5,804 spoken contributions under 12 words (interjections such as “Will the hon. Member give way?”) are hidden. Show them

1. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   Joseph Chamberlain, one of my great political heroes, said that in “great deeds, something abides”. Perhaps the greatest deed of my parliamentary lifetime was our decision to leave the European Union, made greater still by the fact that it was a decision taken by the British people against the advice of most of their political leaders from across the spectrum. Suddenly the people spoke—and they spoke clearly—about their intentions, contradicting the long-standing prejudices of most of the British establishment. What endures of that deed is our right to self-government, which lies at the heart of our short debate today. It is the affirmation of parliamentary sovereignty. That matters, as we all know, because our legitimacy is afforded to us by the choice that people make to send us here, and the fact that we are answerable to them in a way that those who exercise power in the European Union are not—they have never been directly accountable. It is true that we elected MEPs, but almost no one knew who they were. I did not know who the Tory MEPs were, let alone those from other parties. Former MEPs will often say that they had little contact with the people in their constituencies and that their postbag overall was a fraction of what we receive in a single week, let alone over a longer period. Interaction is at the heart of the legitimacy that I have just described, but with MEPs it just was not there. Of course, much of the governance of the European Union was not done by people who had been elected, for the character of the way rules are made there rests on a very different connection between bureaucrats and elected people. The sovereignty secured by the referendum result is something precious, something that should be valued by every single Member of this House, regardless of their party. What does this deal do in respect of that sovereignty? I have reservations about the youth mobility scheme, not because I do not think that there are people in Lincolnshire who want to take advantage of it— [Interruption.] I did not say that, by the way; I did not say that. I will not defend the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice), other than on this basis: the exact figures for his constituency show 13,596 people living there who come from eastern Europe, central Europe or further afield—Bulgaria, Romania and so on. The influx of those people over a short period of time has had a dramatic effect on the character of that part of Lincolnshire. On immigration more generally, free movement had a devastating effect on this country. It displaced investment in domestic skills, without doubt, and it also changed workplaces—I think it drove down wages, for example, because many people who came were not unionised and were not able to make their case to their employers with the same confidence that domestic workers rightly do. It also stultified our economy by fixing it in a labour-intensive, low-skill profile. That was bound to damage productivity and make us less competitive. What we needed to build was a high-skill, high-tech economy to compete internationally, and free movement damaged that prospect. The fear about the youth mobility scheme or the youth experience scheme—it keeps changing names, which in itself leads to a certain degree of scepticism; I will not put it any more strongly than that—is that it will bring people here who will want to work and to compete with our young people in Lincolnshire and across the constituencies represented in this Chamber today. That may be in seasonal jobs, part-time jobs or first jobs for people getting into the labour market. So I have profound doubts about it. We wait to see the detail, because it may be that the Government share my view; I hope they do, but I can understand entirely the reservations of my neighbouring MP, the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness, about it. Indeed, as I have said, they are reservations that I share. I will not speak about fishing, because others already have, except to say that fishing is always a bargaining chip in these negotiations. It was Edward Heath, allegedly a Conservative Prime Minister, who sold out the fishermen when we first joined. You will not remember that personally, Ms McVey, because of course you are a very young person—we are back to talking about young people, as the hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) and others did earlier—but you will know of it, and know that that too was a last-minute deal. Edward Heath was so desperate to join the European Union that he was persuaded at the last minute, as we were about to enter it, that he needed to trade off our fishermen’s rights. Fishing is certainly a concern, but so too is this issue of regulation, because—

