Showing every spoken contribution, including 5,731 under 12 words. Hide short remarks

1. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

   Debate on the Address

   Madam Deputy Speaker, I am grateful to catch your eye in this important King’s Speech debate. I follow other colleagues in congratulating the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on their amusing and well-informed speeches. One of the few things that this Government have got right in the King’s Speech is the expedited Bill to nationalise Scunthorpe steelworks in order to safeguard domestic steel production. The plant is costing the taxpayer £1 million a day, and therefore modernisation and future private and public investment under a Government-owned company need to be implemented. However, our economy is in a very fragile state. It grew by only 1.3% in real terms in 2025, and the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that it will grow by only 1.4% in 2026—the lowest level of any G7 country. The United Kingdom is carrying one of the highest levels of borrowing in the western world. National debt is a staggering £2.9 trillion, which is equivalent to 93.8% of our entire GDP or £102,000 per household. Even more concerning is the fact that we are expected to spend—wait for it—£111 billion on debt interest alone to service that debt. If that were a Government Department, it would be the third largest. We are heavily reliant on international markets, and our national balance sheet is highly leveraged. That leaves our economy dangerously exposed to external shocks, such as the war in Iran and the Ukraine conflict. As a result, our borrowing premium on that debt is one of the highest in the OECD; today, we are paying more in debt interest than Greece. A 1% rise in interest rates adds £1.3 billion in costs in the first year, and £12 billion by the end of the forecast period, as new, expensive debt replaces older, cheaper debt. Indeed, yesterday, 30-year gilts hit a 28-year high at 5.81%. That gives a clue as to what the international markets think of our economic standing. On that note, I observe that one of the Labour leadership candidates does not have a clue how the bond market funding our enormous debt actually works. With inflation expected to rise again—some forecasters expect it to reach 6.7% next year—we face the very real risk of sliding into recession or a bond strike. If those very serious consequences were to occur, this country would be forced to take much more fundamental measures to cut our expenditure. A competent Government should already be doing so, to avoid any chance of this happening and to protect our reputation in the international markets. I note that the Government have included a Bill to reform the welfare system. The fact that 1 million people could work but do not is causing unacceptable tax increases on the rest of the hard-working population’s earnings. On top of that, higher interest rates are leading to higher food prices, higher mortgage payments and higher business costs. No one in this country—especially poorer working people—will be protected. Some of the issues we see today are avoidable. The current political instability is a major factor. It is not my job as an Opposition MP to tell Labour how to sort out its leadership problems, but whatever it does, it is important to convince the international community and the people of this country that there is a stable, well-thought-out economic policy and to give the markets confidence, in order to reduce the current borrowing premium. It is not the job of the Government to subsidise every business, but it is the duty of the Government to create conditions in which growth, prosperity, enterprise and investment can thrive. The Government have included a Bill to target youth unemployment, which is welcome, but the fact that it has risen by 16% or by 100,000 compared with a year ago makes it very hard for youngsters now leaving university or further education to start their careers. Meanwhile, businesses—particularly in hospitality and retail—are being taxed into oblivion and are not hiring as many people. In my North Cotswolds constituency, we employ 3,700 people in hospitality, and the sector provides £220 million to the local economy. However, higher employer national insurance contributions, rising minimum wages, hugely increasing business rates and energy price increases, exacerbated by the Employment Rights Act 2025, are all making it harder to make profits and are stalling growth. Taxes are already at a post-war high and there are threats to hike them further. None of this environment is encouraging businesses to hire and take on more people and so reduce the high unemployment figures.

   Hansard source
2. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

   Debate on the Address

   I do not think I could design a tax increase that was a bigger tax on jobs than the hike in national insurance. I totally agree with the hon. Lady, and I think it is tragic in particular for our young people trying to get into the world of work today. As Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, my focus is on value for money for the taxpayer and ensuring that no expenditure goes to waste. Figures published by the National Audit Office in its “Audit insights” report in January 2026 point to a deeply worrying picture. The Government now spend around £1.1 trillion of taxpayers’ money across 17 Departments. A Department’s accounts are qualified—sorry, this is getting a little technical, but I hope the House will bear with me a little in this section of my speech—when it does not spend its budget as Parliament intends. The Department for Work and Pensions has had its accounts qualified for 36 years because its fraud and error rate is 3.3%, costing the taxpayer a staggering £9 billion. Overall—this is even more staggering—the Government have written off close to £7 billion this year across Departments, including the Ministry of Defence writing off £1.5 billion purely on cancelled projects. I repeat: £7 billion has been written off this year from cancelled and wasted projects. That is staggering. The PAC has consistently recommended that each Department improves its digital and AI efficiencies. We believe that should be implemented from the top down, and that a chief digital and information officer should be appointed at a senior level in every Department and on arm’s length bodies. That would lead to efficiencies and savings. After all, every efficiency and every saving that can be made is more money to spend somewhere else. The public sector is constantly behind the private sector digitally, and we need to do much better to ensure that our public services actually deliver for taxpayers, using the latest and best technology to do so. AI is a tsunami that the Government are nowhere near prepared to deal with. I do not mean this as a criticism of the civil service—it is just how it is—but only 5% of the civil service have specific IT qualifications. Some experts say that needs to rise to 10%, which would be a massive transformation. The Government announced a Bill to reform the welfare system. This year alone, the Department for Work and Pensions budget is expected to reach a projected £333 billion, or around 23.7% of UK spending. That almost outweighs the income tax payments of £330 billion that we receive from hard-working people. Imagine that: the total amount of income tax from hard-working people almost does not pay for the bill for the Department of Work and Pensions. The pension and benefit budgets are ballooning, and that expenditure is only due to increase as we mercifully live longer and healthier lives. Somebody else mentioned that we are at risk of intergenerational unfairness. There is a risk that our children will be unable to pay off this increasing debt, yet this Government have failed to take back control of this skyrocketing budget. Instead, their Back Benchers refuse to support such changes, which would cost just £5 billion. Another issue that the PAC will be examining closely is the cost of Government compensation schemes, which over their lifetime are expected to exceed £102 billion, or just under what we pay in debt interest in any one year. The Government, of course, have a moral obligation to compensate citizens when the state makes serious mistakes, but we must do so in a fair, proportionate and non-litigious way. Finally, and most importantly, I want to turn to defence. The first absolute duty of any Government is to ensure that our nation is properly defended. The King’s Speech made a commitment to NATO and to a sustained increase in defence spending, yet the defence investment plan, promised from that Dispatch Box in June 2025 and in every month since then—alongside the strategic defence review—has still not been published. Until we have that plan, we cannot see how the Government propose to procure all the military equipment that is needed.

   Hansard source
3. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

   Debate on the Address

   If the hon. Gentleman is just a little patient, he will find that, two or three paragraphs down, I will address precisely that point. Currently, the defence budget for 2025-26 is £62.2 billion, which is a measly 18% of the welfare budget of £333 billion. The Government have pledged to increase it by 2.6%, or £9 billion, by 2027 and by 3% in the next Parliament, which means a further increase of £14 billion. But none of that new money has yet arrived.

