and I well remember talking to him about the devastating impacts that he saw on people’s health and the cost that such terrible and avoidable conditions can have, both to the economy and to the health service. As I mentioned to the Secretary of State, I am no longer asked for proof of ID when I go into shops to buy anything. However, I can well remember that as a young schoolboy —this just goes to show how this country’s relationship with tobacco has changed—the headmaster at my local primary school seemed to be addicted to Piccadilly cigarettes.”
“I am pretty certain that had we known in the past what we know now about the harms of tobacco for so many thousands of our citizens, both societally and in terms of health, Queen Elizabeth would have probably said to the merchant adventurers, “Thank you very much for bringing it over, but please take it back.” It would not have taken root, but it has done. We have moved through a time when medics were paid by the industry to tell us of the beneficial effects of tobacco—for example, the idea that menthol was good for clearing people’s lungs. As we know, the medical profession has very much changed its tune. Rather like the hon.”
“I welcome this Bill, and I think the country should welcome it and salute the Government for effectively taking on the Bill—they have polished and finessed some elements—that was introduced by my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) under the previous Government. The gracious remarks of the Secretary of State in his opening speech will have resonated on the Conservative Benches and been appreciated. A lot has happened in our country’s relationship with tobacco.”
“Too often, it is interpreted as being paternalistic and patronising, but I like what the Secretary of State said about this approach to lawmaking being in the proud one nation tradition of the Conservative party, because Tories like order, not disorder.”
“Things have changed. The ultra-libertarian would ask why we force people to wear seatbelts, as people should be free to hurl themselves through their windscreen at speed. Why do we have speed limits? The libertarian would say that we should be absolutely free to drive at whatever speed, irrespective of the conditions. I remember, back at university, hearing an eccentric American—that can sometimes be a tautology—questioning, from the extreme wing of libertarianism, the merits or otherwise of ages of sexual consent. I suggest that all we do, and our inspiration for doing it, is benign and kindly.”
“The hon. Gentleman takes me neatly to my closing point. If I understand him correctly, he is making an argument about civil liberties and freedoms. One does not have to be a libertarian to cherish freedom and liberty, as I hope we all do in this House. Libertarianism is the extreme form. It is the difference between liberty regulated and controlled—parametered, if one will—and liberty laissez-faire. It strikes me as rather incongruous for a libertarian to wish to become a lawmaker, because most laws are there to control, prohibit and regulate. It seems masochistic: “I am a free market libertarian, yet I have decided to put myself in the shackles of lawmaking in order to restrict the liberties that I cherish.” The hon. Gentleman makes a serious point, but we have to deal with society as it is, rather than as we might like it to be.”
“Friend that it is an entirely Conservative instinct to say, when all the levers have been pulled and buttons pushed—when there has been public information, education and some forms of prohibition—“It has worked up to a point, but not enough and not at the right speed. We will have to do something else.” I accept that not everybody who describes themselves as a Conservative, as my hon. Friend and I both do, will make the same analysis and arrive at the same position as me. I voted for the Bill in its last iteration, and I will vote for it again today, because I think it is the next lever that we need to pull and the next button that we have to push.”
“A disproportionate amount of resource goes to dealing with smoking-related diseases, illnesses and conditions. We can do something about that. We know full well the negative impact of passive smoking on other people’s health, so the impact of the exercise of that liberty is not limited to the individual. I suggest respectfully that my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) would have a stronger point if it was limited to the individual. Then we could say, “Provide the information and let the individual take the decision.” However, that decision impacts many other people. It affects the productivity of the nation and the national health service, and the health of family and society. I suggest to my hon.”