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2. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   I wondered whether the hon. Member for North Somerset (Sadik Al-Hassan) was going to finish my speech for me, Mr Vickers, but I am not sure it would have been quite in the same vein as that in which I intend to continue. We have talked a bit about the youth mobility scheme, or the youth movement scheme or the youth experience scheme—call it what you will. Of course, it is true that some young people want to go abroad, but many more young people from abroad will want to come here, and we spoke a little before you came, Mr Vickers, about the consequences of that. Things have changed since we left the European Union. The principal change internationally has been the greater need for national economic resilience, epitomised in the covid pandemic and then the European war in Ukraine that followed. Never has it been clearer that Britain needs to become increasingly resilient, and that means protecting our industries to some degree. It certainly means manufacturing more of what we need and growing more of the food that we consume in this country. Shortening supply lines will have many benefits, environmental and other but, fundamentally, it is about taking a national view of our economic interests. Of course Britain co-operates and collaborates with others; but, as I said to the hon. Member for Walthamstow when she opened the debate, there is a world of difference between co-operation and governance. In a sense, that has permeated considerations of this subject since we started them back in the late 1950s. For a long time, many of those who favoured European governance pretended that it was a matter of logistics rather than principles, of details rather than essentials and, as we heard again in this debate, of co-operation rather than governance. Fundamentally, however, it is about the difference between supranational Government and collaborative measures—treaties and so on—between sovereign nations. That is at the heart of this debate. It is unfortunate that when we joined the European Union—as you will remember, Mr Vickers, because you were a campaigner against it even in those distant days—it was labelled the Common Market. There was no sense there that we would be giving up our sovereignty—no sense that it would have any effect on our political structure or system of Government. It was just a trading association. How things have changed. I know the hon. Member for Walthamstow welcomes that change, because she fought the Brexit referendum result in an honourable, but none the less stubborn way, if I might say so. I wonder whether she is as stubborn now.

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3. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   I say to the hon. Lady—not in a way that is patronising or pompous at all—that I can speak with a bit more authority about that than she can, because I am a former security Minister, currently a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, and I was once responsible for countering serious organised crime in Government, so I came across a lot of the need to co-operate and share data. The hon. Lady will remember that we were never part of the Schengen arrangement, although we did have access to the Schengen database. We were never part of European governance over security, although we did share information with European partners. She will also know that the key security relationship for us is the Five Eyes relationship with countries beyond the European Union—America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. That is the core security partnership but, of course, we co-operate with other countries across the globe. To be frank, that is not really about governance, is it? That is about exactly the kind of collaboration that, as I described, has always been part of the way that this country has dealt with its affairs internationally. [Interruption.] I am not going to take another intervention because I know that even you, Mr Vickers, are beginning to tire—even of me. I will therefore move rapidly to my concluding remarks, which concern this issue of trade and regulation. It is undoubtedly true that, in my constituency—I think a Member who is no longer in their place asked me to offer a balanced view of this—exporters in the horticultural sector will benefit from smoother transitions at ports. However, it is also true that there is a risk that that will encourage us to import more food at a time when we need to export less. We need to grow, make and consume more of our own food. Yesterday I was at a meeting with the all-party parliamentary group on the UK fresh produce network, which I chair, and a major haulier, farmer and grower said that he feared that that was the problem with this deal. I meet farmers, growers and hauliers in my constituency every single week, such is my diligence, and they are most concerned about the possible impact of that additional ability of the Europeans to flood our markets with foreign food. I will end with this: Joe Chamberlain also said that we should “carry on even to distant ages the glorious traditions of the British flag.” In the end, this is about just that. It is about how one sees the nationhood, and how one regards the national interest. There are those on the left—although I do not say that they are in this Chamber—who are affected by doubt about nationhood, and some even afflicted by guilt about our past who do not see the national interest in the way I do. I do not think that that includes the Minister, by the way, as we will no doubt hear when he speaks. But in the end, we do have to come to the logical conclusion of Brexit and all that has happened since: the national interest ought to be the supreme consideration of any Government.

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4. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   Many of us on these Benches were not happy with the direction of travel of previous Conservative Governments—let us put that on the record. We did not support the EU. I have never supported the EU; I first campaigned to leave it when I was a student, when we had only just joined it. The hon. Gentleman is right that we did not agree with that situation, and this deal perpetuates it for 12 years. If it was bad then, it is worse now.

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5. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   The National Crime Agency and the security services work co-operatively with our neighbours in Europe, and always have. That co-operation has perpetuated since Brexit, as it did before. A lot of it, of course, happens under the radar by its very nature, but it is not true to say that we do not have that kind of collaborative relationship with other nations where our national security—and theirs—is concerned.

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6. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   To illustrate that point, looking at the figures the UK is the EU’s biggest export market. We receive about €51 billion of goods from the EU and return about €15.4 billion, so there is no doubt about where the balance lies. To emphasise the point made by my hon. Friend, the problem is that so much of this is smoke and mirrors. When we hear about realignment being dynamic or about subsidiarity, as we used to hear, those are terms that are used to disguise exactly the kind of pernicious detail that he set out.