   Hansard source
4. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

   Debate on the Address

   I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. As someone who worked under my right hon. Friend for Sutton Coldfield (Sir Andrew Mitchell) as a junior Opposition defence spokesman, I understand the value of overseas aid, and I particularly understand the elements of it that he describes as soft power. The other day the PAC conducted an inquiry about the BBC World Service, and I do wish that the Government would fund that service properly. It is an extremely well-respected element of Britain’s ability to project our values around the world, and it is very sad when the Chinese and the Russians come in as soon as we make cuts in it. At a time when the world is increasingly uncertain and bellicose, our MOD budget is in crisis, and as a result a significant number of procurement projects have been put on hold. These delays will have significant cost implications, so when, or if, the extra money does arrive, it will buy less and less equipment. I went to Ukraine earlier this year, and it is clear to me that we need more and more rockets, drones, interceptors, unmanned vehicles and investment in space. However, some of the proposed equipment is designed for yesterday’s wars, and it remains to be seen whether the MOD will be agile enough to make those substitutions in future procurement.

   Hansard source
5. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown

   Debate on the Address

   It may be pretty obvious to some, but it is not so obvious to others. To govern is to make difficult choices. In short, the Government are spending more than the country can afford, funded by ever-increasing amounts of debt. If we are serious about protecting our nation in an increasingly uncertain world, we must also be serious about the strength of our economy. That means bringing our unaffordable welfare bill under control, creating a stronger environment for growth, eliminating billions of pounds in waste—some of which I have identified in my speech, although if time had allowed I could have identified billions more—and reforming how government works through the rapid roll-out of digital reform. The civil service must be reoriented around productivity and efficiency. Only with a stronger, leaner and more resilient economy can we fund our defences, secure our future and meet the challenges ahead.

   Hansard source
6. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Andrew Mitchell

   Debate on the Address

   Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me a chance to contribute to this King’s Speech debate at such an early point. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas), and I want to express strong support for what he said about the determination of the Government and of the whole of Parliament to crack down on antisemitism. I hope that he will have carried everyone in this House in the words he used. It is also a great pleasure to congratulate the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on their brilliant speeches, which entertained and amused the House. The hon. Member for Harrow West said that it was an honour to be in the same party as both of them, but I think all of us can say that it is an honour to be in the same Parliament as both of them, and they certainly did very well. I have to admit that it is now 34 years since, in 1992, I had the privilege of seconding the Queen’s Speech from the Government Benches. On that occasion, I referred to myself as an “oily young man on the make”—[Official Report, 6 May 1992; Vol. 207, c. 56.] Those were the days! There are three points I wish to contribute briefly to the debate, all of which came off the doorsteps in the royal town of Sutton Coldfield during the recent elections, when I was listening carefully to my constituents—elections, incidentally, which were extremely successful for the Conservatives in the royal town of Sutton Coldfield, where we hold now all 10 seats on Birmingham city council, having got rid of the last vestiges of the Labour party in the royal town. That clean sweep in the royal town of Sutton Coldfield was not echoed across the city of Birmingham, where six significant parties are now represented on the council, making governance even more difficult than it was before. I urge those on the Treasury Bench, in particular the Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to be on red alert about what happens now in the city of Birmingham. They are, I think, going to need to give the commissioners far greater powers. Vulnerable people, old and young, depend on Birmingham city council turning a page and becoming a more effective giver of good local governance. The words of the Conservative leader of the Conservative group on Birmingham city council, Robert Alden, are important. He said that the group would try to “work with people across the political spectrum” to deliver these priorities. Birmingham has languished under a profoundly inadequate Labour administration, which even the Labour party nationally did not think was doing a proper job. It will now require a herculean effort of restraint and good will to deliver the governance that the people of Birmingham are entitled to receive. That will involve devolving more power locally. Governance is always best when it is closest to the people it seeks to serve, and certainly the royal town of Sutton Coldfield’s town council, under its outstanding leader Simon Ward, is ready for more devolution, which we think will make life better for local people. My second point is about defence, because although the words are in the King’s Speech, an awful lot more needs to be done. Ukraine and President Trump have ushered in a new era on defence—and, incidentally, thank goodness the last Conservative Government were so fast to realise, arm and train the Ukrainians ahead of and during the early days of the illegal invasion by Russia. The Prime Minister complains—he may or may not have some justice in doing so—that the armed forces have been hollowed out over many years by both parties. However, it is on his watch that these acute problems have come to pass. George Robertson, who was respected on both sides of the House over many years, has made clear that we must now rearm and increase our spending on defence, and I very much hope that the Government will provide far more urgency than they are providing at the moment to that cause. President Trump was not the first person to complain about Europe failing to pull its weight financially in NATO, but he is the first American President to take action. Britain needs to step up. We need to lead European NATO with France and Germany, but also with Poland and in co-operation with Ukraine, whose technology has redefined modern warfare. Australia and Canada are significantly increasing their spending, and I very much hope that the Government will now entertain far greater urgency in addressing these matters. I am pleased that Gordon Brown is now at the heart of this Labour Government. I hope he will explain the importance of soft power being the other side of the defence coin. Many hon. Ladies and Gentlemen on the Labour Benches are experts on defence, and they know that the Government made a terrible mistake in cutting further the amount that we spend on development. Development is a very important arrow in the defence quiver, and I very much hope that Gordon Brown will be able to explain to the Government why this is so important, and why they have made such a mistake. My third and final point is about welfare, which is now consuming every penny that we raise in income tax. We simply cannot go on like that. The Government always appear to be caught in the headlights whenever welfare is discussed. The last time they sought to tackle the issue, they were unable to carry their Back Benchers and they failed to do so. I submit that they failed because they tackled it in the wrong way. There are three rules of welfare reform, as I learned many years ago as a junior welfare Minister between 1995 and 1997 in John Major’s Government. That may have been 30 years ago, but the rules of welfare reform have not changed. It was the most complex of the various ministerial jobs that it was my privilege to undertake, and this is what I learned. First, we cannot take benefit money off poor people. It is not right to do so anyway, and as constituency Members of Parliament we know that it cannot be done. None of us came into politics to make poor people poorer. Taking money off the poorest people is not something that anyone who is planning to reform welfare should entertain. Secondly, the only way to save on welfare is to freeze benefits, although not disability benefits—something that I believe no Conservative Government have ever done. Freezing benefits can make a significant difference to the size of the budget.

   Hansard source
7. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Sir Andrew Mitchell

   Debate on the Address

   I am worried that the hon. Gentleman, who is my friend, was not listening to what I said. I said that the first rule of benefit reform is not to take cash off very poor people, and I explained that it cannot be done. That is what Labour found when it outlined its policies for welfare reform and then had to back off. The third rule is to narrow the gateways into a benefit. We have seen—particularly with the personal independence payment, but in other ways as well—that narrowing the gateways is an important aspect of any reform. I very much hope that the Government will return to the issue with a well-thought-through plan and will manage to carry people with them. Finally, the hon. Member for Harlow said in seconding the motion that this is a King’s Speech for young people. I hope that it is; I fear that it is not. We need to recognise that we are presiding over a period of growing intergenerational inequality, and this House must address it. I hope that the hon. Member’s point will inform the decisions that the Government make now.

   Hansard source
8. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Richard Fuller

   Debate on the Address

   That is a bit weird.

   Hansard source
9. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Richard Fuller

   Debate on the Address

   Finally, something we can agree on.

   Hansard source
10. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Ms Nusrat Ghani

    Debate on the Address

    Order. Let us start the Session as we mean to go on, with no “you” or “your”, because the hon. Member is not talking about me.

