Liberal Democrats MP for Witney since (elected).
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| Party | Office | Area | Period | Began | Ended | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lib Dem | MP | Witney | – present | elected | — | Party history |
Every entry the member has in the Register of Members' Financial Interests, as Parliament currently publishes it. The wording and values are the member's own declarations; nothing here has been assessed by this site.
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Does the hon. Member agree that making it easier for young people to get functional skills qualifications, rather than being stuck in an endless cycle of resits, would allow them to get those qualifications and then on to an apprenticeship and into work, exactly as those at the Aspire youth hub in Witney do so well?
The Chancellor said in his speech last week that people were looking to Government “not to solve all their problems but to give them a bit of breathing space”.<span id="vol792_col304" class="cross-reference" data-house-id="1" data-column-number="304" data-volume-number="792" data-external-id="D4B71A13-44AC-4127-9B51-E65739BB69CB">—[<em>Official Report</em>, 28 October 2026; Vol. 792, c. 304.]</span> That may be partly true, but I think it demonstrates the lack of ambition that sits behind this Budget. The Government should be solving the systemic problems in our economy, or at least making a much more serious attempt to do so than we saw last week. Those problems are at the root of why so many families are struggling to make ends meet and so many businesses are failing. When the economy is as damaged as it is, when public sector debt sits at 104% of debt to GDP—according to the International Monetary Fund—when productivity is decreasing, when consumer confidence is down and when housing costs continue to rise, I think it is the Government’s job to do something substantial towards solving the country’s problems. Make no mistake: the various incremental measures that the Chancellor announced, such as those on household energy bills, will be welcome, but they are not sufficient to “move the dial on growth”, in the words of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. As bigger, more difficult decisions are kicked down the road for another time, what my constituents want to know is how they are to absorb another year of no real earnings growth, while mortgage increases are coming down the pipe on the back of a likely Bank of England rate rise this week. My constituents want to know that the public services on which we all rely are safe, and they are not. My constituents want to see genuine hope for a future with better jobs and more opportunities, and they want to know that our food supply is secure and our rural economy will be supported. Across the board, however, this Budget was too unambitious, and ducked the big decisions that our country is crying out for.<span id="657" class="column-number" data-column-number="657"></span> Let me give two examples that could “move the dial”. First, the Chancellor’s speech was silent on Britain’s relationship with our biggest trading partner, the European Union. Our country prospers when fair, dynamic markets for goods, services, capital and labour operate effectively. If the Government are serious about our economy and want growth, they should get on with opening negotiations for our country to rejoin the EU now. Secondly, if we are serious about getting our national debt under control, we must look at reforming our fiscal rules. Why? Because they do not work. That is demonstrated by the fact that for the last 25 years there has not been a single year in which tax receipts exceeded spending. Our fiscal rules front-load spending in the early years, and difficult decisions—as epitomised by last week’s Budget—are put off, frequently to the other side of an election. There are good international examples from which we can learn. Other countries, such as Switzerland and Sweden, do this better. I therefore urge the Chancellor to take steps to rejoin the EU, and to establish a cross-party commission exploring more prudent fiscal rules.
Will the Minister meet me to discuss the legal opinion I co-commissioned, outlining the legal grounds for possibly putting Thames Water into special administration?