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7. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   The hon. Member is right that there are all kinds of existential threats that face this country and other countries too, but the Government’s job is to deal with the effect of those threats as they alter life here in Britain. Co-operation is part of that, but in no way does it absolve national Governments from taking responsibility for those threats in relation to national and local priorities. Mass migration is a good example; I regard it as the greatest existential threat, among many. That has to be dealt with in this country.

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8. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger) to talk about the imbalance in food exports and imports. The EU sells us far more than we sell it. Are we not moving to a less globalist age—a post-liberal age—in which countries will need to be more economically resilient, as I described earlier? We need to shorten supply lines and so on. On that basis, why would we want to make it easier for people from abroad to sell goods to compete with our farmers and growers?

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9. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

   EU-UK Summit

   I believe in British jobs for British young people. Should the hospitality industry not first be looking to employ the very large number of young British people who are not in education, work or training?

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10. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

    EU-UK Summit

    My hon. Friend comes to the nub of the issue, which I described as the debate about governance —it might be said to be a debate about jurisdiction. There is a kind of schizophrenia on the Government Benches: some Members want to say that this is a fundamental change, and a step back towards where we once were—that is clearly what the Liberal Democrats want—while others say that it is a matter of detail and simply a different kind of agreement. Essentially, however, the issue of governance and jurisdiction lies at the heart of this debate. I simply invite my hon. Friend to affirm the fact that on the Conservative side of the Chamber, whatever we have said in the past, we are now absolutely clear that the national interest will always be the supreme consideration of this party and a future Conservative Government.

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11. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

    EU-UK Summit

    Let us save Joseph Chamberlain’s reputation, if we can. Joe Chamberlain was an almost legendary figure in the city of Birmingham. In the first half of his life, he gave that city slum clearance, clean water and unparalleled welfare standards. Later, when he came into Parliament, he began as a radical and ended up as a supporter of the Tory Government. In his age, Chamberlain represented was the defence of what he saw as the national interest. I cited him because, as I said, I believe that the national interest should be supreme. May I say to the right hon. Gentleman that I suspect that is what the vast majority of his constituents and mine think, too?

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12. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

    Independent Sentencing Review

    The Lord Chancellor will know that for a very long time in this country, the prejudices of the establishment, poisoned by liberal thinking, have been at odds with the preoccupations of the vast majority of law-abiding people. Will she acknowledge now that the principal purpose of prison is retributive? It has other purposes, too, but its principal purpose is punishment. In that spirit, will she confirm when she will bring forward the further legislation on sentencing that she promised? Given what she has announced today, will she also confirm that violent sexual offenders will be excluded from early release?

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13. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir John Hayes

    Diego Garcia Military Base

    The right hon. Gentleman knows the regard I have for him and for the Foreign Secretary. He knows, too, of my interest and involvement in national security matters. There is no debate across the House about the salience of Diego Garcia. It is absolutely critical to our national interest. The debate is about the legal advice. Will he, in the interests of scrutiny, provide, where it does not compromise national security, all the information and advice given to him and previous Ministers on the subject of that legal advice? We suspect that that advice could have been challenged, and I suspect that many previous holders of his office and others will have received similar, if not the same, legal advice and resisted it.

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14. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir James Cleverly

    Diego Garcia Military Base

    Both the Prime Minister—in his extensive press conference prior to the Secretary of State for Defence coming to the House—and the Secretary of State have said on numerous occasions that this deal is the only way of protecting the military operations on Diego Garcia. When I was Foreign Secretary, I did not see anything to make me agree that this is the only way of protecting military operations on that base. The Defence Secretary suggested in his statement that a judgment could come within weeks that would undermine the operations of the base. From which binding legal authority does he fear that jurisdiction may come? We know it is not the International Telecommunication Union or the International Court of Justice. Who does he believe would prevent us from military operations on that island?

