Sir Julian Lewis
MP for New Forest East · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I will share with the House one particular case that is representative of many. My constituent, Mrs Gillian Pothecary, lost her husband almost a year ago. She wrote to me in July about her valiant but so far unavailing quest to obtain a civil service widow’s pension.”
“She said: “Mrs Pothecary’s…case falls under the commitment to be fully resolved by early September at the absolute latest. Capita has assured me that her case is on their escalation log and has been flagged for priority handling.” I rang up Gill just before coming into this debate and—you’ve guessed it, Dame Siobhain—she has not yet recei…”
“As the Minister seems to have run out of supportive Back Benchers, I shall endeavour to ask him a helpful and easy question. Accepting that it will be some years, to put it mildly, before we can eliminate our dependency on oil and gas, does he accept in principle that we are more secure if we exploit our own domestic oil and gas resources…”
“I warmly endorse almost everything the Secretary of State has said today, and I genuinely congratulate him on his appointment. In my first speech in this House almost 30 years ago, I promised to support Labour Governments as long as they supported the nuclear deterrent, the conventional armed forces and NATO.”
“On Monday, just as campaigners from the New Forest and Waterside were handing into Downing Street a 32,000-signature petition against the appalling and unfair outcome of local government reorganisation affecting our area, the welcome announcement was made by the Government that the local government reform proposals for Hampshire and three…”
“We are now in a situation that is worse than that at the height of the cold war, so the comparison we have to make is between what we are spending now and what we spent during the cold war, which was, in modern calculating methods, between 4.5% and 5.1% on defence. So let us not talk about increases to 2.7%.”
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“In his statement, the Foreign Secretary says that “our approach will always be guided by the UK’s long-term economic growth priorities”. As an example of that, he refers to our universities’ second largest source of international students being China, yet the Intelligence and Security Committee stated in the press notice for its report on China, of which he approves: “China is similarly aggressive in its interference activities… China oversteps the boundary. It has been particularly effective at using its money and influence to penetrate or buy Academia in order to ensure its international narrative is advanced and criticism suppressed.” In answer to the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), he said that we look to the universities to take precautions.”
“Do Ministers agree with the Trussell Trust’s recent estimate that the weekly cost of basic essentials is £120 for a single person and £205 for a couple?”
“As usual, I agree with much of what the Foreign Secretary has to say, but I have to ask him this: how many times must a terrorist-funding, fanatical regime threaten to wipe another country from the face of the earth before a Government advised by Lord Hermer of Chagos acknowledge that military action to delay and degrade its nuclear weapons programme is both ethically and legally justifiable?”
“However, it would do the country and the Government no favours if they were to lose in court a challenge to the process of proscription, because whereas the secret sabotage of planes would certainly have been an act of terrorism leading to proscription, the fact is that this was a performative act that these people announced they had done. My advice to the Government is to make sure, when these people are prosecuted, that it is not solely on the grounds of committing terrorist acts, rather than committing treasonous acts of sabotage.”
“I must say that I am very surprised that the Home Secretary chose to put out a written statement, rather than making an oral statement, when we could have put to her some of these points about what exactly qualifies a group to be proscribed as a terrorist organisation. I entirely agree with the sentiment in the House that Palestine Action sabotaged these planes, caused criminal damage and could be liable to a charge of criminal conspiracy, and that the people who did the damage should be pursued for remuneration to the point of bankruptcy.”
“Yesterday, as the Minister probably knows, food bank groups associated with the Trussell Trust lobbied—very effectively —Members on both sides of the House. My local group, the Waterside food bank, impressed on me the gap between the £92, which the Government believe a single person is estimated to need to survive, and the £120 that the food bank believes is necessary for a single person to be able to survive alone. Can the Minister give an indication as to what extent the gap between those two figures will be closed as a result of this initiative?”
“I hope something else we can all agree on is our admiration for the former Labour MP Ann Cryer, who exposed what was going on back in 2003, which was only five years into a 13-year-long Labour Government, and was disgracefully smeared as a racist for doing so. Let us belatedly make an apology to her and thank her for her courage.”