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Stringer. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) for securing this debate and for her excellent speech. Like all of us present, I find the dangerous misuse of e-bikes and e-scooters is being raised with me more and more. In my constituency, current regulations are not working well and lead to a lot of confusion. One of my constituents wrote to me saying that their friend had been arrested for riding an e-scooter; it turns out they had no idea that privately owned e-scooters are illegal on roads, cycle paths and pavements in the UK. Another constituent wrote to me saying that they had seen e-bikes advertised on the Argos website, and only in the questions and comments did it say they were only for private land use. Locally, Thames Valley police officers are finding and seizing bikes that are able to go 120 mph. The problem keeps growing. By some estimates, there are more than 1 million e-scooters in use across the country, with no standards for speed, brakes or batteries. High-powered e-bikes and conversion kits are being sold for off-road use and then ridden on roads. Uncertified batteries sold online cause deadly fires. Victims of illegal machines face an insurance gap and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Epsom and Ewell mentioned, rental scooter trials have been extended again and again since 2020. There is some good news: since June, the Crime and Policing Act 2026 has let police seize antisocially ridden e-bikes without a warning, and seizures nearly doubled to about 7,000 last year. Overall, however, legislation is outdated and hard to enforce. We should do what many other countries have done already. Private e-scooters should be legalised and regulated, with a speed cap, product standards, lights and a minimum age, so that police can concentrate on machines that do not comply. Over-specced e-bikes and conversion kits should be stopped at the point of sale. That means making online marketplaces legally responsible, appropriately funding trading standards and requiring battery certification. Faster or modified bikes could be required to carry registration or plates, and delivery platforms could be required to check that their riders’ bikes are legal. The police also need practical help, including funding for testing equipment and specialist teams, cheaper storage and quick crushing of seized bikes, fixed penalties for lower-level offences and compulsory insurance for faster e-bikes.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Lagan Valley (Sorcha Eastwood) for securing this fantastic debate on an important issue, on which she spoke so well. I also thank her for shouting out the work of the Business, Innovation, Science and Trade Committee, of which I am a member, and of our Chair; let us see what November brings on that question. The turnover rate of new Royal Mail employees is extremely high, and the work practices are incredibly harsh and getting harsher. We rely so much on our local <span id="422WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="422WH"></span>posties to serve and help us, and it is really depressing to see how they are treated. My local postie, Tony, has just taken redundancy after years and years of work. It is hard not to feel that he was pushed out by being given a new round. It eminently did not suit, and Royal Mail knew that. That is happening in Witney and in other areas up and down the country. It is harsh and cruel. The numbers of people losing their jobs every week are not by accident, but by design. Our Select Committee’s investigation into Royal Mail’s letter delivery service noted that only 74.9% of first-class mail has been delivered on time so far this year, against a target of 93%. That translates into approximately 126 million first-class letters arriving late over the year. At present, missing targets is cheaper than meeting them. Fines totalled about £37 million over the last three years, while first class reached only 75.7% next-day delivery, against a 93% target. That is a real problem. If Royal Mail just takes the fines, that does not help anybody. The way to fix that problem is by focusing on two things that the owner values most: stamp price rises and taking cash out of the Royal Mail business. Here are some ideas on how we could achieve that. First, as others have mentioned, there should be no stamp price rises until targets are met. We have to get that link absolutely firm. That hits revenue directly and will make them pay attention. Secondly, Royal Mail’s cash should be ringfenced: no dividends, inter-group loans or management fees to the parent company while targets are missed, as Ofwat can do with water companies. That would stop letters subsidising parcels. Thirdly, fines should be escalated, linked to turnover and paid into service improvement when we receive them. Fourthly, there should be automatic compensation for customers when mail is late, as there is with delay and repay. Fifthly, there should be no executive bonuses—none—while targets are missed. Sixthly, we need transparency: performance by postcode area, letters and parcels shown separately, and staffing levels published. That is absolutely critical. They hide behind this fug about how they lack the data. We need it at a granular level so that we can see what is going on where. Finally, there should be—
If possible, I would love to hear the Minister’s thoughts about the points I raised: linking targets to stamp price increases, escalating fines, transparency, and ringfencing Royal Mail’s cash.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. <em>[</em><em>Laughter.</em><em>]</em> The latest round of the sustainable farming incentive was a disaster for small farmers, including many in my constituency. They were counting on this money as a lifeline after another impossibly difficult year. As one local farmer wrote to me:<span id="1231" class="column-number" data-column-number="1231"></span> “It is madness to set a deadline and then require a field-by-field online application process with a limited budget and first come first accepted”. No public money should be allocated this way, let alone money that farmers were relying on to stay afloat. I welcome the Minister’s commitment to scrap first come, first served for 2027. What is most disappointing is that this chaos was entirely predictable. The Government abandoned the rolling scheme. The sector warned loudly that the Prime Minister’s extra £50 million would barely touch the sides, and the scheme ran out within six hours. Of course, the Conservatives laid the groundwork for this. They began phasing out the basic payments scheme the support farmers had relied on for years, long before its replacement was ready. They cut farmers’ income first and asked questions later, while hundreds of millions in the farming budget went unspent. Labour has inherited that mess, but it certainly has not fixed it. Farmers now face a perfect storm. The summer’s heat and drought are projected to cause the worst harvest on record. That follows a drought-hit 2025 harvest, and a 2024 harvest that was washed out. Farmers expect to balance bad years against good years, but three awful harvests in a row is unsustainable, and as the climate crisis deepens, there is no reason to think that next year will be better. Meanwhile, farming costs are rising at about twice the rate of inflation, with fertiliser up by about 35% in a year. The Government list food as one of the 13 critical national infrastructure sectors, yet the farmers who are at the start of the chain receive support that is wholly inadequate. Farmers need a payment system that rewards both growing food and restoring nature. They also need help to invest in resilience measures, such as better irrigation and on-farm reservoirs. Will the Government not only review the process and budget for next year’s scheme, but say what additional funding they will provide, to help farmers adapt and future-proof their businesses?
