Bobby Dean MP: speeches

Speeches

• 14 Sept 2026 · Sovereign Grant Bill · Hansard source

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  The Liberal Democrats support the thrust of the Bill. We understand why the royal household budget has increased and agree that it is right for the grant to be reset now that the Buckingham Palace programme has finished. However, we remain concerned about transparency and have put forward an amendment to that effect. Our amendment would insert a new subsection that would stop the royal trustees proposing any future increase to the percentage of Crown Estate profit used in the grant formula unless three conditions are met first. The National Audit Office must be commissioned to carry out a value-for-money assessment of the proposed change; that NAO report must be laid before both Houses; and finally, the House of Commons must debate and approve the change by resolution. This contrasts with the Bill as drafted, which sets the figures straight into primary legislation on the strength of the royal trustees’ own conclusions, with no separate independent check built in for the next time that the percentage is revisited. That matters because it is the royal trustees who produce that report—the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. In other words, the people proposing the change are marking their own homework, with no independent body or vote required to test whether it represents good value for the taxpayer. Our amendment is not about opposing the grant or blocking today’s readjustment, which the Liberal Democrats accept is right now that the reservicing works are complete. Instead, it is about ensuring that if a percentage increase is proposed again in the future, taxpayers get an independent, NAO-assessed value-for-money check, with their elected representatives getting an actual vote on it, rather than the change simply following through the trustees’ own formula. To conclude, the Liberal Democrats believe that greater transparency and independent scrutiny of taxpayer money must be built into the system for the future, not treated as optional, and that that is best guaranteed by external checks, not simply taking the Government’s word for it.

• 14 Sept 2026 · Sovereign Grant Bill · Hansard source

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  The Liberal Democrats understand the purposes of this Bill and accept some of the Government’s conclusions about how the grant needs to change, but we continue to be concerned about transparency. It is important to make it clear at the start that the sovereign grant provides no personal income to the King or Queen or any member of the royal family; the funding is tied entirely to the running of the institution. We recognise that the household’s budget has increased, but the bulk of that increase is earmarked for a maintenance backlog across the royal palaces, green infrastructure, and cyber-security in an increasingly hostile international landscape. We agree that it is right for the grant to be reset now that the Buckingham Palace programme has finished. However, taxpayers will rightly have questions about where and, importantly, who this money goes to. The Government must ensure that not a penny of this grant goes to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who disgraced his title in office —

• 7 Sept 2026 · Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  The Minister spoke about global instability. There is no doubt that energy costs are having an impact on the cost of doing business, but this summer, local businesses told me that domestic Government had raised the cost of doing business, through national insurance and business rates rises. Will the Chancellor do something about that in the next Budget?

• 3 Sept 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I also welcome the Leader of the House back to his place. I believe this makes him the longest continuously serving member of the Labour Front Bench at 20 years, which is a remarkable achievement. I will not go into what I was doing 20 years ago—I am sure he has no interest in what I studied for my GCSEs. One of the stories that caught my eye over the summer was the sale of British success story easyJet to a US private equity-backed investor. The sale will create worry about jobs, fares and routes across Europe, as well as worry for the British economy, as we are now going to see profits move overseas. Acquisitions in and of themselves are not a bad thing—sometimes they are a sign of positivity for British business—but what is worrying is the trend. We are starting to see British businesses bought out by overseas investors again and again, and we are seeing people leave the London stock exchange at an alarming rate. This is starting to become a problem for the resilience of the UK economy. Tate & Lyle, the famous sugar manufacturer, was also sold to an overseas investor this summer, and three London-listed companies decided to leave the London stock exchange just this week. If the Government share my concern about this, they have many levers available to them to address the issue; they could look at stock market regulation, competition regulation and taxation. I believe that the time has come for us to have a proper debate in this House about this matter so that we can properly look into the details of those levers, see which are the correct ones to use and get a ministerial response on this matter. Will the Leader of the House organise for a debate about the future of UK businesses and the alarming trend of them being sold to overseas investors?

