Luke Pollard
MP for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport · Labour (Co-op) · United Kingdom
“As the Member of Parliament for Devonport, where we not only base-port but refit Type 23s, I know that many of those ships that have given decades of service are no longer able to provide the capabilities we need.”
“It is unlike the SNP to be so positive about defence, isn’t it? The Type 83 and Type 32 were PowerPoints—there was no budget attached to them. That is why in the defence investment plan we set out a plan for a common combat vessel and a hybrid Navy to fulfil the opportunities that the retirement of the Type 45 presents for us.”
“If the right hon. Gentleman is talking about a salary of up to £1 billion, he is cosplaying as the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), isn’t he? Seriously, we are the third-largest cash spender in NATO. At the spending review next year, we will be setting out an increase in defence spending.”
“My hon. Friend really is the Member of Parliament for the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, as she is determined to champion it so frequently. She will have seen in the defence investment plan our commitment to the new generation of fleet solid support ships, and she will have seen the work that this Government have undertaken since 2024 to address…”
“I say seriously to the House that my hon. Friend has been an incredible advocate for Rosyth. I have met him on a large number of occasions, and he has been absolutely determined to talk not just about the potential of Rosyth, but about the professionalism of the men and women who work there and the opportunity for young people to have a c…”
“We inherited a situation where the north-east was the region with the lowest Ministry of Defence spend in the country and we have made it a mission to increase defence spending in the north-east. We have an incredible talent pool in the north-east, with brilliant defence companies both large and small doing brilliant work.”
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“Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), but three weeks ago I attended the opening of an all new wellbeing hub at the Cumberland centre in Devonport in my constituency. Those are genuine attempts to provide wraparound care, in addition to primary care, and to provide more thorough and effective services. I believe that Ministers should roll that model out across the country as it has real benefits. We should listen to our doctors, not just when it comes to our health but about what is best for our health services. They claim that the health and wellbeing hub model is an important addition to GP services, although not a substitute for them. Plymouth City Council has submitted a bid to Ministers for £13 million funding to create more hubs across the city, including a superhub in our city centre.”
“That means that GPs in Plymouth have far more appointment demands to support patients with mental health needs than GPs elsewhere in Devon. At a meeting I held with GPs last year there was general agreement that integration of general practice, mental health and community services would be beneficial and would lead to patient care being not only better but more efficient. This is a good moment to talk about something that Plymouth is really good at, as well as having challenges: the introduction and roll-out of health and wellbeing hubs. Plymouth City Council, our local clinical commissioning group, and Livewell Southwest—our social enterprise that provides NHS services in Plymouth—have come together to roll out health and wellbeing hubs across our city. Many of them are in the north of Plymouth, which is represented by the hon.”
“GPs are on the frontline of healthcare and many people in Plymouth have told me that pressure has increased as community services have been cut back in other areas. A large proportion of the patients that GPs see consists of patients with severe, complex and enduring mental health difficulties who need regular GP support, and for some their GP is their only point of contact. While GPs continue to go above and beyond for their patients, they are not being given enough help to ease the pressure, particularly with patients with complex needs. Mental health services in Plymouth have significantly longer waiting times than other areas in Devon. Patients struggling with their mental health consult their GPs more frequently, until they are accepted into a specialist service that can support them in appropriate settings.”
“Someone else said: “For months now, it’s been impossible to book appointments online at my doctor’s. It takes three weeks to see a GP, and two just to see the practice nurse. After becoming part of a merged practice, the surgery has declined drastically.” Another told me: “Telephone consultations now seem to be the norm. Better than nothing, but a poor substitute for thorough examination.” There is, of course, a growing role for community pharmacy in Plymouth, as there is across the country, and our pharmacists do a superb job. More people need to access services provided by community pharmacists, and I encourage the Minister to continue to promote the services that pharmacies offer as part of the broader array of services to address the primary care crisis.”
“There are even some areas of the city where people are having difficulty registering or cannot register with a GP, because GP surgeries have closed and there is not sufficient bandwidth in the system to accept additional patients. I know that because my GP surgery in Plymouth closed and it was a struggle for the patients to find another with places available. People in Plymouth have reached out to me on social media, and I have been inviting comments on my Facebook page. It was nice to get comments that were not about the B-word. I will recount a few of those experiences, but should the Minister or officials want to look at them again there are plenty more on my Facebook page. I heard from a pregnant woman who told me she had to wait three weeks for an appointment.”
