Damian Hinds MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jun 2025 · Fraud · Hansard source

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  The figures were, of course, coming down, but the incidence of fraud—much of it online—is now back up to a new high. Many factors are involved, but will the Government look at taking further steps, including requiring enhanced intelligence sharing between platforms and banks, and better mandatory user identification on sites such as dating apps and online marketplaces?

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  I am conscious that I have gone on for quite a while, and I want to wind up. Fourthly, there is the Employment Rights Bill. On the face of it, who would not like something with that name? It sounds like a positive thing, but the point is the effect that it will have, particularly on seasonal businesses, which might otherwise take somebody on at Christmas or in the summer. Hospitality, travel and events businesses rely on doing that. The Bill will affect the national health service, which will have to deal for the first time with some of those considerations. It turns out that the national health service is a considerable user of zero-hour contracts—by the way, not for someone’s first job, but usually for their second—so that staffing can vary according to the demands of a hospital or clinic. The Minister is a labour—and a Labour—economist, so I would be interested to hear his comments on the shift that we are likely to see from permanent to temporary contracts, and the shift that we are already starting to see in companies that are moving from relying on contracted, salaried employees to relying on agency workers.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to join this lively debate. Small businesses are the backbone of the economy in my constituency. In fact, 99.9% of businesses in East Hampshire are small or medium-sized enterprises. We over-index in professional services, retail, information and communications, and, of course, agriculture. [ Interruption. ] I thought there were few Labour Members present before I stood to speak! The biggest sectors for employment are retail, health and care, and manufacturing. [ Interruption. ] I am starting to get a complex! I have heard from all those sectors, which are worried about the prospects for their businesses and the economy under this Government. We must always remember two things about business. First, contrary to what the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher) said—he is no longer in his place but I know he will return—only business can create the wealth and jobs, make the livelihoods and generate the tax that, in turn, makes the high-quality and brilliant public services that we all so value and on which we rely. There is a second thing that we should always remember about business, and I encourage Ministers to remember it. Accountants talk about the entity principle and describe a business as an entity that is separate from the people who run it. That might be true in an accounting sense, but in a broader sense, businesses are people. They are collections of people coming together to achieve something. The joint stock company was created to share risk among different people, and the way that organisations work within companies is a way of increasing efficiency and productivity, compared with everybody doing their own thing as a sole trader. So, because businesses are ultimately people, there is ultimately no such thing as a tax on a business. Taxes can only ever fall on people. A so-called business tax falls on one or more of three groups of people: the business’s customers, the business’s employees or the business’s owners.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady makes a good point about small businesses, particularly rural small businesses, and I will talk about national insurance contributions and business rates, but let me come back to how taxes on businesses are ultimately taxes on people. Some Labour Members might say that they do not mind a tax on business owners, because they are the capitalists and they can afford it, but we need to remember that the owners of businesses are a mixture of institutional owners—which, by the way, includes your mum’s pension fund—small business owners, who are quite often sole traders, and family businesses. If the owners are not affected, either the customers or the employees will be affected, and I am afraid the effect of the national insurance contributions rise will ultimately be felt by those two groups of people, and particularly by employees, through a mixture of wage suppression over time and possibly some job losses. The bigger effect will not be about job losses; it will be about jobs that are never created in the first place, particularly among the youngest people and those furthest from the labour market.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  It will, and I repeat that it can only be one of those three groups. There will be some price increases, and those costs will be felt by customers and consumers, but all the indications are that the big effects will be felt in wage suppression and in employment, which will ultimately mean slower economic growth. In the same way that taxes on business ultimately land on people, taxes that look like they are on people can sometimes have an effect on business. I want to talk briefly about two examples. The first is the family farm tax. This is clearly a desperately ill-conceived measure, although, to be fair to Labour Ministers, they probably did not realise at the time quite what they were doing. However, their Members of Parliament representing rural seats found out very quickly exactly what they were doing and the effect it would have. There is an alternative proposal on the table, which we know has been put to the Treasury by representatives of the sector. As this brilliant Treasury Minister the Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the hon. Member for Swansea West (Torsten Bell) will be winding up, I am sure—at least I hope—he will find it possible to share with the House the Treasury’s critique of that alternative proposal, the so-called clawback proposal, which would be much fairer, and tell us why the Government are rejecting it. There has been quite a lot of debate in the House on the family farm tax, but somewhat less on the business property relief situation, which is not quite as acute in some ways, but there are a number of parallels and similarities. Business property relief was put in place to level the playing field for family-owned businesses and others, so that people could invest in their family-owned businesses, confident that they could pass it on, within the family, without incurring a tax that applies to no other business ownership model. Typically, these businesses will not have large amounts of net cash or liquid assets that will allow them to settle the tax bill upon the demise of the owner, and there are no listed shares, so there is typically no market for those. There has to be a theoretical valuation, because the shares cannot be valued, and that figure is likely to be considerably higher than the amount that could be realised in the event of a sale. The relief was created specifically to stop family firms having to be broken up; however, the net effect of the changes is that a substantial number of firms in this situation will be bought up, either in whole or in part, by foreign owners or private equity. Is that really what a new Labour Government had in mind?