“My hon. Friend makes an important point, and I readily accept that it has a huge intellectual underpinning, but we have had public health campaigns for years on the dangers of smoking tobacco. In some instances, it has worked. We have also used taxation and the pricing mechanism. My late father told my mother that he would give up when cigarettes reached 10 shillings a packet. He eventually gave up when smoking was banned in public buildings and the like. The question that remains is: do we allow unfettered freedom if it harms only the individual who is exercising it, and step in when the exercise of that unfettered freedom has negative impacts on society? The Secretary of State and others have dilated, perfectly correctly, on the impact on demand and supply in the national health service.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. One can nudge, prod, push and exhort as much as one can, but the Bill is probably the final stepping stone in quite a long line of stepping stones to try to wean people off their dependency on tobacco. The House has been generous with its time, as have you with your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. In closing, I echo and endorse the point made by the Secretary of State and other contributors from the Government Benches: people who have an addiction are not free. They are trapped by their addiction, and that affects many areas of their life. If someone is terribly well off, they can afford the addiction to tobacco, and it will make not a jot or tittle of difference to the household budget or income, or to their standard of life—”
“I will not, I am afraid, because I want to conclude. The disproportionate hammer blow is felt by families who would describe themselves as poor, on low or fixed incomes. When the choice between feeding the addiction and feeding the children comes into play, then feeding the addiction seems to have the trump hand. The Government are right to have picked up the ball and taken the Bill forward. It is an entirely Conservative measure. This is not a restriction of liberty in the abstract. The Bill is about public health. It is about taking the data, extrapolating the facts and recognising the harms, and, as responsible legislators, responding to that to make a difference to all our communities up and down the country.”
“It is not the silver bullet, but given the severity of the situation over the weekend, every little helps. Will the Secretary of State—he will earn huge plaudits if he is able to pull this off—convince the Environment Agency that it would be helpful to many communities in North Dorset, the south-west and elsewhere to increase the capacity of our rivers through a managed programme of dredging? We are losing capacity. Last week I saw a river where two arches of a bridge were entirely silted up. That is losing 20% of capacity. It is not the silver bullet, but capacity improvements would help.”
“Gentleman’s constituents—and constituents of all Labour Members—are probably asking themselves when the Labour party will crash the glass ceiling of having either a person of colour or a woman lead it.”
“This timid church mouse of a Bill says, “We will take away some people who we would have taken away more than a quarter of a century ago.” The Paymaster General, who I always consider to be one of the stars of the Treasury Bench and who is a good friend, told us that the principal motivation behind the Bill is for young constituents of Torfaen to say, “Ah, a glass ceiling has been removed,” as if they have sat there thinking, “You know, I would love to get involved in public life, if it wasn’t for this roadblock to my advancement”—namely, the 92 hereditary peers. With the greatest of respect to those on Treasury Bench, I think that a greater percentage of the right hon.”
“Is that what all the intervening years since 1997 and the 14 years of Labour navel-gazing in opposition, as it contemplated its radical programme for government, have produced—removing 92 people who would have been removed in any event had Blair not blinked? No democratisation at all of the House of Lords? What a wasted opportunity.” What a wasted period of opposition that was—something I hope and know that our Front Benchers will not replicate.”
“I will endeavour to be brief. I think that the Bill is to be welcomed. It is many things, but it is not, I fear, what the Government have tried to dress it up as. It is the fulfilment of a manifesto commitment, but one that was made, as my hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) made clear, back in 1997. Blair blinked because my friend Robert Salisbury did what all Cecils have done since their appointment by Queen Elizabeth: he did a bit of deal-making and they found a solution. If you are very quiet and listen, Madam Deputy Speaker, you can hear the voices of Labour radicals of the past muttering to themselves, “Is that it?”
“My right hon. Friend is a very clever former Treasury Minister and I am not, so perhaps she can help me to reconcile these two statements. In essence, and in true Harold Macmillan phraseology, the Secretary of State told us that farmers have never had it so good, yet his advice is that they will have to learn how to do more with less. I cannot make those two things add up. Can my right hon. Friend?”
“The hon. Gentleman and I shared very similar concerns about the trade deals with Australia and New Zealand. We feared that imports would swamp the market, but fortunately that has not come to pass; it has all been swallowed up by an ever-voracious Chinese and south-east Asian market. New Zealand lamb producers have actually reduced the size of the flock per capita. What we worried about has not come to pass, and we should be grateful for that.”
“We have the rural services delivery grant, and I hope that the Minister and his departmental colleagues are strongly making the case to both the Treasury and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government that the rural services delivery grant is vital for enabling rural local government to deliver the services that our communities are looking for. In an earlier contribution to the debate, reference was made to the entirely urban-centric rubric of Environment Agency funding decisions when it comes to flooding. It effectively boils down to how many chimneys benefit from the investment. The larger the community—by definition, the more urban or metropolitan—the more likely they are to be successful in a bid, compared with a scheme that will benefit many hundreds of acres of prime farmland but possibly only 200 or 300 households.”