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15. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Edward Leigh

    Occupied Palestinian Territories: Christians

    This week I met Rana Musa of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Under the traditional status quo, the Israeli authorities levied arnona—the property tax—only on Church-owned business properties, but they are now levying it on Church properties used for religious purposes. That is an existential crisis for the Christian churches in Jerusalem. It is part of a pattern of intolerable pressure that has resulted in a reduction of the Christian population in the west bank to just 45,000 people. That must stop. I beg the Church of England, the Catholic Church, all Christians in this country and everybody else to shout at the top of their voices that Christians in the Holy Land deserve to be treated with respect.

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16. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Desmond Swayne

    Independent Sentencing Review

    Respect for justice is diminished by the fiction of the judge announcing a sentence and those in the know then calculating on the back of a fag packet the fraction that it actually represents. Has this statement not reinforced that system with bells on?

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17. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Christopher Chope

    Business of the House

    May we have an early debate on the refusal of the Bank of England to comply with its 2% inflation target? Also, will the Leader of the House facilitate a meeting between me and Treasury Ministers to see whether the Government are willing to support my Bank of England (Inflation Targets) Bill, due for Second Reading on 11 July, which makes provision for penalties against the court of directors of the Bank of England for failure to meet inflation targets?

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18. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Christopher Chope

    Points of Order

    On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am on record as having expressed my appreciation to the Leader of the House for her insistence that Ministers should give accurate and timely responses to parliamentary questions. I am sure she will therefore share my disappointment that in answering my question earlier she asserted that inflation is falling when in fact it is not falling but has reached 3.5%. She also chided me for not having raised the issue at Treasury questions on Tuesday, but the news did not come out until Wednesday. Is that the standard we are now expected to accept?

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19. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    As the Government say, NATO is the cornerstone of our defence, and that is how we co-operate with our European partners on defence. EU defence is an add-on that has been in the minds and the ether of the EU since the Maastricht treaty, but it has never come to anything substantial.

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20. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    I want to correct the hon. Lady on a matter of fact. The dispute about sand eel fishing was resolved, under the trade and co-operation agreement, by a bilateral arbitration panel. It had nothing to do with the European Court of Justice. It is a normal trading agreement. There was no involvement of the Court of Justice of the European Union. [Interruption.]

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21. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    Would the hon. Lady like to correct the record, because what she said was incorrect? We can prove it afterwards, and she will have to correct the record afterwards if that is the case.

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22. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    I am grateful to be able to make a short contribution to this debate. I will not repeat everything I said in last week’s debate, but I want to make this point. The hon. Member for Walthamstow (Ms Creasy) said that we do not want to go back to the old arguments we had about Brexit at the time of the referendum and while we were negotiating the trade and co-operation agreement before we finally left, but that is exactly what the Government are doing. Who is trying to turn back the clock? Who has decided that we should rejoin the single market for food and agriproducts, having promised that we would not rejoin the single market? It is this Labour Government. The idea that the Government should be able to wash their hands of their responsibility to voters for honouring the referendum result is an absolute absurdity. Let us remind ourselves that these are the same people who hated the idea of leaving the EU, who campaigned passionately to stay in the EU for ideological reasons, who refused to accept the referendum result, who desperately tried to pervert the referendum result or get a second referendum, and who, in their hearts, have never really accepted the referendum result. They long to rejoin. That is the motive behind this: they know they cannot rejoin the European Union because they know the voters will not have it, so they are rejoining by stealth. That is what they are doing. They have rejoined the single market for food and agriproducts, which means we are effectively back in the European Union as far as the regulation of food and agriproducts is concerned, only we do not have a say on the new laws that will be made and imposed on all British food businesses.

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23. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    The House of Lords still has a European Affairs Committee, which held an inquiry in the run-up to the reset. There has been no inquiry into the reset by any Select Committee of the House of Commons, apart from the Business and Trade Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (James McMurdock) are absolutely right that we need to reinstate the European Scrutiny Committee, because there will be a flow of new regulations coming out of the European Union that should be scrutinised in the proper way, as they were when we were a member of the European Union. Without that, there is no proper scrutiny in this House at all. I will now move on briefly to the question of how bad Brexit really was as an economic event. We were told that the British economy would fall off a cliff, that the housing market would collapse, that interest rates would rocket—actually, none of those things occurred. When we left the European Union at the beginning of 2021, the dial hardly moved. Our economy was growing at roughly the same rate as other economies in the European Union.