“Until the people of Iran rise up and overthrow the dreadful mullahs’ regime, it is obviously true what the Foreign Secretary says when he says that no military action can put an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, because even if its capacity was entirely destroyed, Iran could start rebuilding it. Having said that, though, it is true that it is possible to contain those ambitions by knocking back Iran’s capacity repeatedly, until such time as it no longer wishes to acquire nuclear weapons. I advise the Foreign Secretary to think carefully about the question of diplomacy alone containing those ambitions, because one day we might wake up and find that a successful nuclear test has been carried out by Iran.”
“It is encouraging that the Gibraltarians are receiving more consideration than the exiled Chagossians did. When the Foreign Secretary says that a sovereignty clause was inserted, does that mean that Spain absolutely and explicitly recognises the sovereign relationship between Britain and Gibraltar? If so, what has the reaction been of those elements that he referred to in Spanish politics that do not accept that relationship?”
“The Minister will be well aware of Sir Andrew Dilnot’s ambitious plan to put a cap of £86,000 on the cost of the social care that any family would ever have to pay. It was never going to be easy to implement that. Previous Governments postponed the plan, and the Chancellor effectively scrapped it completely. May I appeal to the Minister to work across party lines, and to focus on the crippling debt that hits hard-working families when they come to the end of their working lives and need the support of the state?”
“It seems quite radical to suggest, as the report does, devolving responsibility for post-16 technical education and training to local leaders and transferring responsibility for skills to the Department for Business and Trade. Will the right hon. Gentleman briefly expand on that, and explain how it relates to apprenticeships on the one hand and university education on the other?”
“I am sure that we wish the Government well in what they are trying to do. I gather that the International Air Transport Association highlighted only last week that, at the moment, sustainable aviation fuels cost approximately five times as much as conventional jet fuel. Will she explain how the measures in the Bill will bridge that gap to make it economical?”
“Assuming that the large nuclear power station at Sizewell C and the small modular reactors both prove to be successful, as we trust they will be, what is the Government’s thinking about the respective roles of each of those two very different types? Which does the Secretary of State think will be the better bet in the long term for the future of the country? Can he assure us that China will have no part in any of this?”
“Emeritus Professor Sarah Nield, the chairman of the New Forest Association, writes: “The current planning and environmental frameworks have played a crucial role in protecting the New Forest’s special qualities. However, the proposed changes in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, particularly those aimed at streamlining planning approvals, accelerating infrastructure projects and weakening environmental safeguards, would seriously undermine those protections.” This is not a political statement; it is a statement of concern for our most delicate and valuable rural areas.”
“In the spirit of that remark, I do not wish to ambush the Minister when he speaks with a quote from the Defence Secretary when he was the shadow Defence Secretary, so may I put it on the record now? After a major inquiry by The Independent , Lighthouse Reports and Sky News in November 2023, he was quoted as saying: “It is extremely worrying to hear that Afghan special forces who were trained and funded by the UK are being denied relocation and left in danger. These reports act as a painful reminder that the government’s failures towards Afghans not only leave families in limbo in Pakistan hotels, but also put Afghan lives at serious threat from the Taliban. Britain’s moral duty to assist these Afghans is felt most fiercely by the UK forces they served alongside. There can be no more excuses.””
“I know that the Minister sincerely cares about all of this, and I am sure that he really wants to do his best, however the key point being made by my hon. and right hon. and gallant Friends is that, if the criteria do not cater for a situation in which senior British military personnel give first-person testimony that somebody saved British lives by taking exceptionally courageous steps in our support, the criteria need to be adjusted. That is what should be done, as I hope he is going tell us that it may have been adjusted for the Triples.”
“I know that the Minister is drawing his parameters rather tightly today, but can he give us at least a hint of what impact the Treasury’s consideration anticipates for the defence investments in the regions resulting from the recent strategic defence review, given the closeness with which his Department was involved in the formulation of that review?”
“Does the Secretary of State think that the situation might improve if Thames Water executives were obliged to sign up to performance-related pay?”