“Now is the opportunity—I have been very clear that we had opportunities over the last few years, but they were not delivered for a whole variety of reasons, including covid, Ukraine and other things that we all know about—to have some serious, grown-up thinking about rural-proofing policies, because, as others have mentioned, the delivery of public services in our rural areas is more expensive. Our populations are sparser, and our communities are further flung. As the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) said, we do not have big teaching hospitals and so forth. The Home Office needs to give proper consideration to rural-proofing the funding formula for rural policing, and likewise with the fire service.”
“It also concerns me that many Labour Members have been told that the money raised will give them an oncology centre in every constituency, and that other wonderful things are going to happen. In fact, this is just a round of drinks when it comes the amount of money that it will generate in taxation for what may be required by the health service or by education, so I say to the House, “Please do not fall for that old chestnut.” The Minister and I worked very closely together on the Agriculture Act 2020 and on trade issues.”
“I am still at a loss as to how farmers are supposed to be rejoicing, as we are told they are by so many Labour Members, with all this record investment and expenditure in rural areas, when they are being told by the Secretary of State that they must do more with less. You can have one or the other, Madam Deputy Speaker, but you cannot have both. Many of my right hon. and hon. Friends have spoken very authoritatively about the taxation changes. I am fundamentally opposed to what the Government are trying to do because of the damage that it will cause, in the long term, in constituencies such as mine and many others—particularly, but not exclusively, in the south-west.”
“Some 88% of my constituency is hill, wood or farmland. It is the “Vale of Little Dairies”, in Thomas Hardy’s phrase. It is a mosaic of farms, both family-owned and estate and many of them tenanted, punctuated by villages and market towns. I would willingly swap my inbox with that of the hon. Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley)—who is no longer in the Chamber—because her constituency, like those of many Labour Members, seems to be full of farmers who are, with a spring in their step, welcoming the wonderful, halcyon field that the Government are offering them. Let me make again a point that I made in an intervention earlier.”
“The other issue is driving tests. It is very hard to get a driving test in rural areas, which deprives young people of access to work, and to colleges and learning. In this debate on rural affairs, it is not just about the proposals for changing the way farmers are taxed. It is about the whole mosaic and rich tapestry of rural life, of which this Government currently find themselves the custodians. Historically, the Labour party has always been urban-centric, but it now has some rural seats. I hope that the Front Benchers listen to rural Members, hear the concerns that we, too, are hearing, and actually make some progress towards making life in our rural areas a little better.”
“Property prices go up, and people will only come back as and when they able to inherit something—that is, of course, on the presumption that the Treasury has not taken everything by that point and that the only thing they are able to inherit is a very small part of the family grave plot, although that might be taxed as well. I would urge a ruralisation of this area. I will mention two other things, both of which begin with “d”. Hon. Members on both sides of the House have mentioned dentistry. There have been too many nascent plans for a revival and renaissance of dentistry over the years. For reasons that I cannot understand, none has come to fruition, save for the entirely skewed and bogus funding formula for dentists. All Governments wed themselves to doing something; I just hope that something will be done.”
“I hope that there is sympathy for that argument on both sides of the House. Many Members have referred to access to housing. A lot of my constituents have invested in rental properties and so on, but we all know that quite a lot of housing in rural areas is older. It could be in a conservation area, it could be listed or it could be thatched—it could be all of those things. People are trying to meet the EPC regulations for rental properties, which is putting huge, artificial and urban-centric pressure on the rural rental housing market. The Prime Minister recently launched a very welcome initiative about skills. Again, I urge that a bespoke channel of work is carved out that looks at how we skill young people in rural areas. We suffer from a young person’s diaspora too often: the elderly retire to an area, and the young move away.”
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Then we can think about the impact on insurance premiums, which will close businesses and put householders out of the insurance market, with the exception of the scheme that the previous Government introduced. All these things have knock-on effects. I think the Minister and his departmental colleagues have sympathy with the point I want to make. Across Government—it is not just his Department—the funding formula and the rubric that decides where these things go need to have a far more digital, contemporary account of the challenges in delivering services in our rural areas. It is an issue that I have banged on about in this place in the nearly 10 years that I have served my communities of North Dorset, and I will continue to talk about it because that is the right thing to do.”
“The Minister is seeing silver linings in the clouds hanging over family farms and tenanted farms in North Dorset, but I must confess that I fail to see them. I will give ask the Minister a simple yes or no question: yes or no, will he come to North Dorset to meet farmers in my constituency and explain these wonderful silver linings that he can see in the clouds but none of us on the Opposition Benches can see?”