    Hansard source
11. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Mrs Kemi Badenoch

    Debate on the Address

    This King’s Speech is taking place against the most extraordinary backdrop. We knew that the carriages were booked, that the horses were ready and that the King was coming, but would we have a Prime Minister? It is such an honour to be the Leader of the Opposition who gets to respond today. May I start by congratulating the proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address on their excellent speeches? I also congratulate the Whips on finding two Back Benchers prepared to support the Prime Minister at this time. The hon. Member for Bradford West (Naz Shah) gave a moving and funny speech. I especially appreciated her comments about black and brown faces on TV—or, as my children say, “Oh look, it’s mummy again.” She only touched lightly on the fact that she is someone who has faced one of the most challenging childhoods imaginable, yet through the strength of her character, has made it to this place. She is made of tough stuff, and that is something we need more of in this House. Anyone who can boast of chewing up and spitting out George Galloway in an election is clearly formidable. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) on successfully delivering a humorous and warm-hearted speech. As he noted, he is my constituency neighbour. He ran the London marathon last month, raising money for the St Clare hospice, which cares for his constituents and mine, so I would like to take this opportunity to thank him for doing that. I have become a big fan of his after listening to his speech, especially as he was so generous in his comments about the Harlow Conservatives’ successful election campaign and my councillors’ outstanding work on regenerating the town centre. If things on his side of the House are getting a bit much, he would be very welcome to cross the Floor and help the Conservatives carry on that work. I think we can say that the proposer and seconder of the Loyal Address have upheld the best traditions of the House. I would of course like to pay tribute to His Majesty the King. His Majesty has served through a period of great personal difficulty, and throughout it he has exemplified the virtues of grace, dignity, humour, modesty and resolve in the face of adversity—virtues that were on full display during his hugely successful state visit to the United States. I am sure the whole House will have admired his skilful speech to Congress. It was a speech full of the wisdom and courage needed for our times. Of course, we would never have got to hear it if we had listened to some people in this House who called for the King’s visit to be cancelled—thank goodness no one listens to the leader of the Liberal Democrats. As for the Prime Minister, when he was young, he called for the end of the monarchy, so I am glad that the right hon. and learned Gentleman has seen the error of his ways, because previous King Charleses took a much dimmer view of that kind of thing. I am only sorry that this new-found appreciation of the monarchy and our country’s traditions has come too late, because this is the first parliamentary Session ever without the hereditary peers. Their departure will be keenly felt and our Parliament will be poorer for it, especially when we consider some of the people Labour has been replacing them with—people who have already had the Whip removed before they have even taken their seats. Mr Speaker, I know that the convention is for this to be a light-hearted debate, but as I have already said, this is a highly unusual moment. The Prime Minister is in office but not in power. Everyone is trying to pretend it is all right—it is not all right. In the past 48 hours, nearly 100 Labour MPs have called for the Prime Minister to resign. Four Ministers have quit. It is clear that his authority has gone and that he will not be able to deliver what little there is in this King’s Speech. This is a Government less than two years in office who have already run out of ideas and run out of road. So how did we get here? There is a great line in the musical “Hamilton”: “Winning is easy, governing is harder”. Everything that has gone wrong in Labour’s first two years comes back to one problem: it came into office with no plan. It did not understand the difference between winning an election and governing a country. It was very easy to make promises in opposition—promises to freeze council tax, promises to take £300 off energy bills, promises to the WASPI women. Hundreds of Labour MPs took photos with them to post on their Facebook pages, websites and election leaflets, but at no point did they bother to think how they would deliver any of it. Labour did not spend its time in opposition thinking deeply about the country’s problems. It assumed that governing in the 2020s would be like governing in the 1990s, but it is not. Britain is facing new structural problems. We have an ageing—[Interruption.] Labour Members all shout at me; I know they cannot wait to get back to their plotting, but it is quite important that we hear what is being said. We have an ageing population, a falling birth rate and a welfare bill that is spiralling out of control. We have an information revolution in the shape of AI that threatens to unravel the world of work as we know it, and the cost of energy is driving industry out of the country. Labour was taken by surprise that we are living in a more competitive and increasingly hostile world. Its manifesto was just a set of misleading promises. It promised no new taxes on working people—fail. It promised to crack down on illegal immigration—fail. It promised to tread more lightly on people’s lives—epic fail. It made promises without knowing how anything works. Let us look at housing. Just after Labour took office, when I was shadow Housing Secretary, I stood at this Dispatch Box and warned the former Deputy Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), that she had been stitched up and that the 1.5 million new homes Labour promised had been hung like a millstone around her neck. I knew the Government would not be able to meet that target, because they did not understand why more houses were not being built. Sure enough, they are already more than a third down on their target, and well behind what we delivered. Of course, in the end it was not 1.5 million homes that did for the former Deputy Prime Minister; it took just one flat in Brighton to bring her down. It is so obvious—[Interruption.] I know Labour Members don’t want to hear it. Look at them—they are so arrogant that they want to lead our country, but they cannot even lead a coup. It is so obvious that they cannot handle being in government. They hate the responsibility, and they hate having to take tough decisions. They prefer scratching the itches that they had in opposition: giving inflation-busting pay rises to the unions, with 28% for the doctors who, after nearly two years, are still striking, and handing out more benefits to the only people who will still vote for them, because Labour Members do not understand that poverty is created not by a lack of benefits but by a failing economy. We spent the last Session listening to Labour MPs telling us how great everything was going, and no doubt we will hear lots of grandstanding speeches this week, telling us what a fantastic job they did. How absurd, given the number of them demanding that the Prime Minister stands down. We counted, Mr Speaker, and there were 24 U-turns in that first parliamentary Session: winter fuel, family farms, grooming gangs, welfare reform, social media for under-16s, day one workers’ rights—the list goes on and on. Every single one of those U-turns had at its core a single issue: the Prime Minister’s total lack of judgment. This is a man who, faced with a crisis of vision, charisma and electoral success, sent for Gordon Brown. Leadership is about having a vision for this country, and the courage to take difficult decisions, persuading your party that those difficult decisions will pay off in time, and taking responsibility for your mistakes. The Prime Minister has failed on every count. We have had pillars, promises, four-point plans, five-point plans, missions, with none of it achieving anything—reset after reset after reset. Even if the Prime Minister lasts long enough in office for this Loyal Address to be delivered, the Bills announced today do not remotely come close to what the country needs—[Interruption.] Labour Members are chuntering, Mr Speaker, but not a single one of them dares to intervene on me. I welcome the Government’s ongoing support for Ukraine and their commitment to NATO. In this increasingly dangerous world, it is more important than ever that we stand with our allies in the fight against tyranny. I also commend the Government for their commitment to speed up the delivery of infrastructure such as new nuclear. Too many Governments have been frustrated in their attempts to deliver nuclear projects quickly, and we will support efforts to make the process simpler, faster and cheaper. I also want to be generous to the Home Secretary, because I see that she is trying to do something about illegal immigration. The elephant in the room is that she almost certainly will not be Home Secretary for much longer, and sadly, no one else in the Labour party looks remotely interested in bringing down illegal immigration. The rest of the offerings in the King’s Speech make it clear that Labour Members have learned no lessons from their mistakes in government so far. All we have is a load of reannounced policies: hounding our brave veterans through the courts; legislating for digital ID—a policy they told us they had dropped; and banning trail hunting, which is just more class war that makes no one’s life better. Scrapping NHS England is something the Prime Minister announced 14 months ago—but I suppose the Health Secretary has been a bit distracted lately, hasn’t he? [Interruption.] He’s chuntering now. Why don’t you just do your job? There is no point in him giving me dirty looks; we all know what he has been up to. Even worse is what is not in the Gracious Speech. There is no defence readiness Bill, because apparently it is not ready. Where are the plans for welfare reform? There are none, because Labour MPs have blocked them. Where is the plan to make savings? There isn’t one, because Labour Members do not know how to make savings; they only know how to spend money—other people’s money. Where is the plan to support businesses? There isn’t one, because they do not understand that it is business that creates growth, not Government. They have no answers on what really matters: the problems that must be solved to get Britain working again. I do feel very sorry for Labour Back Benchers. [Interruption.] It’s true—I do feel sorry for Labour Back Benchers. They arrived here not that long ago with such high hopes. Some of them, in fact, were so talented that they were made Ministers before ever speaking a word in Parliament. So talented! Although one of them has just resigned; I must not forget that. We have watched their growing horror, day after day and week after week, as this hope descended into total chaos; the dread as they are sent out yet again to defend the indefensible; the injustice of feeling like pariahs in their own constituencies—banned from pubs and banned from hairdressers, which is presumably why all the women on the Government Front Bench have the same hairstyle. We have seen the realisation that their legacy is just going to be—[Interruption.] They can complain as much as they like. I was not expecting this to be comfortable for them. They are the ones who are trying to unseat their Prime Minister; they should face that. We have seen the realisation that their legacy is just going to be breakfast clubs and Peter Mandelson. Labour MPs have been treated as disposable by their leadership: sacked for backing the two-child benefit cap, sacked for opposing welfare changes, sacked for supporting farmers. The Prime Minister then U-turned on all of them. It must be tough when you take a principled stand and have the Whip removed, only for the Government to confirm six months later that they agreed with you all along. It is no wonder that nearly 100 Labour MPs have now called for the Prime Minister to go. I know that there are another 100 who claim to be supporting him, although some of them did not even know that their name was on that list. When you can only get a quarter of your MPs to publicly back you, the game is up, so the starting gun for the Labour leadership contest has been fired. Let’s have a look at the runners and riders. We have the former Deputy Prime Minister—she is not here—who has giving up vaping but still has not paid her taxes. We have the Health Secretary, who accidentally sent his takeover plans to No. 10—almost as incompetent as leaving them on the photocopier. And we have the Mayor of Manchester, a self-proclaimed winner who has twice failed to win the Labour leadership, including against the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). As one Labour MP said about all the candidates in this race, and I quote: “We have to face up to the fact that every single one of them is”— I apologise, Mr Speaker— “f****** useless.” I do feel sorry for the poor Labour MPs who will now be subjected to months of peacocking by leadership candidates while the country is not being governed. I have some advice for whichever of them eventually takes over. Getting to No. 10 is not an award for being in a game show. This is not “Strictly Come Dancing” and, despite appearances, it is not “The Traitors” either. If you are a Housing Secretary who cannot work out her housing taxes, if you are a Health Secretary who can only cut waiting lists by deleting names from them, if you are Gordon Brown’s former Chief Secretary to the Treasury and you think the bond markets are a hoax, I can assure you that being Prime Minister is going to be a lot tougher. Too many have failed because they thought that winning an election or a leadership contest was the success, but it is not. The work does not end when you get the job; that is when it starts. It is absolutely preposterous that the Government are here laying out a programme as their Ministers are resigning and a large proportion of the Labour party is saying that the Prime Minister needs to go. The whole thing is totally illogical. Either Labour MPs agree with this agenda—in which case, why are they trying to get rid of the Prime Minister? Or they do not agree with this agenda—in which case, what on earth are we all doing here? It is time to be brutally honest. The country is angry with the entire political class—all of us here. They are not happy with how we have been doing politics. It is time to get serious.