“It has often been said that the courts rejected the legacy Act, at least in part. I am not aware of which part specifically they rejected, but I would like to remind the ministerial team that in 2017 the then Defence Committee examined in great detail whether it would be legal to have a statute of limitation that would put an end to these prosecutions. Four professors of law, including Philippe Sands, agreed that it would be, as long as there was an investigative process, possibly embodied in a truth recovery process. When the Government bring forward whatever alternative legislation to the legacy Act they propose, will they make sure that a statute of limitation is part of it?”
“The Home Secretary was asked a question about Lord Hermer of Chagos, as he perhaps ought to be known. Why did she not answer it, and will she do so now?”
“Knowing the Leader of the House to be a decent person, I suspect that behind the scenes, when events of this sort happen, she probably argues quite strongly that announcements should be made to this House first and to the press afterwards. Does she think the reason that is not happening is that the Government genuinely think they will get less publicity to hold a press conference after there has been scrutiny in the House, or is it that they just have no confidence that they can stop their people leaking things in advance?”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. You may have noticed that I briefly exited the Chamber to see whether copies of the SDR were available in the Vote Office, and I was told, quite rightly, that no, they would be made available immediately after the Secretary of State had made his statement. If we were to have the press conferences the day after statements—not the day before, or on the same day—everybody would have time to read the report, we would have an initial stab at it, with very little sight of it on the day, and then we could go into it in more detail subsequently, as we usually do.”
“As it was this issue that brought me into politics many decades ago, it is an absolute pleasure to hear the full-throated commitment of both the Government and the Liberal Democrats to the strategic nuclear deterrent. If the future of the American commitment to NATO were not in doubt, we would not need to think about tactical nuclear weapons ourselves, because that role has always been fulfilled by US tactical nuclear weapons allocated to the defence of NATO. Will the Minister assure the House that we have sufficient confidence in the willingness of the United States, despite the present Administration’s attitude to NATO, that the co-operation that we need for the future of our strategic nuclear deterrent is not in doubt?”
“It is tempting to remind the Secretary of State about the 4.5% to 5% of GDP that was spent on defence by Conservative Governments throughout the cold war years of the 1980s, but instead may I ask whether, like me, he would endorse what Admiral Lord West wrote in the national press last week, when he stated that the Chagos deal was a “disgraceful decision”, and that as a former chief of defence intelligence, he did not accept that the move is “absolutely vital for our defence and intelligence” as the Prime Minister claims? He is a former Labour security Minister and current House of Lords representative on the Intelligence and Security Committee, so he knows what he is talking about, doesn’t he?”
“The Secretary of State referred earlier to placing certain statutory duties on county councils. When she considers that, will she consider including in those duties the maintenance of companion bus passes for people with learning difficulties who cannot travel on their own? It is not much good for them to have a free bus pass if they cannot take a companion with them. Will the Secretary of State join me in expressing our sadness and commiseration over the recent passing of Mr Andrew Wickham, who spent more than 40 years in the transport industry and over a decade as managing director of Go South Coast, which operates Bluestar buses in New Forest East? I always found him to be a marvellously attentive correspondent, and he was someone who worked until almost the very end.”
“Given the constructive tone that the Secretary of State is taking today, would he like to say a word of praise for the upper House, without whose determination to keep revisiting this matter he might not have felt it quite so necessary to come to this House today and outline in such detail the constructive alternatives he wishes to put forward?”
“1298.] In reality, as the BDA points out, the reason why that budget is underspent is not because of the lack of demand, but because NHS practices cannot fill vacancies and are unable to meet contractual commitments. Therefore, those who do work with and for the NHS are having to deliver dental care at a loss. There is a fundamental requirement for a rewritten constitution and contract by which it becomes worthwhile for people to practice dentistry in the NHS, because otherwise we will see a two-tier society, in which only the rich can get the dental care that people so desperately need.”