“I have just tried to make an appointment and have been told I can’t make an appointment”— for many months— “as they are changing their systems.” I think that is an isolated example, but it is part of a trend of concerns that patients express not only to the patient participation groups in practices—groups of patients who deserve special thanks and who are often overlooked in our debates—but by way of representations in the postbags of councillors and MPs. The Care Quality Commission found that people could not always access a GP when they needed one and GPs told the CQC that it is not uncommon for the waiting time for a routine appointment to be four weeks.”
“It means patients will experience longer waits for routine appointments, have trouble getting through on the phone, and face reduced availability of urgent appointments. Healthwatch Plymouth published a report in November about primary care in our city. One patient had this to say about their experience: “I had a brilliant surgery. But since merging with another I have had problems. I had the flu bug over Christmas, I received a diagnosis of a throat virus over the phone. I waited 7 weeks to see my doctor. Then when the results of my ultrasound came in, I found out from the receptionist that my doctor had retired.”
“They are looking for confidence that there is a plan. In a similar debate in March 2018, I spoke about primary care in Plymouth and the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), agreed to meet to discuss the issue with Plymouth GPs. I spoke to him about it in the Tea Room the other day and, while I realise that the Minister will not be controlling her diary in the same way as she did before being elevated to ministerial office, I should be grateful if she confirmed that she too would be happy to meet Plymouth GPs, so that they can raise their concerns directly with her about the direction in which primary care in Plymouth is going. I should welcome it if the meeting were with a cross-party delegation, to make sure that the concerns were not party political. A crisis in primary care means longer waiting times.”
“It found 15% GP vacancy rates, with several practices having handed back their contracts or at risk of doing so, in some cases owing to recruitment difficulties. It also found that between 25% and 35% of GPs and practice nurses would be retiring in the next five years. I realise that issue is not specific to Plymouth, but it is a trend across primary care that we need to address if we are to continue providing patients with the care they deserve. I should be grateful if the Minister responded to the concerns that those GPs have raised and set out what steps her Department is taking to address GP recruitment and retention, in particular. I think that a lot of GPs will be watching the debate and looking for reassurance that there is light at the end of the tunnel, albeit the route to it may not be an easy one.”
“It gets tough in those hotspots first, so GPs leave to work in better resourced areas, and it is harder to recruit in those practices when partners retire. This inequality in funding is driving the crisis. Will the Minister reconsider whether levels of deprivation and health need can be taken into account in the funding formula to ensure that inner-city practices are well resourced? On average, GPs in more deprived areas have a higher workload, with 20% more consultations with patients, who are more likely to have multiple morbidities, with both physical and mental conditions, but they do not necessarily receive the additional funding to address those complex needs. The Care Quality Commission has described primary care in Plymouth as at a “tipping point”.”
“If that is acceptable as a step-in provision, I would like the Minister to look at whether increasing the per patient funding would avoid the need for practices to hand back their contracts. Levelling funding across a city in this respect, rather than adding extra resources to those practices that have handed back their contract, might be a more efficient tool to address the funding crisis and to deal with the emergency situation. Deprived practices in Plymouth are not the only ones that are underfunded and under-resourced; the crisis is a national one affecting the whole of primary care, but the crisis is crystallising in hotspots, where the funding and resources are more markedly different from elsewhere in the country.”
“The challenge is so great that we feel abused by the government who know we are dedicated and will stay until the job is done no matter how hard it gets. But there is a limit—we do break.” That sense of getting to the point where they cannot go much further came across from a lot of GPs, and we have witnessed that in the number of practice handbacks across Plymouth. About 15% of Plymouth’s population is now covered by non-general medical services primary care, where a contract has been handed back and an emergency provider has stepped in. That should worry the taxpayer as well, because those organisations consume two to three times as much resource as normal primary care. Last year, instead of about £79 per patient, the step-in provider got about £191 per patient.”
“If there is not enough funding GP practices cannot recruit enough doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants and other health professionals, receptionists or managers. Everyone therefore works harder, yet many GP surgeries feel they cannot meet patient demands or expectations. An inner-city Plymouth GP, Dr James Boorer, told me yesterday: “Working in Plymouth is hard. But we are not alone—there are many other practices in similar deprived cities around the country where it is equally difficult. The problem probably stems from systematic under-resourcing of primary care over the last 10 years where demand has increasingly outstripped resource and funding. This has led to a failure to recruit new GPs and retain others who have left the profession early because it has been so difficult.”