I thank the Chancellor and the Minister for their speech and statement. We know that the Conservatives’ Brexit deal has hit national GDP by as much as 8%, costing the country up to £90 billion a year in lost tax revenues. Will the Government <span id="722" class="column-number" data-column-number="722"></span>now pull the largest zero-cost growth lever available to them by negotiating a growth and defence partnership with the EU, including joining the single market and a new customs union, rather than clinging to the same failed red lines, which are costing businesses billions every year? Being outside the single market and the customs union directly links to the 13% fall in the UK’s export of goods since 2022, which has hit traditional manufacturing regions the worst—the same places that the Government’s reindustrialise-the-north agenda claims to prioritise. I would like to understand whether she acknowledges the reality of that linkage or not. I welcome the Chancellor’s emphasis on the importance of fiscal credibility and, linked to that, meeting the fiscal rules. However, the reality is that those rules have been easily gamed by successive Governments, with our budgetary process being summarised as speculation without scrutiny, short-term headroom chasing and gaming the system, with an approach of jam today, which is spending, and pain tomorrow, which is tax, but tomorrow never arrives. The result is that it has been more than 25 years since we had a balanced Budget, and our national debt is now six times larger than 20 years ago. Will the Chief Secretary demonstrate that she is serious about tackling our debt and agree that a key way to do that is to grow our economy? Will she consider what we can learn from how other countries such as Switzerland, Sweden and New Zealand have addressed and solved their budget process problems?
I thank the hon. Member for his speech. Around Witney, 200 farmers are implementing a landscape recovery scheme. Only three such schemes have been implemented in the country. That one is on the Evenlode. Would it be helpful if the Minister said when the Government are going to bring forward the third round of landscape recovery schemes? We urgently need to be moving faster.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chair, Mr Twigg. I thank the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley (Callum Anderson) for securing this important debate and for making it a large enough subject for us all to pick and choose, because it is hard to cover such an enormous range. It is much appreciated. I thank him for such good points made, and I thank the Minister for returning to her role. I look forward to working with her. I refer Members to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and my ownership stake in BDA Partners, the business I founded in 1996, which focuses on Asian mergers and acquisitions, in which I have no management role. Everybody here believes that our financial services sector is a strategically important national asset and a key competitive advantage for our economy. We all want the sector to continue to thrive, boosting businesses, jobs and growth all across the UK. We all want Britain’s financial and professional services industry to remain possibly the leading such services cluster globally. Such services make us a trade superpower. We benefit from our unique combination of language, law and location. We have strong institutions and dynamic markets. We are the world’s second largest destination for fintech investment after the US, and we are a material player in the AI space.<span id="51WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="51WH"></span> Those are huge strengths that we must continue to build on, but we must also be clear about the challenges. Our financial services sector has lost ground on a relative basis and on a global basis. Other economies are rapidly growing, innovating, investing and preparing for the future. We have no cause for complacency. We need to be ambitious and take decisions now, which will help the UK over the short, medium and long term. Post Brexit, the City has continued to be an excellent location to base a global financial services business. However, our departure from the EU has substantially weakened our financial services industry, both in terms of the UK serving as the centre of European finance and a slower-growing UK economy that has not provided the traditional tailwind that it previously did. UK financial services remain a bright spot, but it would be a lot brighter if we were inside the EU’s single market. Do not just take that from me. TheCityUK notes that even though overall services trade has held up, “Exports of financial services have declined 5.9 per cent…likely at least in part due to the impact of Brexit frictions.” If the Government are serious about growth, they need to fix this. We should be pursuing a growth and defence partnership with Europe, including joining both the single market and the customs union. That would be revolutionary for the future of the UK financial services sector; it would tear down the barriers to trade in services that we have erected, which are still holding back our financial sector. In particular, joining the single market would secure again passporting rights for the sector, reducing costs and administration burdens and enabling financial firms to offer services across the whole of the EU without requiring further authorisations. In the shorter term, the Government should move quickly to immediately improve financial services co-operation with Europe. For example, they should be making the most of the UK-EU financial regulatory forum to secure a deal on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications, building