    Hansard source
12. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Mrs Kemi Badenoch

    Debate on the Address

    Oh, I am not done yet; there is plenty more to come. The right hon. Lady says that she is getting a lecture, and she is. We are all getting a lecture, because we are legislators of the United Kingdom. We were sent here to fix difficult things, not to focus on our personal hobby horses, ranging from the petty to the puerile. Labour Members do not need to be scared of the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage)—I am not. He is not the cause of Britain’s problems—[Hon. Members: “You are!”] Labour Members are still delusional. I am sorry to puncture the bubble, but I am not here to pretend that what is happening is not happening. They can all pretend and live in la-la land, but I am going to speak the truth to them. The hon. Member for Clacton is not the cause of Britain’s problems; he is a symptom of the failure of the political class to focus on what matters. If you fix the problems that people care about, he goes away.

    Hansard source
13. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Mrs Kemi Badenoch

    Debate on the Address

    That was a nice try, but it is not going to work. You cannot solve the problems of the country unless you have a plan to fix the civil service, the regulators, the legislative straitjacket and the powers transferred from Parliament to the courts. Unless you fix the structures of Government, everyone will continue to fail. Britain is not ungovernable and it is not broken. The right hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) asked what the plan was. We have published an alternative King’s Speech, and the reason is that we need to take tough decisions to get the country out of the mess we are in by cutting wasteful spending, funding defence, securing our borders and reducing the cost of energy. If you want to bring down bills for families and bring industry back to this country, you need a plan to scrap the net zero legislation that is strangling industry and making energy costs higher. That is why we are proposing a cheap energy Bill to do just that. If you want businesses to employ people, you need to stop crushing them with thousands of pages of employment laws and stop handing power to the unions. You need to stop hammering businesses with tax rises. That is why we are proposing a get Britain working Bill, which would scrap laws that are no longer fit for purpose and are killing jobs. If you want to get a grip on illegal immigration and remove foreign criminals from the country, you must have a plan to leave the European convention on human rights and repeal the Human Rights Act. Efforts to get control of our borders have been frustrated because power has been taken out of the hands of Ministers. We need to bring that power back, so that we do not have murderers staying in our country because the courts stop us from deporting them. Our alternative King’s Speech shows how it can be done, letting the Government, not the courts, decide who comes and goes. Prime Ministers are going to keep running into problems until they deal with activist lawyers and international agreements that tie the Government’s hands against the interests of the British public. [Interruption.] Labour Members are chuntering that this is “boring.” Does someone want to stand up and tell us who they are supporting: the plotters or the PM? I know that is what they really want to get to. They are not interested in hearing what the plan for the country should be, because they are too focused on Labour party problems. Next, we must reduce welfare spending, which is eating every penny that we generate in income tax and more. We must spend much more on defence. Even former Labour Defence Secretaries are pleading with the Government to do so. That is why we are proposing a sovereign defence fund that will overhaul Britain’s defence industrial base. That is what the alternative could be. The alternative King’s Speech makes difficult choices, because that is what leadership is. We have laid out these plans now because we are more than happy for Labour to take them; they might be our political opponents, but we are all citizens of this country. We recognise the enormous challenges facing Britain. We want to see those problems solved, and so do our constituents. Time and again, I have offered the Prime Minister support to pass difficult legislation. Time and again, he has turned it down. It might be too late for him now, but it is not too late for his successor. It is time to get serious—it is time to deliver. That is what the British public expect, and it is what the Conservative party will do.

    Hansard source
14. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Mr Mark Francois

    Debate on the Address

    On that point, will the Prime Minister give way?

