Claire Coutinho MP: speeches

Speeches

• 10 Sept 2025 · Equality Act 2010: Impact on British Society · Hansard source

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  I believe that the hon. Gentleman is talking about discrimination. The point of being equal under the law is that the same protections from discrimination can protect his constituents, the hon. Member for Romford and me. The whole point of our common-law system is that we must all face the same law, whether that is for penalty or in the case of discrimination and harassment. He refers to many of the examples of discrimination and harassment that are in the Equality Act, but they were not created by that Act; they were created decades and decades earlier.

• 10 Sept 2025 · Equality Act 2010: Impact on British Society · Hansard source

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  I thank the Minister for her speech. Labour Members always try to equate protections against discrimination and harassment with the entirety of the Equality Act but, as many have said, protections against discrimination and harassment existed before the Act. They also exist in many other pieces of legislation, such as the Public Order Act 1986 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. What answer does the Minister have to my questions about the public sector equality duty, which talks about advancing equality by taking specific action to address disproportionate participation? That is where we have seen some internships excluding young white people, for example.

• 10 Sept 2025 · Equality Act 2010: Impact on British Society · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Andrew Rosindell) on securing this debate. This issue is having a fundamental impact on our society but is not discussed enough. I associate myself with his remarks about Don’t Divide Us and its excellent report, which I urge everybody to read. We are not a country that divides ourselves into tribe, clan or creed. We do not believe that one sex is more intelligent or more modest than the other. We do not persecute people for their religion or sexuality. At our heart, we are a country built on Christian and enlightenment values and common law. The desire for reason and the belief that we should want for our neighbour what we want for ourselves and that we should be equal before the law have steered us towards being a more meritocratic society than almost any other in the world. I believe in making sure that opportunity can reach people no matter their background, class or circumstances, and I do think that we have some way to go in that regard. However, deep in our national psyche, we believe in judging someone by their character and not by their characteristics. There is a proud legacy of laws passed by Parliament that shows this tendency of ours to protect the few from discrimination or harassment by the many. As many Members have said, the Equality Act 2010 brought together many existing laws on discrimination, including rights for pregnant women and disabled people. Those were certainly important pieces of legislation, but they serve as a reminder that just as human rights were not created by the Human Rights Act in 1998, equality was not created by the Equality Act in 2010. The Lib Dem spokesperson, the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine), talked about being evidence-based; the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights conducted a review of the public sector equality duty in Scotland and found that “there was virtually no robust evidence of positive change in the lives of people with protected characteristics”. We should not fall into the trap of treating this piece of legislation as flawless or beyond scrutiny just because it speaks to values that we hold dear. The Equality Act did not just bring together discrimination and harassment laws, but went much further. It imposed a legal duty on public bodies and private institutions to promote equality based on nine specific characteristics. In turn, as my hon. Friend the Member for Romford pointed out, that has created an industry that wants to force a statistically perfect division on the basis of sex and race in all parts of society, even though that is impossible to achieve. It encourages us to presume that every disparity is a result of prejudice and to turn even minor workplace differences into legal grievances. Worst of all, unelected officials in our institutions have worked behind closed doors with radical activists, who prescribe social engineering to get equal outcomes, even when it takes a hammer to the British people’s sense of fairness and is against the law. In seeking to progress equality, these aspects of the Act have changed our culture and taken us backwards. We do not believe that people should be held back from progression because of their protected characteristics, but in the RAF, white male recruits were deliberately blocked from training and given fewer opportunities because of their race and sex. We do not believe that women should be paid less than men for the same work, but in the Department for Education, they are using the Equality Act to justify paying men a thousand pounds more than women for the same jobs in childcare. We do not believe in employing people just because of their race, but senior officers at West Yorkshire police rigged the recruitment process to hire an ethnic minority candidate, who had failed their interview, just to meet a diversity target. Thanks to the Labour Government, a young person’s opportunity to take their first steps serving this country in the civil service is based not on how hard they work but on what job their parents did when their child was 14 years old. If you are the child of a nurse, cabbie or shopkeeper, I am sorry, but you are just not working class enough—the door is shut to you. In