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24. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    We were told by the Office for Budget Responsibility that there might be a 4% reduction in what our GDP would otherwise have been. That has not occurred—the OBR was wrong. Our economy has continued to grow at roughly the same rate as the other EU economies. Of course, there have been adjustments because the economy has a different trading relationship with the EU. We now have a very deep and comprehensive trading relationship with the EU, as opposed to being in the single market, but there are swings and roundabouts. There have been gains in other areas. The other big advantage is that our contribution to the European Union, which used to be very substantial, pushing up to £20 billion a year, is now right down, which is a huge advantage. Given all the exaggeration about how bad Brexit was going to be and how bad Brexit is, how seriously should we take what the Government are now saying about the huge benefits of this so-called reset?

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25. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    I will give way once more, because I need to be brief.

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26. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    The Library does not say that Brexit is the cause of those declines. [Interruption.] It does not say that, and there are all sorts of factors. For example, we are closing down the North sea and exporting far less fuel. We used to import a lot of uncut diamonds and then export them to the EU, but we do not do that any more. That was worth £1 billion a year.

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27. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    I am not giving way again. The basis for recalculating our trade statistics has changed. There is also what was known as the Rotterdam effect. The point is that our underlying economic growth is broadly the same. In Tuesday’s statement, the Prime Minister claimed: “The deal means that British goods that have long been off the menu in Europe can regain their true place, including shellfish”.—[Official Report, 20 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 890.] He went on to say, and he mentioned this several times: “Under the Conservatives’ deal, shellfish was locked out, but it can now be sold back into the market”.—[Official Report, 20 May 2025; Vol. 767, c. 897.] So what are the statistics for shellfish exports to the EU? They declined very substantially between 2019 and 2021, from 32 million tonnes to 25 million tonnes, largely because of covid, I suspect. In 2022 they declined a little bit more to 22 million tonnes. That is not off the menu —22 million tonnes of shellfish exported to the EU. They went up in 2023 to 23 million tonnes and have continued broadly at that level. They were not locked out. That is just not true. The fact is we have a different trading relationship. Yes, the EU puts up lots of stupid and time-wasting barriers to trade, but that is because it knows this Labour Government are suckers and have fallen into this trap. The Government think they are going to get rid of all these checks. Well, under this new arrangement, we are going to have EU vets inspecting British farms and British food producers without any authority from the British Government, except through some kind of agreement. We also know that the agrifood SPS agreement has not yet been agreed. And why has it not been agreed? There is no start date given by the Government. We have not seen the small print. There will have to be legislation, and we do not know how much we will have to pay the EU for this so-called privileged access. It begs the question, given that shellfish was not locked out, and given that our shellfish exports to the EU remain substantially the same, what else are the Government saying about this deal that is completely untrue? I suspect that, just as they exaggerated and continue to exaggerate the disadvantages of being outside the European Union, they are also grossly exaggerating the economic advantages of this deal. I come back to the point: if the referendum decided one thing, it was that we should no longer have our laws made in the European Union and that we should no longer have to contribute to the EU budget. Both of those commitments, which the Government made in their manifesto, have been betrayed. We have rejoined the single market in food and agriproducts, and we are going to contribute money to the European Union once again. This will have a sting in the tail for the Government. I am afraid that all those so-called red wall seats are now vulnerable to a sense of betrayal among the voters that this Government cannot be trusted on even the most fundamental thing. I remind the Chamber again that 17.4 million people voted leave, which is a good deal more than the 9.7 million who voted Labour, giving them such an extraordinary majority on such a paltry share of the vote—less than 34%. The idea that this is a superior mandate and that the Government now have the right to overrule a referendum result is very dangerous territory. It is playing into the hands of the Reform party, which is the very thing that Labour fears. It is vital that we have the European Scrutiny Committee back. Now that European regulation will be created and applied once again in the United Kingdom, even though we do not have any say over it, we should be able to scrutinise it properly through a proper scrutiny Committee. I would be grateful if the Minister would address that point.

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28. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    May I point out that supermarkets tend to be interested in their balance sheets and profits, and not in democracy and accountability, which this debate is really about? Can the hon. Gentleman explain to the House what concessions the EU made in this deal?