    Hansard source
15. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Mr Mark Francois

    Debate on the Address

    The Prime Minister will know that in the recent Supreme Court Dillon judgment the Court ruled that the Conservatives’ Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 overwhelmingly was not incompatible with the Human Rights Act—he knows that. He referenced the awful events in Golders Green, rightfully, and he defended the police officers against attacks and the leader of the Green party, rightfully, and said that they had to take split-second decisions. If Northern Ireland veterans had to take split-second decisions to uphold the rule of law in Northern Ireland, what is the difference?

    Hansard source
16. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Martin Vickers

    Debate on the Address

    It is a pleasure to take part in this King’s Speech debate. I join with others in congratulating the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince) on the way they spoke earlier. I want to focus in particular on the proposals to nationalise British Steel. My constituency takes in a part of the Scunthorpe steelworks site. Many hundreds of my constituents work in the industry, with many more working in the supply chain. It is worth noting that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government estimates that closure of the steelworks could equate to a loss in economic output in northern Lincolnshire of £802 million over the next five years. As a Conservative, it is not natural for me to speak in favour of nationalisation; it is somewhat uncomfortable in many respects. However, the present situation—Jingye still owns the site, but Ministers and appointed officials manage it—is clearly not sustainable, and it is difficult to see any other alternative in the short term. The hon. Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) spoke about the privatisations of the Thatcher years, and it is certainly the case that some of them need refining; certainly they need better regulating. It is worth noting, however, that for 13 years, between 1997 and 2010, the Labour party was in power and could have done something about those privatised companies. I think the big fault with the privatisation process was not the actual process initially, but what followed, with many companies now in foreign ownership and poorly regulated. I want to comment on the EU reset that was proposed in the speech. I am an ardent Brexiteer. I am old enough to have voted to leave the EU—or the common market as it was then—in 1975, so my credentials in that respect are pretty good. I have no objection in principle to resetting our arrangements with Europe; clearly, we need to trade with Europe and we need good working relationships there. However, I would just warn Government Members that EU procurement rules and over-regulation will not be helpful to much of our industry. If we are to remain a manufacturing nation—I share the view held by Members across the House that that should be the case—we need a domestic steel industry. As I have said in the House on previous occasions when we have discussed the steel industry, if we are going to maintain a domestic steel sector, which we must, there will be a cost to the taxpayer. Whether that is through subsidy or through nationalisation, the cost will certainly be there. Scunthorpe thrives on the steelworks; as I have mentioned, 3,000 to 4,000 people work there, and many more work in the supply chain. Although I was born in Cleethorpes, I moved to Grimsby at the age of five, when my parents were allocated a council house, which they thought, quite rightly, was magnificent. In Grimsby, I lived through the decline of the deep-sea fishing industry, which means I am very aware of how such a decline can affect a town and its people. I subsequently went to work as the constituency agent for the current Father of the House in Gainsborough, which was in a similar situation at that time; the two big engineering companies had closed, and the inevitable downturn resulted. I do not want that to be repeated in Scunthorpe and the surrounding area. I am grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, the hon. Member for Stockton North (Chris McDonald), for contacting me on Monday and going through the proposals. I hope that when Ministers wind up these debates, they will give an assurance not only that the Government are committed to the steel industry, but that they will ensure that the blast furnaces now in Scunthorpe remain operational until electric arc furnaces are up and running. I will move on to one or two other items. We heard from the hon. Member for Newport West and Islwyn (Ruth Jones) that the Great British Railways Bill will transform the railway network. I suggest that transformation will cost money and that taking the private sector out of the railway industry will mean the taxpayer has to find yet more money, which may well result from Government borrowing. The other hit that my local economy has taken recently has been the closure of the Prax Lindsey oil refinery at Killingholme, near Immingham. That, again, has led to the local economy taking a really serious hit in recent months. We have heard oil mentioned today. I urge the Government to look again at the licences for the North sea. I would also like to talk about local government, as I see no mention in the King’s Speech of how we are going to improve local government services. I was a councillor for 26 years; I worked for 14 of those years on Grimsby borough council, which was in the two-tier system, followed by another 12 years at the North East Lincolnshire unitary authority. I support the changes to unitary authorities as a gradual process, but I suggest to the Government that local government reform as it is proceeding at the moment is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—it is not dealing with the serious business of the services that local government provides. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) spoke earlier about basic council services—cutting grass, maintaining parks and libraries, and the like. I see no way in which this is likely to change. If we are to create a vision and make people want to be part of their local communities to a much greater extent, local authorities can play a major part in doing that, but they need resources. I remember the days when even the lamp posts in Grimsby had the coat of arms on them. Now we have street furniture all over the place, but it is just basic grey steel. The place begins to look a mess. If we are going to tidy up our towns and improve the public realm, it is vital that local authorities have resources, but I do not see the Government looking seriously at ways to improve that.

    Hansard source
17. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Lincoln Jopp

    Debate on the Address

    The Prime Minister has used a lot of words about the defence investment plan. I think it was due in the autumn of last year, so when is he going to sign it?

    Hansard source
18. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Jerome Mayhew

    Debate on the Address

    Madam Deputy Speaker, you do not need me to tell you that this is a deeply unhappy Government. It is a deeply unhappy party sitting on the Government Benches, and Labour Members do not appear to understand that their core problem is a lack of economic growth. If the Labour Government were presiding over fast economic growth, the taxes would come rolling in, their ability to spend on their pet welfare projects would be unlimited, and they would be riding high in the polls. They used to know that. When they came into office, they said that their No. 1 mission was to deliver economic growth, yet what we have seen in the two years since is the most appalling example of a fundamental misunderstanding of how an economy works. Instead of bringing in policies to increase economic growth, we have entered into the depressing doom loop of increased taxes to fund increased welfare, leading directly to reduced economic activity, which leads to increased welfare needs and therefore an increased need for tax rises. We need a leader and a Government who have a plan, not just words, to support economic growth—something that reverses the welfare taxation doom loop. And what do we have in the King’s Speech? Where is the welfare reform bill? It is an appalling statistic that we now spend more on welfare than we recover in income tax. Four million adults receive PIP—the figure has gone up by half a million since the last general election. The Centre for Social Justice came out with a really terrifying argument the other day: according to its analysis, 25% of all full-time workers would be better off receiving benefits than they are in employment—a quarter of the working population. Yet, in this King’s Speech, there is nothing to fix the relationship between welfare and the productive economy.

    Hansard source
19. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Jerome Mayhew

    Debate on the Address

    I will just deliver this point and then give way. We have the extraordinarily named “regulating for growth Bill”, which I think is oxymoronic—or perhaps just moronic—because it seems to me that the Government’s answer to anaemic growth is more regulation. We will also have “more Europe”, according to the Prime Minister.

    Hansard source
20. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Jerome Mayhew

    Debate on the Address

    I said I would give way to the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed).