internships up and down the country, including at MI6, young white people have been told they cannot even apply. Here is the problem: the Equality Act has created a hierarchy of diversity. Women are told that their rights are not as important as trans rights. If a white boy grew up in care, had parents were alcoholics or had recovered from a life-changing disease, tough luck—he is not as deserving as an ethnic minority. Who is to say whose adversity has been more of a challenge? How can we fit the whole of human experience into these tidy little boxes? When rights clash, as they do, who gets to choose which group is deemed more worthy? When it came to gender ideology, it was bureaucrats behind closed doors, often working hand in glove with extreme activist groups. When women lost their jobs or were forced to share changing rooms with men, it was HR departments citing the Equality Act who held the pitchforks. Across the NHS, police forces, local councils and Government Departments, it was unelected officials who were using the Equality Act as a weapon to undermine meritocracy. In the cases of Birmingham and Next, it was unaccountable, independent experts who decided that manual shift work was equal to retail and office work. In the case of Next, when employees were given the chance, they refused to move to warehouses. The work was deemed of equal value, even when it was clearly not thought to be so by the workers themselves. That is simply absurd. One ruling bankrupted a council, and the other will push up costs for consumers, all because of decisions made by people who are unaccountable. More such cases are on the way. This hierarchy of diversity does not reflect the values upon which this country was built: fairness and merit, judging individuals by their actions and their character, not by their immutable characteristics. We cannot assign innocence or guilt, merit or privilege, by characteristic, placing some groups on a pedestal while others are pushed aside. The public see a society where protection is selective, and where the playing field tilts towards those who can claim special status. We heard today calls from the hon. Member for Wolverhampton West (Warinder Juss) to have yet more special statuses, but surely, the answer is this: the law that protects me from discrimination should protect my hon. Friend the Member for Romford and his constituents from discrimination, when we are all equal before the law. It is about to get worse, because the Government are set on introducing an Islamophobia definition, which they have tried to do behind closed doors. That will have a chilling effect on the ability of our public services to grasp difficult and sensitive issues, such as grooming gangs, gender inequality or Islamist extremism. They are doing this under the pretence of combating hatred and violence, which are already against the law. Instead of doing the hard graft of breaking down barriers and creating opportunity, Ministers want to hand yet more powers to consultants and HR officials in a undefined race and equality Bill to further shape the world according to who they deem worthy. It is easier, after all, to talk about quotas at diversity conferences than it is to fix entrenched problems in education, geography, family structures and culture. Because it is easier to judge physical characteristics, it risks creating a system that overlooks each individual’s personal circumstances and what they may have overcome. Giving pen pushers more authority to dictate who is privileged does not create more opportunity or make Britain more fair or prosperous, so we should ask: what message does this send to our children? Do we want them to believe that their future is determined by tick boxes on a form? Do we want them to grow up thinking that fairness means that some doors are closed to them because of their race or sex, or do we want them to live in a country where the law guarantees equal treatment and opportunity for all? It is time to put an end to the social experiment and return to first principles: equal treatment under the law, equal opportunity in life and the belief that the people of this country can rise as far as their talent and determination can take them. That is what genuine equality looks like, and that is what the British people believe in.

• 15 Jul 2025 · Net Zero Policies · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Secretary of State tried to argue yesterday that he is a climate change believer and everybody else who disagrees with him is a denier, because he does not want to engage with any legitimate criticism of his policies. He is offshoring British industries—in other words, replacing British goods with dirtier imports with higher emissions. Can the Minister confirm what the scientific evidence is that doing so will help to tackle climate change?

• 15 Jul 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  Yesterday, the Secretary of State said I was hiding when I was, in fact, with my six-month-old baby, who I know he is aware of. On behalf of all young mums who face those kinds of comments in their first few weeks back at work, may I gently suggest he reflects on those remarks? I want to ask the Secretary of State a very simple question: is £82 higher or lower than £72?

• 15 Jul 2025 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  I do not know whether the Secretary of State does not know or does not want to say, but £72 a megawatt-hour is what electricity cost last year, and £82 is the price he has paid for offshore wind, and he is set to do the same this year—and that is before the extra costs for the grid for wasted wind and back-up, which are going through the roof, thanks to his policies. Yesterday, he committed to radical honesty. In that spirit, will he admit either that he cannot add up, or that his policies cannot bring down bills?