“NHS England estimates that one in seven GP posts in Plymouth have not been filled, which is alarming. A GP in Plymouth who recently advertised for a vacancy at their surgery told me that they did not receive a single application. We know that the far south-west has trouble recruiting healthcare professionals at primary, secondary and acute levels. Our peripherality as a region compounds an already extremely difficult recruitment environment for health professionals. I know that the Government have considered support for GP recruitment in Plymouth in recent months, but it has not produced the additional GPs we are looking for. Will the Minister update us on GP recruitment and on what will happen next? A common theme in feedback from GPs is that funding and pay have decreased while job pressures have increased.”
“Is there an agenda or even a plan in place for change? It has been said that Plymouth is being watched to see what happens when Primary Care fails. If there is any truth in this please tell us now—don’t watch it fail”, but act to stop that happening. That is a common view among most of the GPs I spoke to. They have a real sense that primary care in Plymouth is being watched by NHS England and other NHS bodies to see what happens when a system falls over. Whether or not that is true, that is the sense they have. As a result of underfunding, nurse and GP vacancies in Plymouth’s primary care sector are hard to fill. If GP practices cannot fill vacancies, the quality of care they can offer suffers as more and more patients chase fewer and fewer available GP appointments.”
“An inner-city Plymouth GP, Dr Williams, told me: “I don’t know of a GP at the moment who isn’t working at full capacity. We are all working way beyond our contracted hours, late into the evenings, on our ‘days off’ and at weekends. Not for money, not for glory, but to give our patients the best possible care. I have colleagues who have burnt out, friends who are burning out, friends who are back at work too soon after serious illness because we are…putting our lives on hold to prop up the job we love and the patients we are passionate about. But the system is failing, and it’s feeling like that may be intentional. We believe we are set up to give the most cost effective and best patient care—but maybe that’s wrong. Can you give an honest answer about where NHS England see primary care going?”
“That is where the exceptional support required to resolve any one crisis is no longer given because a crisis is no longer exceptional. I think that these debates are best done on a cross-party basis. Plymouth is represented by three Members of Parliament, and I am sorry that the other two are not here today, but I hope the Minister will recognise that many of the things I speak about are cross-party concerns. I will attempt to keep party politics out of my remarks today. Plymouth’s primary care is in a state of crisis. Our GPs are working to the point of exhaustion because of the lack of funding and resources not just in primary care, but throughout the system. I think that it would be helpful to hear the voices of those on the frontline.”
“I am pleased to have secured this debate. When I was elected, I said that I would try to give Plymouth its voice back in Parliament by raising the issues that really matter, and primary care is one of those issues that comes up at nearly every constituency surgery that I hold. People who live in Plymouth know that the far south-west does not get its fair share of funding, and that is true from health to education and from transport to housing—all get below-average spend. Ours is one of the lowest funded regions in the UK, and that has consequences for our public services. I worry that with the housing crisis, the NHS crisis, the crisis in young people’s mental health and the social care crisis, we are at risk of crisis fatigue.”
“She is not the type of Minister to play party politics; she does engage with the issue, and I am really pleased that she is able to respond to this debate. Secondly, I thank all those medical professionals who work in primary care in Plymouth: the doctors, including GPs, paramedics, nurses, community pharmacists, dentists, medical students, receptionists, wellbeing professionals, volunteers, patient participation groups and many more besides. Their dedication and good will is the glue that is holding together a very fragile system in Plymouth, and I place my thanks to them on the record right away. Many GPs in Plymouth often work long hours—12 or 13-hour days. They do so out of dedication to their patients and to the health service, but they simply cannot be expected to do more and more with less and less.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered primary care provision in Plymouth. Today is a special treat for me. Not only is it my 39th birthday, but I have a chance to raise the concerns of the people I represent about a very important issue: their difficulty accessing primary care in Plymouth. This is the second time that I have spoken in this place about primary care in Plymouth, having participated in a similar debate in March last year, and never has the issue been more pressing. I will start, though, with a welcome and a thank you. First, I welcome the new Minister to her place. I have great respect for her, and there is sincere warmth towards her from both Government and Opposition Members—although perhaps they are not in the Chamber today. She has a very difficult job, and I genuinely wish her well.”
“Flexible working is a huge opportunity. May I ask the Minister to look also at whether flexible working schemes with acute hospital trusts, such as part-time GPs and part-time acute hospital doctors, could be included in that scheme? I think there is real merit in that.”