on the dialogue that was agreed at the UK-EU reset last May. We must also finally see the UK-EU youth mobility scheme, which was agreed in principle last year, through to implementation. Secondly, if the Government are going to boost financial services and seriously compete with the US, they must look at the business landscape as a whole. We need far more ambition to boost UK plc—especially our high-growth, high-tech businesses—and pull every available lever to encourage capital formation, so how can we do this? Traditionally, the UK has been a fantastic harbour for international capital on the back of a cast-iron reputation for strong, fair regulation that safeguards investor rights. We need to ensure that our regulators continue to live up to that benchmark, and I think there is a question about that today. The same goes for competition. The Competition and Markets Authority needs to be using its powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 to demonstrate it has the will to enforce both quickly and effectively against strong players as well as weaker ones and, where applicable, it should be working closely with its EU counterpart to magnify its impact. This is not an issue that is just floating in the ether; it matters to people across my constituency, because it <span id="52WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="52WH"></span>brings down costs. Everybody talks about the cost of living; if we allow people to control markets so that there is no competition, costs go up, and everybody feels that in their pockets. It is really important to draw that link, so having the CMA move fast, at scale and at speed matters. We also need to fix how we support business innovation. Research and development tax reliefs are a powerful tool, but too often they are undermined by uncertainty, delays and a “compliance first” mindset. A more liberal, pro-innovation approach should move towards an expert-led pre-clearance system for R&D tax reliefs. We could have up-front assessments by scientists and engineers—people who understand the technology—rather than retrospective scrutiny by compliance teams. Models in countries like the Netherlands show that this can work effectively. It provides certainty to the founders, reduces disputes, and ensures support is directed towards genuine innovation. We must also look at reducing regulation where it is not required, as the right hon. Member for Godalming and Ash (Sir Jeremy Hunt) mentioned. For example, why is the regulatory burden on the venture capital industry so much higher in the UK than in the US, including in terms of time, which is as critical as cost? How about the UK taking the approach of using exempt reporting advisers—as they do in the US, focused on professional investors—to more effectively balance regulation with levels of risk? Many Members have talked about AI, and I am going to do so too. Any discussion of the future of financial services has to take AI into account. Earlier today, the Governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, published an open letter warning G20 Finance Ministers that artificial intelligence could pose a major cyber-security risk to financial systems. Writing in his capacity as chair of the international Financial Stability Board, he said that the potential impact of frontier AI is “the most immediate concern” for the global financial system, and that financial institutions, financial market infrastructures, and technology providers all need to “strengthen vulnerability management, response and recovery capabilities, and prepare for more severe scenarios involving simultaneous disruption across multiple firms or shared technology dependencies.” These risks are inherently international, and many jurisdictions still lack the systems to manage them—frankly, I think we do too. The UK Government must make AI security a top priority to safeguard not just UK financial services but the international financial markets on which we all depend. I would therefore be grateful if the Minister could set out what steps the Government are taking to promote the safe and responsible deployment of AI internationally, and how the cyber-security of the financial system is being strengthened. The other technological revolution that will shape the future of financial services is digital assets, stablecoins and cryptocurrency. A few days ago, the Treasury gave the Bank of England the new objective of supporting payment systems innovation. That is welcome, and having the right regulatory conditions in place to make the most of digital innovations is critical, but we need more clarity from the Government about how they intend to balance the opportunities and risks generated by new digital assets.<span id="53WH" class="column-number" data-column-number="53WH"></span> A key question is what stance the Government intend to take on stablecoins and a central bank digital currency or digital pound. The global stablecoin ecosystem is now dominated by two US dollar-pegged issuers, Tether and Circle, which together account for around 90% of the market. The UK’s own GBP stablecoin is, per the House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee’s assessment, “nascent”. Many are therefore worried that the digital financial infrastructure of the future is likely to default to dollar-denominated instruments issued by foreign private firms. I urge the Minister to address those concerns clearly, and to set out how this Government plan to make the most of the opportunities presented by this new technology while safeguarding against the risk and, crucially, whether there is or will be a timeline for a decision to be made jointly with the Bank of England.