    Hansard source
21. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Jerome Mayhew

    Debate on the Address

    The hon. Gentleman will acknowledge that the previous Government absolutely did take action to reduce the welfare state, although the global crisis caused by covid knocked that back a bit. The shadow Chancellor, in his previous role as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was bringing in wide-scale reform, which would have been effective, but it was cut short by the general election. So this was a long-term project for the Conservative Government, but it has gone into reverse as a result of the Labour Administration. If there is one message that the election results last week should have transmitted loud and clear to all of us, it is that the country is frustrated. People feel that we are bogged down in bureaucracy, with Ministers announcing plans and then nothing happens, but it costs a fortune and takes forever, with costs spiralling. So where was the “reducing bureaucracy Bill” that would unlock the power of the state to actually get things moving? We heard the Leader of the Opposition, in her powerful response to the Gracious Address, setting out the plans of a Conservative Administration, yet without such a bureaucracy-busting Bill, this Government are doomed to failure, even on their own terms. For that matter, without cheaper energy, manufacturing in the United Kingdom is also doomed to failure. Commercial energy in the UK is now the highest in the world, which is a sobering fact, and domestic energy is the second highest in the developed world. So Labour Members cannot be surprised when we have a decline in manufacturing if its energy, which is its primary input, is the highest in the world. It is higher not because it costs us more to produce energy in this country than elsewhere, but because of deliberate taxation and levy decisions taken by the Government. The Government have taxes and levies on electricity to subsidise expensive renewables. Where is the cheap energy Bill? They have done the opposite. The Labour Government have doubled down on their renewable levies, tying this country into the world’s most expensive energy for decades to come. Let us look at the wider economy. The high street has been hammered by Labour, whether from the business rates revaluation, the removal of the hospitality and leisure exemption, or employer national insurance contributions. Pubs and shops right across the country—not just in my constituency, but in every one of the Labour Members’ constituencies—have been closing in record numbers. So where is our “bring back the high street Bill”? It is not there. In fact, there is no coherent plan for a stronger economy and a stronger country. Instead, the King’s Speech is just a hotchpotch—bureaucratic fiddling while the Prime Minister burns. The Government have had two years—two years already—yet the Opposition are doing more serious thinking about solving the problems of this country than the Government, with all their resources, which is shaming. [Laughter.] Labour Members should not be laughing; they should be ashamed of themselves and of their Government, given that the Opposition have a more complete King’s Speech, with more complete answers to the problems of this country, than their Government seem able to bring forward. It is extraordinary that we have this weak legislative programme from a weak Government. The country deserves so much better.

    Hansard source
22. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Dr Ben Spencer

    Debate on the Address

    I pay tribute to the opening speeches from the hon. Members for Bradford West (Naz Shah) and for Harlow (Chris Vince). However, context is key. The backdrop to the Gracious Speech is a Labour party engaged in open warfare—we heard something of that in earlier speeches—and a huge amount of uncertainty over what will happen in relation to the leadership of the Labour party and the current Prime Minister, and that uncertainty is playing out in the financial markets. The message that I want to convey to Labour Members is this: “Whatever you are going to do, please just do it quickly, because we need to move on.” The country needs leadership, and there are a great many important things that we need to be getting on with. As Labour Members are mulling over their options, I want to give the House some feedback from my constituency on a couple of issues affecting its residents. The message from the constituency is that small and medium enterprise is the backbone of our economy, but it is now under intolerable pressure. Let me give a couple of examples. I received a letter from One Cobham—a business improvement district covering Cobham, in my constituency—which was co-signed by 50 other BID members, that raised the issue of business rates in particular, but also rises in rent, wages and utility costs. Two companies have already gone bust recently, and this is putting intolerable pressure on the high street and individual businesses.

    Hansard source
23. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Dr Ben Spencer

    Debate on the Address

    In a different world, we would have a very different King’s Speech. We would have the alternative Conservative King’s Speech from the Leader of the Opposition—soon, hopefully, to be the Prime Minister—which would scrap business rates for those with rateable values of up to, I think, £110,000. I ask Members please to look at the details. In recent weeks, I have visited another company, in Egham in the north of my constituency. It is a very specialist logistics company, which transports medical devices to be used in pathology investigations. In fact, it has probably supplied the pathology department at St Tommy’s across the river. The company has been operating for 40 years, but when I met its representatives, they told me that it faced going to the wall because of the increases in business rates and tax burdens. I hope to God that the company will be OK—that the Government will change course and that it continues to be successful—but if it does go to the wall, all the jobs and livelihoods of the people who work for it will go with it. That is a story that affects businesses and organisations across my constituency. In Chertsey, Addlestone, Weybridge, Woodham, Row Town, New Haw, Oxshott and Stoke D’Abernon—in all the different parts of my constituency —businesses are struggling, and free enterprise is under pressure. It is dying, and it is dying because of the tax and regulatory burdens that are being imposed on businesses by this Government. For all the great words in the King’s Speech, the fundamental problem is the Government’s tax and spend approach and the intolerable pressure that is being placed on free enterprise and business. This is my final message to Labour Members: “As you agonise over the direction of the Labour party leadership over the next few days, please just remember that you cannot tax a company that has gone bust.”

    Hansard source
24. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Reed

    New Developments: Unadopted Roads and Public Amenities

    I thank the hon. Gentleman for bringing this important topic to the Chamber. We have had a great deal of development in my constituency, and we are seeing these issues play out in places like Cranbrook, Pinhoe and Lympstone. In Cranbrook, no grit bins were provided during the cold weather at the end of last year because the roads were unadopted. Local councillors were sloping their shoulders and the developers would not do anything. Local people were falling over and injuring themselves. In more extreme cases—this has been alluded to already, but I will not name the developments—people have not been able to sell their houses because the utility companies, councils and local people cannot agree on where things need to go. What more can be done to make the various groups accountable? What in today’s King’s Speech does the hon. Gentleman think will drive legislative changes to improve the situation?

    Hansard source
25. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Reed

    New Developments: Unadopted Roads and Public Amenities

    Like many other Members, I am exhausted by dealing with the Liberal Democrats on East Devon district council and Devon county council. They seem completely unaccountable, so can I ask the Ministers directly what can be done to make local government more accountable for the adoptions of roads?

    Hansard source
26. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    The Prime Minister quite rightly prioritises the defence of the country. We have depended for decades on the courage, honour and loyalty of our soldiers. However, some of our best units are now losing soldiers, because this Government are undermining them and allowing them, under the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, to be prosecuted and persecuted for alleged crimes—that were not carried out—from decades ago.

    Hansard source
27. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    That is pretty obvious.

    Hansard source
28. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    During the privileges debate, I told the House that I had hoped, a couple of years ago, that the Prime Minister would make a success of his new job. Unfortunately, this House is now debating against the backdrop of a Labour psychodrama, but that psychodrama would not have happened except for the fact that the Government have failed, and failed very clearly. In his now infamous speech, the Prime Minister said that he was going to undertake a reset. I don’t know about the Labour party, but the country certainly needs a reset. What he said, in describing his reset, was that he needed to “explain” things better. That is not a reset; that is a re-spin of what they are doing. We need a proper reset. The hon. Member for Hornsey and Friern Barnet (Catherine West) was exactly right when she said that Labour must be “judged on actions and not just our words”. As a number of people have said, including the new leader of the SNP group, the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens (Dave Doogan), Labour came into office promising that its No. 1 mission was economic growth. It was right to do so, because without growth we do not have the money to do anything else, yet the consequences of its own policies in the last couple of years have been that growth has been suppressed. The IMF has literally just reduced the UK’s growth forecast by half a percentage point. That is the largest reduction in the G7. It is not just the Opposition who are concerned about growth. I recommend that the House reads the Labour Growth Group report called, “An Honest Day”, which is aimed directly at this problem. While I do not agree with everything in it, there are a lot of good ideas that the Government should have already taken on. When Labour took over, inflation was bang on 2%—that is something it cannot claim was disguised in any way—and now it is 3.3%. Again, Labour and the Prime Minister will try to blame somebody else, and no doubt at the moment the blame is on the strait of Hormuz. That explains energy costs in the future; it does not explain the increases in food costs in the past, or indeed a number of other costs.