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  I shall suitably dampen. At a time when the Government are changing the relief from 75% to 40%, try telling those businesses already facing the national insurance contributions increase and all the other cost increases that their bill is being reduced. Clearly, it is going up.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is going to tell me that he has told that to his local retailers and pubs.

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  Forgive me, but I do not have the history at my fingertips. The relief has been recognised over the years, and has been looked at in the past by Treasury officials. I have been a Treasury Minister, and I know that they get presented with various things that could be done, but generally speaking, when many Ministers before you have found good reasons to keep a measure, it is a good idea to wonder what those reasons might be. Overall, this Government’s changes to the business taxation regime will affect many sectors, but particularly those that are labour intensive. We can all name hospitality, retail and care as the three really big-volume employers in the country. In my constituency, I would also mention nurseries, pubs and hair and beauty businesses. Of course, there are sector-specific pressures. For nurseries, for example, the issue is whether the unit rate per child per hour is sufficient. Many of my nurseries say that it is simply not sufficient to cover their costs, at a time when entitlement to nursery care is increasing. In the hair sector, there has long been an issue about those who have created a business that has employees, and their ability to compete with others who are below the VAT threshold. The confluence of four things that the new Government have done is creating a big headache. First of all, the national living wage going up to £12.21 is a good thing in and of itself. We absolutely support a rise in wages for people on lower wages; it is the fact that it is happening at the same time as all the other things that is causing the problem. I will not talk in detail about the national insurance contributions increase, because others have done so, but that will have an effect, particularly on part-time employees, and the Government ought also to acknowledge the gender differential effect of that, which we have heard little about. Today I have heard two Labour MPs say that business rates have gone down for retail and hospitality businesses. One was the Minister. Try telling that to those businesses—

• 21 May 2025 · Business and the Economy · Hansard source

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  Forgive me; I will not. Finally, there is the effect that the measures will have on the removal of job opportunities for those further from the labour market—perhaps those who have been out of work for a long time; ex-offenders, who it feels like more of a risk for an employer to take on; and, most of all, young people. That is the concern with this package of measures: the effect on unemployment, especially youth unemployment. Today we heard the Government make the first of what I hope is a series of U-turns over the winter fuel payment. I ask the Government to look at what is happening, and what will happen to our small businesses and the unemployment statistics, and to please think again.

• 19 May 2025 · Support for Veterans · Hansard source

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  National insurance relief for employing veterans comes at really quite a low cost to the Treasury, but it is effective, not just in its financial incentive but because it opens up conversations within employers. In written answers of late, the Government have been slightly equivocal about the future of the programme. Can the Minister confirm that this programme of relief will continue to support veterans’ employment beyond the next year?

• 19 May 2025 · Support for Veterans · Hansard source

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  16. What steps he is taking to help support veterans into employment.

• 16 May 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is right, of course. When we in this House are told that there will be secondary legislation, guidance or a code of practice, we can only ever take that on trust, and this subject is of such moment that what is on the face of the Bill is that much more important. Given the scale of the decisions that people could make as a result of this legislation, it is right that an additional layer of caution should be applied by legislators. Obviously, it is important not to generalise—every single person is an individual—but it is the case that people with Down syndrome often exhibit distinct social characteristics, including great sociability, empathy, and a strong desire to please others and seek positive social feedback, while also being particularly sensitive to criticism or perceived failure, which can compound issues around communication and comprehension. We do not need to define what can result as coercion to worry about what might happen in that context. Amendment 101 and new clause 1 are about initiating a conversation and ensuring that there are additional safeguards, and I urge the House to apply caution that is commensurate with the gravity of the path that could be embarked upon.