“On 13 March, I put a question to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care about a point made by the Darzi report, last September, which says: “There are enough dentists in England, just not enough dentists willing to do enough NHS work, which impacts provision for the poorest in society.” I was pleasantly surprised when his reply was: “NHS dentistry is in a terrible state and, in fact, in many parts of the country it barely exists. There are lots of reasons for that, and it is a source of constant astonishment to me that the dentistry budget was underspent year after year despite that situation.” —[ Official Report , 13 March 2025; Vol. 763, c.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for that no-pressure introduction. I congratulate the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) on her speech and I agree with every part of it. I was hoping to quote from individual cases raised by constituents and from the local Women’s Institute, but all that will have to go by the board. I have a wonderful briefing from the British Dental Association and, in the remaining two and a half minutes, I would like to make one pertinent observation, from which everything else flows. Dentistry is a highly skilled profession in which practitioners can charge colossal sums of money in private practice, which gives them a financial incentive to steer clear of working for the NHS. That is the root of the problem.”
“When a former Foreign Secretary asks a sitting Defence Secretary for a direct answer as to which court would be able to make a binding judgment against us on this matter, he is entitled to a direct answer, so will the Secretary of State now give that direct answer?”
“If the Prime Minister is right that our food standards are already in alignment with those of the EU, why could we not have negotiated the deal on the basis of mutual recognition of those standards, as other countries have done, rather than open ourselves up to having to alter our standards in line with whatever the EU may decide to change in the future?”
“Unlike certain other institutions, NATO is an alliance of separate sovereign countries. I thank the Minister for his strong support of NATO, but does he agree that we should follow the example of the frontline NATO states like Estonia and Poland, which recognise that the difference between deterring a hostile Russia and actually having to fight a war is the difference between spending 4% or 5% of GDP on defence, as we did in the 1980s, and 40% or 50% if, God forbid, we ever have to engage in open hostilities?”
“Does the Minister agree that, now it is slowly dawning on President Trump that his friend Vladimir is stringing him along, there are good prospects that America will not weaken the level of sanctions it imposes on Russia? Can he also clarify one point? He said in his statement—and also yesterday evening—that if Putin does not engage seriously with peace, the UK and our allies will have no choice but to ramp up the economic pressure even further, forcing him to the table. I would have thought that we ought to be ramping up the economic pressure now to the maximum level that we can, so unless the Minister is just saying that that ramping up will take longer, can I suggest that the Government get on with it as quickly as possible?”
“Does the hon. Lady believe that the safety of very vulnerable claimants would be improved if there were a system within the DWP for flagging them as vulnerable and ensuring, so far as it is practically possible, that they always deal with the same person, who might be specifically qualified to look after people with such vulnerabilities?”
“As well as raping, kidnapping and killing civilians on 7 October for the sake of it, Hamas had a strategy: to try to prevent further peace deals between Israel and its Arab neighbours by provoking a massive, frenzied reaction to the atrocities. Does the Minister share my dismay that this brutal strategy seems to be succeeding?”
“The right hon. Lady is an attentive Leader of the House, and I hope the Government show the same degree of loyalty to her after a tough couple of weeks that she is showing to them. Although I do acknowledge that the Government make many statements to the House, all too often they make them to the media first, as you noted, Madam Deputy Speaker, in your announcement on Monday: “Mr Speaker does not understand why the Government persist in making announcements in this way, when the ministerial code is absolutely clear”. —[ Official Report , 12 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 47.] Will the Leader of the House take back the message, even if she cannot confess it on the Floor of the House, that they are going too far and they need to stop?”
“The Minister referred briefly to something called a duty of candour, which will try to avoid a repetition of what was described as a “defensive culture in the civil service”. Will he expand on that phenomenon? It is quite extraordinary, is it not, that when people in all innocence were infected with lethal diseases by the NHS, civil servants should have gathered round to deny them the help and compensation they needed? Surely some sort of sanction ought to be involved. Will anyone be held to account for this, because otherwise, it will happen again, won’t it?”
“The Minister referred to the attempts to cripple the ghost ships and fleet. Does that have any effect on the shipments of oil to third parties, such as India, that refine the oil and then sell it on to countries that, like us, are trying to sanction Russia directly?”
“Is a pattern emerging where the Trump Administration take initially extreme positions on international trade and foreign policy and then quickly re-adjust to more realistic and sensible policies? What opportunities does that give for British diplomacy?”
“At a time when we have been commemorating a significant anniversary of VE Day, does the Minister share my concern that certain large pension firms are refusing to invest in profitable defence industries on spurious ethical grounds? Is that something that his pensions investment review might care to investigate?”