    Hansard source
29. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    No, not for the moment. Neither does it explain the increase in borrowing costs, which are higher than any other G7 country’s and virtually double Japan’s. That is nobody’s fault but the Chancellor’s, and the horrific consequences for our public finances have been laid out already by the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). The real brake is Labour’s own policies: high taxes, massively burdensome regulation, high business rates and high energy costs. What on earth do we expect from our businesses when we saddle the country with the most expensive energy in the developed world, or indeed with the national insurance increases that the hon. Member for Angus and Perthshire Glens mentioned?

    Hansard source
30. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    It is interesting, because the hon. Member’s Government and his Secretary of State have claimed, “All these green policies are reducing the cost of our energy. Not using oil and gas is reducing the cost of energy.” What is the consequence? The highest energy costs in the world. I will be interested to hear if he can explain that when he makes his speech. The other issue is that growth, or the loss of growth, has a material impact on the public finances. To give the House a measure of that, a 1% change in the growth rate is £10 billion to £11 billion in the first year and then more money in the consequential years, so when we lose that growth, we lose that amount of money. But even if we imagine that we could get that growth back, it still would not be enough. It would not be enough to pay the bills that we need to pay. So what can we do? I am afraid that, because of the size of the debt, we have no choice but to cut welfare costs. I am a great believer in our welfare system, but it should be a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. People who can work should work, and the public have little sympathy for those who choose benefits over a job. It is true today, and it has been true since I was a child on a council estate, that the British working class, who Labour used to think of as its own voters, hate it when they see one of their neighbours choosing to sit at home spending the taxes that they have earned. Low growth handicaps our ability to solve our citizens’ problems.

    Hansard source
31. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    I think the answer to the question is, “No, it didn’t,” but the hon. Member should be aware that it was only two months ago that a Labour Member described me as the MP who is never knowingly on message, which is a label I espouse—I do not mind that. No Government have got this right. We need a welfare system that looks after the disabled and people who have no choice about what they are suffering, but not one that makes it an even choice to be on the dole or in a job.

    Hansard source
32. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    I will be careful how I answer the right hon. Member because I have an interest to declare here: I have a disabled grandchild, and her mother is one of the people who suffers the stress he talked about. As I say, we need a humane system that deals with people properly. Our current system for supporting disabled people and people looking after disabled people is incredibly bureaucratic, unpleasant and nasty to deal with. That is not the area of welfare that we need to deal with; it is principally the area of employment that we need to deal with. We want to get people back to work, because there is no better way out of poverty than employment, rather than, as it were, being on the dole. To come back to the thrust of my argument, what is it that we are talking about paying for? I will pick three issues—I could pick any number, but the top three issues that matter to my constituents are healthcare, education and defence. Our health service needs radical reform. I know we have a Bill in this King’s Speech, but it does not look to me like it will have a sufficiently radical impact. For some reason, we do not actually speak enough about the fundamental aims of our health service. Healthcare must be free at the point of delivery—that is an absolute—but it also must do its job of saving lives, and we turn our face away from that too often. Too many Britons are dying early and avoidably under a system that swallows money without delivering the outcomes. Every year, 125,000 deaths are listed officially as avoidable, and the situation has worsened in recent years. It went from 129 deaths per 100,000 people to 156 in the course of a decade. That is a huge increase and, as a result, we have an avoidable death rate that is higher than all our comparator nations. I am not just talking about rich nations like Japan; we are even worse off than countries like Portugal that are much poorer than we are. It is an extraordinary problem that we have to face.

    Hansard source
33. 13 May 2026·Parliament·David Davis

    Debate on the Address

    That is absolutely right. My concern is that the reason we have so many excess deaths is not poor doctors or poor nurses, but poor management. We have really, really poor national health service management. To put it starkly, poor management effectively kills 15,000 people a year. If we improved that number, we could get within range of our comparator nations. That is a huge number of people, and we could do quite a lot about it if we set our mind to it. Experiments within the health service now demonstrate that. Just over the river at St Thomas’, a high intensity theatre programme triples the number of people who can be put through an operating theatre or under the hands of one surgeon in a day. That means we can do something like 17 hernia repairs rather than five, or 12 hip replacements instead of four—those are the numbers they measured. A lot of lives are saved rather than lost, because people are put through the system and are not effectively left waiting until they die, as has happened to a number of my constituents. We need to reflect that efficiency in the management of the health service. It requires a complete change in how we select, train and organise the senior management of the national health service. For the moment, they are not up to the job and we need to put that right, but I do not see anything in the King’s Speech that will do that. My second point is about education. A number of speakers have already said that there is an intergenerational problem in our society today, and education is where that crystalises. We are failing both very young children and young adults. Evidence shows that one in four children are not sufficiently literate or mathematically capable by the age of 11 to get any benefit from the next stage of education. To put it another way, the state has failed a quarter of our children by the time they get to 11. For poor children—those on free school meals and so on—we can double that number; in fact, we can more than double it. When I grew up, I was lucky to be at the peak of social mobility in this country. This was one of the world’s leading meritocracies, but that is no longer the case. That is a shame on our nation and we must put it right, starting at the bottom. We must do something about it, and we can. Uniquely, using AI and software, we can do quite a lot to help children at the bottom of the scale, but we do not currently do that, and the Department for Education is not up to it. It is not under this Government and it was not under the preceding one—I spoke about this at the time, and we need to put it right. It is not just the very young who we are letting down; a whole generation in higher education is being failed. The transition to student loans and tuition fees by the Blair Government has been an unmitigated disaster, shackling a whole generation to mortgages without houses and futures without jobs. I opposed it when it came in, I opposed my party’s decision to uphold it when we came into government, and I oppose it today. It takes away much of the point of university, because at least one in five courses do not give youngsters opportunities that will pay for their education. That means that we have to write off their loans, and in the next 50 years, the Government—the state—will pay £430 billion in unpaid loans in cash terms. From what I have seen of the calculations, I am pretty sure that that is an underestimate. In my view, we should revise the whole policy radically, and perhaps look again at grants for certain courses—I think the Liberals have talked about this—with a 2% graduate tax to offset it, or something like that. That is better than what we have now, which leaves a loan hanging over people for their entire adult life—a loan they may never pay back. We could have grants for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, architecture and design—courses that will contribute to the economic growth of this country—and take the rest from there. We need radical reform, but we will not see it in this year’s education Bill. Finally, I want to talk briefly about defence. There has been much criticism of the Government, rightly, for taking too long over enlarging the expenditure we put into defence, and the simple truth is that we will face challenges that will materialise much faster than we expect. The hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) spoke in an earlier question about peace being better than war, and since Roman times we have known that being well armed is the best way to prevent war. Nobody wants warfare. At the moment, our military is depleted beyond value and would struggle in a major war, and obviously we must address that. In addition, we must ensure that our strategy and management are right. Frankly, the management of the Ministry of Defence is a disgrace—to be honest, I cannot pick a better word. I always think that it is symbolic of the extraordinary priorities of the MOD that we have 134 admirals to oversee 63 ships, many of which are not able to set sail at any point in time—Nelson must be spinning in his grave. That is symbolic, but similarly the UK currently maintains an Army of just over 70,000 people, and the Ministry of Defence employs roughly 60,000 civil servants—a ratio that defies logic. Of those civil servants, just under a quarter are employed in procurement, operating a system that is among the worst in the world. If hon. Members need to, they should look at the Dragon, the Type 45 ships, or the Ajax. If the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee were sitting here now, he could get up and given me a dozen cases of disgraceful scandals in procurement in our Ministry of Defence, and we need to put that right. If we are to maintain effective armed forces, we must also maintain the morale and spirit of our soldiers. The simple truth is that the first step towards that is to treat those soldiers decently, and we are not doing that. The Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, which has been carried over into this Session, is exposing soldiers who fought in Northern Ireland to being dragged through the courts, sometimes three times over the course of five years, as with Soldier B in the Coagh case. They are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Honourable people who fought bravely for their country and did nothing wrong are being punished in their old age. That is a disgrace. The excuse that the Government used when they started the Bill was that the previous legislation was illegal—that is what a lower court found. Last week, however, the Supreme Court overturned that judgment in the Dillon case. There is now no legal basis for the Government’s policy, yet still we are pressing on. I asked the Prime Minister, and he said that they are still pressing on with it, effectively psychologically torturing people who served this country. That is morally wrong, but moreover it is causing people to leave the SAS in numbers—this is now in the public domain and I can say it. Our best and most active regiment is being depleted and destroyed. The regiment of which the rest of the world is envious is being undermined by the Government’s strategy, and they should walk away from that policy and drop it. We should bin that Bill. I do not want to take any more of the House’s time. I have picked three subjects, but there are many other important issues that the Government need to address. I say again that I hope the Prime Minister succeeds in resetting the Government and giving them new dynamism. At the moment, however, the only attractive part of the King’s Speech for me was the last line, which always says the same thing: “Other measures will be laid before you.”