• 16 May 2025 · Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill · Hansard source

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  For reasons of timeliness, I will speak only to amendment 101, which relates to adults with Down syndrome or a learning disability, although the amendment is directly relevant to new clause 1, as the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) spoke about. Amendment 101 would disallow medical practitioners from initiating a conversation about assisted dying with a person who has Down syndrome or a learning disability. I speak primarily from my experience, along with others, on the all-party parliamentary group on Down syndrome and what we have heard from members of that community: people with Down syndrome and their families, and professionals specialising in the condition. Many strong and deeply heartfelt arguments have been put by colleagues, and indeed to all of us by constituents in favour of the Bill, including by families in the most difficult circumstances to imagine—actually, they are sometimes unimaginable circumstances. Nobody could question the conclusions they have come to individually as a result of their circumstances. Equally deeply held and heartfelt points are made to us by people from the other perspective, also informed by their sometimes unimaginable own or family circumstances. Of the arguments put against the Bill, I am particularly drawn to those around coercion. However, it is important to remember that coercion is not entirely a black-and-white matter. At the sharpest end, there are cases where an individual will directly bring pressure to bear on another for their own ends, but there are many gradations below that, and pressure can be felt differently by different people. It may be felt especially by people who worry they are a burden on their family, on caregivers, on the national health service, or indeed more broadly on society. Once assisted dying is an available option, over and above the question of pressure from others, I worry about the effect of pressure from oneself. The Bill stipulates in clause 36 that the Secretary of State will issue a code of practice to ensure that the practitioner establishes that there is a “clear and settled intention” for the person to end their own life, including assessing that that person has “capacity to make such a decision”. That will have material challenges of its own. However, with regard to amendment 101, I am talking about the initiation, suggesting or raising of the matter specifically with an individual who has a learning disability or Down syndrome.

• 14 May 2025 · Digital Landlines: Rural Communities · Hansard source

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  What awareness is there in very rural areas where there is not great broadband coverage and very poor indoor mobile phone coverage—sometimes no coverage at all—of the effect of this change, particularly in places where there are frequent and sometimes extended power cuts? When can we expect a full national awareness campaign?

• 14 May 2025 · Infected Blood Inquiry: Government Response · Hansard source

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  Clearly, getting to a good and timely operation of the compensation scheme will take the Paymaster General’s personal attention, and I know that he will give it that attention because of his dedication to getting this right. Could he give an update to the House on the anticipated memorial dedicated specifically to the children who were infected at Treloar’s?

• 13 May 2025 · Local Housing Need Assessment Reform · Hansard source

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  Mrs Hobhouse, it is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair—I think, in my case, for the first time. I congratulate the hon. Member for Horsham (John Milne) on securing the debate and bringing us together to discuss this important matter. It is very good to see this Minister in his place. I thank him and his Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government colleagues for their engagement on these issues. I have been in this place on more than one occasion to talk about related issues, including about how national parks work relative to local authority planning areas. I am grateful to his colleague the Minister for Housing and Planning for also meeting me separately as well as corresponding. Today, I am going to talk not about those issues, but about the algorithm overall and how it works and, in particular, about the affordability ratio and how it works—or, more correctly, does not work. We know that the Government are looking for a big uplift—a 50% increase—in the number of housing completions, but in areas such as mine in Horsham, the increase is much greater than that. In my local planning area the target is up from 575—already a pretty punchy annual target—to more than 1,100, which is effectively a doubling. It is not a north/south thing, it is a rural/urban thing. Rural areas throughout the country have some of the biggest increases, such as in the rural far north-west and far north-east. There have been really big increases in the target, and at the same time major conurbations are seeing much lower increases in their numbers—typically 16% or 17%. Some places, including parts of London and Birmingham, are actually seeing the numbers go down at a time when we are trying to build many more homes. Sometimes it is thought that this is correcting a historical imbalance—that homes have not been built in the countryside for all these years—but that is not the case. Proportionately over the last couple of decades, in the rate of additions of homes per 1,000 existing dwellings, the predominantly rural areas have seen a greater build-out rate than predominantly urban areas. I do understand that the Government need a formula—the 0.8% of housing stock multiplied by the five-year average affordability ratio, minus five, divided by five, multiplied by 0.95, plus one. It looks okay. Trust me: it looks logical if we break it down, but the truth is that in practice, it is not working. It is not delivering what all of us want to see, or what the Government want to see, which is a material, sustainable increase in housing stock in the places where people need it. The affordability formula matters so much more now because of that 0.95. It used to be 0.6, but since it has gone up, it has made the affordability ratio do that much more work. There are multiple aspects to query, such as whether to use workplace-based earnings or residency-based earnings. I think both of those things are relevant, and a comprehensive formula would probably use both. Whether earnings or income is used makes a difference, because it means capturing only the working population or the retired population as well. Crucially, the formula lumps all types of housing together, so it does not distinguish between the cost of a starter home and a two-bedroom flat, a one-bedroom flat or a three-bedroom house in these different places. Echoing what we heard from the hon. Member for Horsham, I have lots of people coming to my surgery who are unable to afford a home; probably everybody in this room has lots of people coming to their surgery in the same position. Some of those people are looking for social housing and there is a shortage of that, but when most people come to our surgeries and talk about the unaffordability of homes, they mean the affordability of a home they can buy—a decision that, I am guessing, most of us made at some point in our 30s or 40s. However, many more homes get built every year and I still get the same number of people coming to my surgery saying that they cannot afford to get on the housing ladder. We want there to be more affordable homes in both senses, both the public sector sense, in what I call “capital A” affordable—social rent, part-ownership and all that—and for young couples and young families to be able to buy a home and invest in their security and that of their children. But the problem is that, other things being equal, the best returns for developers are on larger, five-bedroom or four-bedroom executive homes in large plots of land outside of town centres, which are very aspirational homes for people to buy. Although there is nothing wrong with that, it does not address the needs of the people coming to our surgeries saying that they cannot afford to get on the housing ladder. Therefore, because we have high unaffordability ratios, we get lots more houses being built but they tend to be five-bedroom, four-bedroom executive homes disproportionately. That makes the area even more unaffordable on average, because the average price of a new build house is greater than the median price of the existing housing stock, so over time the formula ratchets up the price. It just says, “However many more homes you build, you will need to build more and more.” Honestly—there is no mathematical logic to it. We should be trying to address the actual need. I ask Ministers to look again at the formula, not to get rid of it but to change it. Development targets must be sustainable and reasonable in different areas of the country, and crucially they must target the addition of homes that people can afford to buy, so that over time affordability ratios improve.