• 10 Jul 2025 · Electricity Market Review · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. I know that this has been a difficult decision for him. He told everyone that his flagship mission was to commission more renewable power than ever before by 2030—more wind than ever before and faster than ever before in a market that was already facing supply-chain challenges and soaring costs. I said at the time that it was completely unfeasible but that if he was going to do it he should take every opportunity to minimise the grid infrastructure that needs to be built and the costs of his plans. On the other hand, I know that he will have had wind developers telling him that if he takes those decisions and makes those choices, they will not be bidding into his auction in the next couple of years—the auctions he needs them to bid into so that he can meet his self-imposed targets—because they want to protect their returns. When faced with a choice between protecting the profits of wind developers and cutting bills for the British people, the Secretary of State has chosen the wind developers, who know that they have him over a barrel. In setting himself an unachievable 2030 target that was based on ideology and ideology alone, he was telling those wind developers that he has to buy whatever they are selling, no matter the price. A little over a year ago, the Secretary of State told the country that bills would come down by up to £300, but his statement today shows that when push comes to shove he will choose higher bills for the British people to fund profits for renewable energy companies. Worse still, what he did not mention is that today’s announcement means higher bills to pay wind farms billions in constraint payments not to produce energy but simply to switch off. I have warned the Secretary of State repeatedly about the risks of building more wind before grid, and I asked him to continue my work on what a full system cost of energy would look like, which includes the cost of back-up and constraint payments. But he did not listen. He axed that work because he did not want to know what those costs were. Instead, last year he signed us up to the most expensive wind prices in a decade, at about £86 per megawatt-hour. That is almost 15% higher than the average cost of electricity for the last year, which has been about £74 per megawatt-hour. This year’s prices will probably be the same, if not higher, and he wants to extend those contracts to 20 years. He has not explained how locking us into much higher prices for longer will bring down bills—but lower bills is what he has promised the British public. There is more. The Secretary of State’s plan requires more grid to be built faster than before—that means £74 on to household bills. His plans mean that constraint payments for wind farms to switch off will rise to £8 billion—that means £100 on to bills. Now we read that we will be paying solar farms to switch off when it is sunny too, and the Office for Budget Responsibility says that green levies will rise by £5 billion. People may have noticed that the Secretary of State used to talk a lot about cheaper energy but now talks about less volatile prices. What his Back Benchers need to realise is that most people would not swap a 4% variable rate mortgage for an 8% fixed one. What they care about is the price of their bills, and they want cheaper prices. If he was truly interested in bringing down bills, he would not have scrapped the analysis that I started last year to find out the true cost of a system dominated by wind and solar. I have now read—twice in one week—that Downing Street is starting to pressure the Secretary of State about when his plans might actually bring down bills. All I can say is: I share the feeling! Before repeating all the empty promises about cutting bills by £300, Downing Street might have wanted to ask where his evidence was, but I will ask him now. Will he reinstate that cost of energy work so that we can clearly see the differences between the systems? Will he set out a road map to show exactly how he will lower bills? Will he confirm that he will not sign up to prices in this year’s wind auction that are higher than the current average cost of electricity? Can he also confirm whether he saw a full cost-benefit analysis of the choices in front of him today, and does he share the views of Ofgem and NESO? I will leave the Secretary of State with two quotes. The chief executive of Octopus Energy—one of the country’s biggest advocates of renewables—has said that the Secretary of State’s plans mean “soaring costs, locked in for years to come, and more on the way… And the more we build, the worst it gets, for years.” He also said, “It’s brutal for families and crippling for growth.” I think the Secretary of State said in his statement that the biggest problem for businesses is uncertainty, but it is not; it is high energy costs. The second quote—perhaps the most revealing— comes from one of his closest advisers, his chief energy system adviser, who said, “If we procure lots and lots of renewable generation and then we do not build the grid that allows it to get to markets, we will be wasting lots and lots of money.” I could not have put it better myself.