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29. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    The point is, if people are prepared to compromise on dynamic alignment for food and agriproducts, what issue of principle will act as a barrier to prevent them extending that co-operation to other products or other fields of European law where they think it is ideologically convenient to do so? The only problem is that, if they think they are currying favour with the European Union by doing so, they will be disappointed, because the EU will simply ask for more concessions without making concessions of its own.

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30. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    It is quite extraordinary that the hon. Lady does not understand the different between a bitter concession that was forced out of the previous Government, wisely or unwisely, that we deeply resented and was time-limited to five years, and an extension of 12 years, which is at least 2.2 times worse, for something freely given away. I remember when the Labour party used to deride the common fisheries policy as an ecological and social disaster. Now it is embracing it, and so is the hon. Lady. I can only assume that she does not represent any fishermen in her constituency.

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31. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    There is another question. A truly bilateral youth exchange arrangement would be fine. It would be like the trade and co-operation agreement, with no reference to the European Court of Justice. Or is this going to be an extension of the withdrawal agreement arrangements involving EU citizenship, which is subject to the European Court of Justice and temporary and time-limited? The real question that the Minister has to answer is: what will be the involvement of the European Court of Justice in overseeing this arrangement?

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32. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    EU-UK Summit

    Where in the Labour manifesto did it say that we would start contributing to the EU budget once again? How much are we going to have to pay and when will we know?

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33. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Sir Bernard Jenkin

    Diego Garcia Military Base

    May I, in all candour, suggest to the Government that having now introduced this new element—the UN convention on the law of the sea and, I presume, the associated International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea—as the decisive factor that might have created a binding ruling, it really is incumbent on the Government to set out in a statement exactly how it would have affected the electromagnetic spectrum or our ability to use it in Diego—[Interruption.] The Foreign Secretary might just calm down for a minute. I just want a proper explanation. I make this forecast. To cut personal independence payments and winter fuel allowances to pay billions of pounds for something that was already British sovereign territory—how is the Secretary of State going to explain that on the doorstep to all his party’s voters? I promise you, we will make sure that they never hear the end of it.

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34. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Saqib Bhatti

    Topical Questions

    The Minister will know that our creative sectors, including our artists, writers, publishers and the fashion industry to name a few, are all fighting for their professional lives as artificial intelligence companies use their intellectual property for AI models. Why will the Government not put an end to the AI copyright issue and back the amendments from the Lords, which have such overwhelming support?

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35. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Robert Jenrick

    Independent Sentencing Review

    Today is about one question: should violent and prolific criminals be on the streets or behind bars? I think they should be behind bars. For all the Justice Secretary’s rhetoric, the substance of her statement could not be clearer: she is okay and her party is okay with criminals terrorising our streets and tormenting our country. The truth is this: any Government—[Interruption.]

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36. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Robert Jenrick

    Independent Sentencing Review

    Mr Speaker, the truth is this: any Government serious about keeping violent criminals behind bars, any Government willing to do whatever it took, could obviously find and build the prison cells required to negate the need for these disastrous changes. What do the changes amount to? [Interruption.]

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37. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Robert Jenrick

    Independent Sentencing Review

    What do these changes amount to? They are a “get out of jail free” card for dangerous criminals. Has the Justice Secretary even gone through a court listing recently? Pick one from anywhere in our country: those currently going to jail for 12 months or less are not angels. They are Adam Gregory in Calne, who got 12 months for sexually assaulting his partner; Vinnie Nolan, who got 12 months for breaking someone’s jaw; Shaun Yardley, 10 months for beating his partner; or Paul Morris, who got six and a half months for shoplifting 36 times. Her plan is to let precisely these criminals loose. It is a recipe for a crime wave. What about the Justice Secretary’s plan for most criminals going to jail to serve just one third of their prison sentence there and for her slashing of sentences across the board—discounts so big they would make Aldi and Lidl blush? I would call it a joke if the consequences for the public were not so terrifying. In fact it gets worse, because criminals who plead guilty—and most do—already get a third cut in their sentence, so under her scheme a burglar who pleads guilty to an 18-month headline term would spend just one fifth of that term in jail—barely 11 weeks. Eleven weeks for smashing through a family’s door and storming through a child’s bedroom looking for valuables, leaving them traumatised for life. Is that the Justice Secretary’s idea of justice for victims? The least she could do is here and now guarantee that violent criminals, domestic abusers, stalkers and sexual assaulters will not be eligible for any discount in their sentence. Will she commit to that? If not prison, what is the plan to punish these criminals and to keep the public safe? Well, the Justice Secretary says it is digital prisons—as she puts it, prison outside of prison, words that lead most people in this country to conclude that the Justice Secretary is out of her mind. I am all for technology but tags are not iron bars—they cannot stop your child being stabbed on their walk home from school, or a shop being ransacked time and again, or a domestic abuser returning to their victim’s front door.