“That is why our determination to fight such cruel punishment for simply being LGBT with our friends and allies abroad must be matched by our commitment to do so at home as well. We must be clear that there is no place for this type of hate, either in the UK or around the world. As we decide what type of country we want to be after Brexit, we must ensure that human rights—LGBT rights—are at the heart of our diplomacy.”
“It gave me great strength to see the first-time activists protesting outside the Dorchester and other hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei, because they recognise that their human rights in the UK are affected if human rights for LGBT people around the world are affected. It does matter. Every time there is hate internationally, hate is brought on LGBT communities in our country. It does not take much to find people on social media saying, “Perhaps Brunei has the right idea”, or, “The sultan of Brunei has the right idea of what to do with you Brighton bitches”, or, “Brunei has the right idea in dealing with such FILTH.” The hate engendered in the laws that my hon. Friend spoke so passionately about empowers people who want to divide others and peddle hate in our country.”
“I have asked the Ministry of Defence in a written question about what advice has been given to UK forces stationed at British Forces Brunei, to make sure that there are no consequences for LGBT serving UK personnel in Brunei. I would be grateful if the Minister could reflect on that in his remarks. We must be aware that the roll-back of LGBT rights can happen. There is sometimes a belief in the LGBT community that LGBT rights only go one way—that we will only ever get more equal and that our fight for equality is over. That is wrong. It is a false wrapper that we put round ourselves to pretend that we do not have to fight anymore.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) on a passionate speech. It is not right that our LGBT friends across the world cannot enjoy the same freedoms as LGBT people in my constituency. We need to send a strong message from this debate that love is love. We must use our power as a country to impress that on our friends. It is harder when our friends fail, and when we have to have difficult conversations with people with whom we share a common bond, but on this we must, because our values do not stop at our borders. I say that as a gay man who is proud to be out. We have an extra responsibility to make sure that people know that whether someone is L, G, B, T or straight, it does not matter—they deserve human rights wherever they are.”
“Q10. Thank you, Mr Speaker. As you may know, there are 53 Mondays this year on which rent is due for people who pay their rent weekly, but there are only 52 universal credit payments this year. The Department for Work and Pensions has acknowledged that that is a problem it is awaiting Government action on. Will the Prime Minister confirm that she recognises that problem and that she will act to ensure that people do not need to find an extra week’s rent or go into debt because of that entirely predictable universal credit fault?”
“As a son of a submariner, I know how important it is that we thank those people who served on submarines. Speaking as the MP for Devonport, however, may I ask the Secretary of State whether he agrees that we should pay special thanks to all those people in Devonport who have, over many decades, refitted our nuclear submarines and ensured that they are operational, so that they can continue to provide the at-sea deterrent? Without the work of those specialist skilled engineers, we would not have CASD today.”
“I implore the Minister to tell the House when the Agriculture Bill and the Fisheries Bill will make a comeback, and when the environment Bill, for which the hon. Member for St Ives made a good case, will be seen. We need action, not just warm words.”
“Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon) spoke about expect politicians in this place to do something similar and declare a climate crisis at national level. We can then take cross-party action against it. The 25-year environment plan is a good start, but we need much more besides. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) spoke with passion about the need for action and that is something I want to impress on the Minister. Since the Environment Secretary took office there have been 76 DEFRA consultations, but only one piece of primary legislation. It is not good enough to be the Secretary of State for consultations. We need to tackle climate change properly, which means that we need proper action.”
“At the last DEFRA questions on 28 March the shadow Environment Secretary, my hon. Friend the Member for Workington (Sue Hayman), declared a climate and environment emergency, on behalf of the Opposition, at column 534. She challenged the Minister to join us in cross-party working to jointly declare a climate crisis. Ministers did not agree to do that, but I hope that the Minister will recognise the importance of cross-party working in relation to declaring a climate crisis. In local government up and down the country, Conservative, Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat councillors, and others besides, have been working in collaboration to declare local climate crises. The public and the young people whom the right hon.”
“I pay tribute to the hon. Member for St Ives for talking about public engagement with nature. If we are truly to value and protect our natural habitat, we need to ensure that people visit it, understand the value of it, and get something from it. It is deeply disturbing how few people engage with our natural world. I am leading the campaign for Plymouth Sound to be designated the country’s first national marine park—the first, but I hope the first of many. Some 20% of our young people in Plymouth, Britain’s ocean city, have not even seen the sea, and 50% have not visited a beach. Those were the findings of the fairness commission that was run by Plymouth City Council. Those should be the type of statistics that scare us all. That is a city right on the coast, so much more needs to be done.”