• 1 Sept 2026 · UK Financial Services · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for Buckingham and Bletchley (Callum Anderson) for securing this debate and for bringing his great experience to it. I hope to build on his comments encouraging the Government to build on the momentum of the pension reforms they have recently introduced. The UK investment system holds £6 trillion-worth of investable capital, mostly via pensions and life insurance schemes, so there can be no doubt at all that the financial services sector will be key to growth when it returns to this country properly, but access to that capital has become a problem. We hear it all the time from businesses. That can only be a systemic failure. Central to the problem is the UK’s allocation of its pension funds, which, as has been noted, collapsed from levels of around 50% back in the ’90s to an average of just 4% now. Some of that is explainable. Some of it was inevitable, as capital markets went global and people diversified their portfolios—we were always going to see a decline from those heights of around 50%—but the UK sits below the global average of allocation, which is 13%, so the UK has a specific problem that it needs to address. We have to ask how we got here. I think the root is a certain naivety in the way that we applied laissez-faire economics. As a liberal, I support free and open trade with the world, but with a narrow interpretation of what free and open means. We have marginalised the state’s role. We have moved its role of shaping the conditions for UK businesses to thrive to the periphery. We have been so hands-off that we have allowed our economy to be dominated by a handful of actors who have accrued pretty unchecked power in a fairly anti-competitive manner. An example I would point to is the proportion of our pension funds that passively invest into big global indexes. An example is the MSCI world index. It allocates more of British pension savings to Apple than to the entire UK economy—around 5% to Apple and 3.8% to the UK. What does that mean in practice? It means that when brilliant UK tech start-ups want to scale and are seeking out capital, their only option is to be sold out to one of the big US competitors that pension savers in the UK are funding. So the cycle continues, whereby Britain fails to scale its businesses to the level required. Britain needs to be more streetwise and a bit more hands-on. We need to redesign our system so that it can still take advantage of global capital markets, while being clever about the way it incentivises and actively supports the growth of the UK economy. One way in which I believe we can do this has been suggested by the New Capital Consensus project, of which I am a member: to right-size some of our defined benefit pension funds so that they are big enough to actively manage funds and to identify and invest in the opportunities that exist across Britain. They should not be so big that they find those kinds of regional opportunities more hassle than they are worth, and they should not be so small that they choose to manage their funds passively in the way that I have just described. At the moment, we have around 5,500 small defined benefit pension funds, and while each charges low fees for a fair return, I ask: at what cost is that a fair return? Is it really good value to get over 8% for the individual saver if the country around them is in decline? Should the real test of value not be about the return to not only the individual but society? After all, this is the country in which they seek to live and retire. I encourage the Government to build on the progress they have made so far with the pension reforms and to look more broadly at investment funds across the sector. I believe that if we can right-size some of those pension funds to incentivise them to identify and invest in UK businesses, things will be delivered for not only those savers but the country as a whole.

• 16 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I join the Leader of the House in his comments about Ann Widdecombe. She was a conviction politician and she was respected for that. I join Mr Speaker, and I am sure Madam Deputy Speaker as well, in thanking the staff for all their service over the course of the term. I had hoped to start by triumphantly demanding the confirmation of a bank holiday, but I will have to change tack slightly and desperately plea with the Government to give us a day off anyway so that we can get over the trauma of last night. More importantly, I raise something that I do not think our nation talks about enough, which is the weather and, more specifically, the relationship between the weather and climate change. A study that came out this week said that of the 2,500 articles about extreme weather over the last few weeks, 72%—the vast majority—made no mention at all of climate change. That is despite the fact that scientists tell us that the link between the two is indisputable. The idea that this is a freak, one-off event is, frankly, for the birds, and the Met Office has confirmed this week that “the climate of the 20th century has now gone.” The number of days at over 30° in London has quadrupled and the warm weather is even moving further north. The impact is pretty serious, and we have seen it on our schools, our hospitals, our workplaces and public transport, which have all ground to a halt at times. More seriously, 2,700 deaths in May and June have been linked to heat-related causes. Will the Leader of the House organise for the relevant Minister to come to this place and explain the link between extreme heat and climate change, and lay out what the Government are set to do to mitigate the effects?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I understand that usually, if the Government want to make a statement relating to foreign affairs, we get a statement from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, so I hope it will not be a habit of the House to change the whole business to Back-Bench debates, rather than giving us a formal statement from Government Ministers. While we are on the subject of Opposition days, it would be remiss of me not to highlight that the Leader of the Opposition recently said: “The fact is we are the smallest opposition party in history—we don’t have enough MPs.” I suggest to the Leader of the House that if the Government want to allocate more Opposition day debates to the Liberal Democrats, we will gladly take them. [ Interruption. ] The Opposition have come out in force today—well done on coming out today. More broadly, the country will be wondering why, although we have effectively known for weeks who the new Prime Minister will be, it will be months before he faces any parliamentary scrutiny on his plans. Will the Leader of the House explain how this situation has been allowed to happen? Does he agree that our constituents deserve answers about the new Prime Minister’s plans much sooner?

• 7 Jul 2026 · Climate Change: Resilience Planning · Hansard source

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  The Office for Budget Responsibility fiscal report, out today, highlights some of the long-term risks of climate damage to the UK’s finances. Unlike other OBR reports at formal fiscal events, there are no implications for the Government; they do not have to make any adjustments to their current financial planning. If he were to be moved to the Treasury, would the Secretary of State consider changing the fiscal rules to encourage more long-term planning for things like climate change?