    Hansard source
38. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Robert Jenrick

    Independent Sentencing Review

    Of course, Mr Speaker. The Ministry of Justice’s own pilot scheme found that 71% of tagged offenders breached their curfew. When it comes to stopping reoffending, tags are about as useful as smoke alarms are at putting out bonfires. What is the Justice Secretary going to say when she meets the victims of offenders that she let off? How is she going to look them in the eye and say with a straight face, “I’m sorry—we are looking into how this criminal escaped from their digital prison cell.” Her reforms are a recipe for carnage. I urge the Justice Secretary to change course and to make different choices—yes, choices—from the ones that we knew the Government would make from the day that the Prime Minister hand-picked Lord Timpson as Minister of State for Prisons, Probation and Reducing Reoffending, a man who is on record as saying that “a lot of people in prison…shouldn’t be there”— two thirds of them in fact, he said— “and they are there for far too long”. The Labour party is clearly ideologically opposed to prison and that is why the Government are letting criminals off with a “get out of jail free” card, rather than deporting the 10,800 foreign national offenders in our prisons—one in every eight cells—a figure that is rising under the Justice Secretary’s watch. If she is actually serious about keeping violent criminals off our streets and finding the cells that are needed, will she bring forward legislation, tomorrow, and disapply the Human Rights Act 1998, which is stopping us from swiftly deporting foreign national offenders? Some 17,800 prisoners are on remand awaiting trial—another figure that has risen under the Justice Secretary. In fact, her own Department’s figures forecast that it could rise to as many as 23,600. If she is serious, will she commit to taking up the Lady Chief Justice’s request for extra court sitting days to hear those cases and free up prison spaces? Will she commit, here and now, to building more than the meagre 250 rapid deployment cells her prison capacity strategy says she is planning to build this year? They have been built in seven months before, and they can be built even faster. If the Justice Secretary were serious, she would commit to striking deals with the 14 European countries with spare prison capacity, renting their cells from them at an affordable price, as Denmark is doing with Kosovo. Between 1993 and 1996, her beloved Texas, the state on which she modelled these reforms—a state that, by the way, has an incarceration rate five times higher than that of the United Kingdom—built 75,000 extra cells. If the Government were serious, why can they not build 10,000 over a similar time period? Labour is not serious about keeping hyper-prolific offenders behind bars. In fact, there is nothing in the Justice Secretary’s statement on locking them up or cutting crime, because the Labour party does not believe in punishing criminals and it does not really believe in prison. The radical, terrible changes made today are cloaked in necessity, but their root is Labour’s ideology. It is the public who will be paying the price for her weakness.

    Hansard source
39. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Nick Timothy

    Remote Betting and Gaming Duty: Horseracing

    1. If she will produce an impact assessment for the proposed remote betting and gaming duty on the British horseracing industry.

    Hansard source
40. 22 May 2025·Parliament·Nick Timothy

    Remote Betting and Gaming Duty: Horseracing

    The racing industry is getting a bit tired of the warm words and lack of action. At the last oral questions, the Secretary of State said that “we need to treat different forms of gambling differently”,—[Official Report, 3 April 2025; Vol. 765, c. 412.] but the Government have since proposed a flat tax on all online gambling, which fails to distinguish between betting on sports like horseracing, which is limited by the number of races and requires knowledge and thought, and online casinos and gaming. However, problem rates for bets on racing are about the same as for lottery scratchcards. Will the Minister commit here and now to making sure that betting on sports like racing is not treated the same as betting on online casinos and gaming?

    Hansard source