    Hansard source
34. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Caroline Nokes

    Debate on the Address

    I call Liz Saville Roberts.

    Hansard source
35. 13 May 2026·Parliament·Caroline Nokes

    Debate on the Address

    Order. The hon. Lady might like to consider withdrawing the comment “false promises”, because I think she is suggesting falsehoods from the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage).

    Hansard source
36. 29 Apr 2026·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

    Engagements

    Q5. In an earlier answer, the Prime Minister made it clear that he understands that global uncertainty makes national economic resilience ever more important, and that energy security and food security are central to that, so why is policy making one the enemy of the other? Twelve per cent. of our most fertile and productive land—for the food that we need to feed the nation—is being eaten up by giant industrial developments, including pylons with the accompanying infrastructure and huge solar developments. Will the Prime Minister meet me and colleagues who feel similarly? By corroding Britain’s food security now, we risk compromising our nation’s future.

    Hansard source
37. 29 Apr 2026·Parliament·Sir Jeremy Wright

    Engagements

    Q7. Many of us across this House worked hard to pass the Online Safety Act 2023, not because we thought it would be the last word on online safety, but because we believed it was an important step forward in making online platforms more accountable for the content on their services and for the algorithms that curate it. Can the Prime Minister reassure us that whatever his Government decide to do to restrict our young people’s access to social media will not be used as cover by social media companies to do less themselves to keep young people safer online?

    Hansard source
38. 29 Apr 2026·Parliament·Sir Jeremy Hunt

    Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners

    I beg to move, That this House has considered the impact of the Community Infrastructure Levy on private homeowners. Thank you, Mr Turner, for presiding over this debate on an issue that is having profound life-changing consequences for ordinary families across the country. I also thank the Minister for his interest in the issue. Politics can be very tribal, but I have already met him twice to discuss it, both times with Councillor Jane Austin from my constituency—once in July last year and once in December last year, alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford). I know he wants to solve the issue. The community infrastructure levy, or CIL, was introduced for the best of reasons: to ensure that commercial developers contribute towards the cost of the infrastructure needed as a result of their developments. It was never intended as an extra tax on people doing home extensions, and certainly never as a retrospective tax that people are landed with unexpectedly after the event. Most councils understand that, but one or two have ruthlessly exploited loopholes that allow them to punish homeowners, including Lib Dem-run Waverley in my constituency, which charges over £550 per square metre, one of the highest in the country. But it is not just there. This morning, I heard about a case in Sevenoaks, where the district council pursued a stay-at-home mother relentlessly, in a case championed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott). For many families the consequences have been devastating. Some have been forced to sell or remortgage their homes, and the financial burden, alongside the stress and uncertainty, has been immense. Some have fought their councils for years, hitting brick walls at every turn. I am aware of 15 families in Waverley alone who faced unexpected charges, ranging from £26,000 to £235,000. There are now more than 100 known other cases across the country. Here are some examples: Steve Dally and his wife Caroline have been forced to remortgage their home to pay a £70,000 CIL charge on a home extension in Godalming. As they explained to me and local councillor Jane Austin, they are not developers; they simply extended their home. They hit a brick wall when they challenged Waverley and had to risk additional penalties and compounded interest in the process. Another Godalming couple were hit with a £70,000 bill because they were living in rented accommodation while their home was being renovated. In Milford in my constituency, a homeowner was forced to pay a £120,000 CIL bill when forced to submit a retrospective planning application because two walls of his existing home fell down. For failing to give notice of the walls falling down he was charged £2,500 in penalties because he had failed to submit a commencement notice, something he had never heard of. Enton resident Helen Grant reluctantly settled a £56,000 CIL charge on the family home, only to be sent a bill for a further £3,000 in interest charges when the council reviewed her case, which had already been closed. It is not just Waverley; I pay tribute to the CIL Injustice Group, which operates across the whole country. Many of its members are watching from the Gallery today, including people from Wokingham, Tonbridge and Devon.

    Hansard source
39. 29 Apr 2026·Parliament·Sir Jeremy Hunt

    Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners

    I thank the hon. Member; he always makes very thoughtful contributions. He makes two very important points. The first is that we do need developers to contribute towards infrastructure costs. The risk of the appalling injustice that I am drawing attention to today is that we lose social consent for very important contributions that enable much-needed infrastructure to be built. Secondly, he is absolutely right to say that not having CIL at all would be very bad. In my area in particular, there is constant concern about the lack of infrastructure to keep pace with new housing developments. I want to return to the CIL Injustice Group, because their accounts are extremely concerning. Some are nervous about dealing with their council because of the bad way they are treated. Others spend thousands of pounds on legal fees, often unsuccessfully. Part of the issue is that CIL is an extraordinarily complex process. Forms must be filled in in the correct order and are subject to strict timetables. Even professionals struggle. It is very unforgiving if someone gets it wrong. They have to pay within 90 days, under threat of seizure of assets and imprisonment, and if they do not comply, they get slammed with thousands of pounds in late charges and interest on top of that. There is effectively no right of appeal, and most importantly, there is no ability to correct errors. Ordinary homeowners inevitably do make errors, but there is no latitude in the system to allow them to correct those errors.

    Hansard source
40. 29 Apr 2026·Parliament·Sir Jeremy Hunt

    Community Infrastructure Levy: Homeowners

    The hon. Member is absolutely right, and he is foreshadowing what I will propose as one of the solutions to this issue: that homeowners should be excluded from the potential ambit of CIL altogether, because that was not its intention. It is a loophole that is being exploited, and I hope to explain why some councils have been so keen to exploit that loophole. We need to remove the root cause if we are going to deal with this issue.

    Hansard source