“Can the Minister explain why it appears that telephone assessments for PIP have a significantly higher success rate in applications than face-to-face applications?”
“In the fullness of time, it will undoubtedly be revealed what the targets of these terrorist plots were going to be. If it turns out that one of them was again the broadcaster Iran International, which had to relocate to Washington temporarily in 2023, will the Minister undertake to speak with his Foreign Office colleagues about the importance of impressing on the Trump Administration that these repressive regimes fear free broadcasting agencies, and that that is why the Trump Administration should not be closing down Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty or indeed Voice of America itself?”
“We can also look at the areas covered by a simple listing of the campaign stars that were awarded: the Atlantic Star, the Africa Star, the Italy Star, the Burma Star, the Pacific Star, the France and Germany Star and, much belatedly, the Arctic Star for the brave men of the merchant navy and the Royal Navy, who risked everything to get supplies to Russia. Let us not forget one last thing. When the war ended, the country for which we went to war, Poland, remained under occupation by the Soviet Union, and it took another 44 years of determined deterrence, coupled with the nuclear balance of terror, to ensure the eventual emergence of democracy in that country too.”
“I will pick out one key factor without which everything else would have been different: the existence of the English channel. There can be no doubt that if we had been contiguous with the continent of Europe, we would have suffered the same fate as all our allies there. There is no way in which we could have resisted being overrun. When we think about how difficult it was to reinvade and retake the continent for democracy in 1944, even with Britain as the launch area for that invasion, we realise how virtually impossible it would have been without the United Kingdom remaining outside Nazi German control.”
“That was a theme on which I expatiated back in May 1997 in my very first speech in this House. I will repeat just one reference from that oration, about when I discovered a small plot of RAF graves in Fawley churchyard in my constituency. I could not help but be moved by the inscription on the headstone of a young airman, John Burrow, whose parents had written the following: “Into the mosaic of victory we lay this priceless piece—our son”. I thought that that was such a wonderful thing to do in the depths of their loss: to say, nevertheless, that this is what we are doing for the victory of our country over Nazi Germany. I salute them and their memory too. How does one do justice to the second world war in a few minutes?”
“What an excellent speech to have the privilege of following. It is always so impressive when people do their duty right up to the very end, and so I ask the House to salute the passing of Normandy veteran Cecil Newton, who as recently as last year came back to Lepe beach in New Forest East and read out the names of more than a hundred of his comrades in the Royal Dragoon Guards who were killed in the D-day landings and beyond. He was one of 6,000 troops who landed on Gold beach, having departed from Lepe beach. He was in an amphibious Sherman tank that made it to shore—not all of them did—and he survived being wounded in combat too, passing at the great age of 101. We have heard from many speakers about the connections between their constituencies and the military history of the second world war.”
“It is unusual for a terrorist group engaged in a civil war to invite retaliation of this sort by attacking international shipping so comprehensively. Clearly, the Houthis are acting as an agent of Iran. Can the Secretary of State advise us what the Government know about the ability of Iran to keep fuelling the attacks in the Red sea? Now that the domestic ability to manufacture drones in Yemen has been degraded, how easy will it be for Iran to supply them directly to the Houthis?”
“I commend what the Minister said at the outset on the need to insure against high-impact, low-probability events. In a non-dogmatic spirit, may I appeal to him to reconsider the way in which the Government are dealing with the question of the two shale gas wells, which they have decided, under normal circumstances, they do not wish to see exploited? Surely those wells should not be sealed so permanently that if we were in a wartime conflict situation they could not be reactivated?”
“As we need some oil and gas while on the road to a clean energy economy, does it not make sense to produce our own, rather than importing it from other countries and thus increasing the global carbon footprint?”
“I am sure the Government recognise that the strategic aim of this sort of terrorist atrocity is to provoke indiscriminate retaliation and undermine peaceful relations between neighbouring countries between which there may be some history of hostility. Will the Minister impress on the Indian Government the necessity of focusing on the actual perpetrators and not on the wider community, and will he impress on the Pakistani Government the importance, in good faith, of tracking down those responsible?”