“I also pay tribute to the Chair of the Select Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh), who spoke so eloquently about microplastics. We need Ministers to rise to the challenge of how we test for microplastics, ensure that we are using common science across all forms of testing and create a safe level and an action plan not only to reduce microplastics and microfibres but to tackle what is already in the natural world. I pay tribute to those Members across the House who mentioned insect loss, a subject which my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) led a good debate on only a few weeks ago. Despite many of us not being huge fans of creepy crawlies, we need to spend more time on that. We need to focus not only on bees but on a wide variety of insects that are vital to our natural world.”
“Friends the Members for Great Grimsby (Melanie Onn) and for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), who spoke about the importance of bird nesting—a subject that now has media attention, not only because of the horrendous footage on social media today of sand martins trying to get through nets to get back to their nests. There is also concern about the practice of developers netting trees to prevent birds from nesting, and the sense that that is being done against the best interests of our natural world. Hon. Members on both sides of the House feel aggrieved by that, but we have the powers in this place to do something about it. We must call out developers who use cruel, inhumane tactics against our wildlife and, if they persist in such behaviour, we must introduce regulation to prevent it.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I congratulate my fellow west country MP, the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), on securing this important debate, and for introducing it so eloquently. I especially liked his phrase that we have to “up our game”. He rightly encouraged ministerial colleagues to do that. Our environment needs to be taken more seriously by all Members of Parliament and all those in public office if we are to meet the challenge that we face. It has been a good debate. The Division has led to a slightly emptier Chamber than we had a moment ago, but we heard some fantastic contributions from speakers from right across the political spectrum. I especially pay tribute to my hon.”
“The recent House of Lords Select Committee report on the funding of coastal communities shows that our coastal towns and communities are hardest hit by austerity. Will the Minister take the report’s recommendations seriously and look at how we can redistribute wealth and power from the centre and into coastal communities, especially those in the far south-west such as Plymouth?”
“I thank my hon. Friend for securing the debate. On the issue of women being given the right to vote, the first woman to take her seat in Parliament was elected in 1919. She represented Plymouth, Sutton, which is the same seat that I represent. In many cases, the same arguments were used against her standing for Parliament as are used against the fantastic young people who protested outside my office during the climate strike. Does he agree that these young people are passionate and determined and want to take part because they realise that the changes that take place here and in local councils affect them?”
“We need to talk about men’s mental health, because the vast majority of veterans who take their own life are men. Men are more likely to commit suicide than women but less likely to ask for help or get support. Those who have served face additional barriers and stigma when they try to access support. I support the call that several hon. Members have made for data collection, because it is hard for us to come together without understanding the true extent of the problem. In localities such as Plymouth—I imagine that it happens in Portsmouth as well—we collect the data on a local level, but it is hard to know how it feeds into the wider national picture. Data collection is not simply about ticking a box to say that someone is a veteran— [ Interruption . ]”
“I congratulate my fellow dockyard MP, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), on introducing the debate. There are certain parts of the United Kingdom in which the prevalence of our veterans is at its greatest. Plymouth has nearly 20,000 veterans; as the son of a submariner, I myself am the son of a veteran. It is important that we recognise that veterans are not uniformly spread throughout the country, and that support systems for them are much better in some parts of the country than others. In places such as Portsmouth and Plymouth, the armed forces covenant—that bond between the communities, veterans and those who serve—is not something that gathers dust on a shelf, but a living document which people live and breathe every day. In looking after our armed forces veterans, we need to engage with it much more.”
“I was talking about the scale of the problem of suicide, which affects men in particular. We must realise that, in many cases, suicide is the end of a process. Many veterans are caught in ruts of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, relationship breakdown or insecure work. We need not only to look at how we collect data about veteran suicide, but to understand the steps towards that, and equally, how we can get support to veterans when they need it most. It is right that veterans have access to and, in many cases, come to the front of the queue for mental health support, but when the queue is already months long, being at the front is no good at all. Huge steps forward need to be taken. I know the Minister is passionate about this issue, and I believe sincerely that some good options have already come out of the debate.”
“Q8. Back in June last year, I asked the Prime Minister to help fund the recycling of the 20 old nuclear submarines tied up and rotting in Devonport and Rosyth. Today’s National Audit Office report shows that the Ministry of Defence has no funded plan to do this work, and no submarines have been dismantled since 1980—that is the year I was born. Will the Prime Minister now extend the civil nuclear clean-up to make sure that it includes all the Royal Navy submarines, so that we can deal with this issue, and make that part of her legacy in office?”
“The college has taken on huge financial capital liabilities in building the rather brilliant new STEM hub in Plymouth, which is delivering not only for City College, but for the wider city and the priorities of the local enterprise partnership. That has contributed to an exceptionally high level of recruitment of learners aged 16 to 19, meeting the local skills gap.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I thank my fellow west country MP, the hon. Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham), for bringing forward this timely debate. City College Plymouth has been on something of a rollercoaster ride in recent years. The college went into financial crisis last autumn, with a series of changes in principal. The current interim principal, Penny Wycherley, has been outstanding in steadying the ship and getting ready for her successor to start this year, but we need to acknowledge that the college is in financial crisis, and that is for a number of reasons. First, the cuts to the FE budget have reduced the overall amount of money that the college has to spend. Changes in the way that funding is allocated have disproportionately hurt many colleges in the far south-west.”
“In particular, the engineering staff can earn salaries of £10,000 more simply by leaving the college and the jobs they love, and that is not right. We need colleges like City College Plymouth to be motoring. It is a forward-thinking college. It has just launched its fantastic marine autonomy course, which will equip our young people with the skills they need to work in Plymouth’s world-class marine autonomy sector. Importantly, it will retrain people who work on the more heavy engineering side of the marine industries in the updated skills they need to succeed in a much more integrated digital marine environment.”
“I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The lack of funding has meant that City College Plymouth has been unable to keep up with many of the repairs on its old building, leading to leaking roofs. It has not been able to replace technology with what it needs and has moved to leasing technology. It now faces financial barriers in moving off leasing to get the latest technology it needs. Funding has also had a huge impact on college staff, who have not been given a cost of living pay rise or any other pay rise this year. That is not because they are not brilliant—they are exceptional—but because there is simply no money in the coffers for the college to do that. In an economy where the skills FE college staff have are in high demand, that means we are losing talent and skills.”
“I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. The key message I want the Minister to take away is that we are all on her side in her battle with the Treasury. We are all ready, but we must resolve to not just talk a good talk about FE; we have to not vote for cuts to FE, and we have to make clear to Ministers, whether we are on the Government or the Opposition Benches, that we will not support further cuts to FE. An FE lecturer has tweeted me to say that people want: “A real increase to bridge the gap, not just make it less small.””
“What steps is the Foreign Office taking to guarantee the human rights of people in Sudan, especially since the President declared a year-long crisis in Sudan?”
“I was amazed and disappointed this week that the Government whipped their MPs to vote for a huge loophole in post-Brexit fishing rules that would allow a cruel and inhumane method of fishing to continue. The 5% loophole that allows electro pulse beam trawling is cruel and destructive. It destroys our seabeds and kills juvenile fish, and it is so intensely destructive that it breaks the vertebrae of cod. Will the Secretary of State now work with the Opposition to bring forward a brief statutory instrument to close this loophole that allows UK boats to use this cruel and inhumane fishing method?”
“I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that answer, which will warm the spirits of people in Plymouth. Plymouth Gin is a fantastic gin, and Mayflower 400, which marks the 400th anniversary of the sailing of the Mayflower from Plymouth to America, is a great opportunity. In these tough times, may I suggest to the right hon. Gentleman that we look not only at the standard-strength gin, but Plymouth Gin’s Navy strength as well? We could all do with a little bit extra in these tough times.”
“In relation to Regulation 1760/2000 (6), these regulations state: “In Article 4a, for ‘Member State in which the animal was born’ substitute ‘appropriate Minister’” I have been looking on the EU website and this provision does not seem to fit with the language of that article—this is in relation to ear tags worn by the animal. This could be a drafting error. Will the Minister state whether that is the correct wording? It seems to sit slightly awkwardly with the wording of the regulation itself.”
“Before I start, I wish to declare an interest: my little sister is a sheep farmer who farms rare breed sheep in Cornwall. She does a brilliant job. I have two questions for the Minister in relation to Regulation 1760/2000. The first one relates to 5(c)(ii) of these regulations, in which “The appropriate Minister may not make use of an electronic identifier compulsory as one of the two means of identification provided for in paragraph 1 before 18 July 2019.” Will the Minister set out why 18 July 2019 is an operable date? What happens if the commencement date of this statutory instrument is on exit day? What happens in respect of the ability to deploy electronic identifiers if exit day and 18 July 2019 do not align?”