• 13 May 2025 · Local Housing Need Assessment Reform · Hansard source

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  Well, I have been there, but I represent East Hampshire.

• 13 May 2025 · Official Development Assistance Budget · Hansard source

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  11. Which development programmes he plans to maintain funding for after the planned reduction of the official development assistance budget in 2027.

• 13 May 2025 · Official Development Assistance Budget · Hansard source

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  These severely constrained budgets call for thinking smarter, not simply smaller, so what work are the Government doing with the World Bank and other international institutions to make sure that UK development spend is fully leveraged so that every penny is as effective as possible?

• 8 May 2025 · Trade Negotiations · Hansard source

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  East Hampshire farmers will be relieved to hear what the Minister has said about food standards, including on hormone-treated beef and chlorinated chicken, after everything that has happened to them in the last period. Obviously we will have to see the detail, and see what else is in the agreement. I will ask about online safety. The Minister has said already that there has been no change to the digital services tax and no rowing back on the online safety regulatory regime. Can he confirm that no commitments have been made that would curtail the freedom of this House to make further changes in this area?

• 7 May 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Very quickly, I want the Minister to confirm that the Ofcom children’s codes, to which he has referred, are all about the 18 age threshold. They are a very welcome move to filter out wholly inappropriate content that is designed for over-18s and other very harmful content, but they do not do anything for the initial threshold—the age minimum—at age 13.

• 7 May 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Our nominal minimum age for social media usage in this country comes from a well-meaning piece of American legislation originally passed in 1998. The age did not have to be 13. Back in 1998 it was going to be 16, but it was changed to 13. With the birth of GDPR, the age did not have to be 13: the default was 16. Various countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland, selected 16, but we selected 13. That means that at the age of 13 people can sign up to social media, have their behaviour tracked for the purpose of targeting content and ads, start their own channel, have multiple IDs and make decisions about what details of their private life they share. Many people believe that, because of brain development, 13 is too young to make some of those decisions reliably, and that there are real downsides, risks and dangers from the combination of social media and the ready availability of a handheld electronic device. For children, there are addictive features, an effect on sleep, an ease of making unwanted content, rabbit holes to fall down and corrosive content that plays on the insecurity of adolescence. Objections to raising the age to 16 are normally centred around worries that pro-social applications will be hit and that there will be unintended consequences, such as children not being able to seek help if they in an abusive family, or to find information about contraception or whatever else they may need to know. Indeed, those were some of the reasons why, back in 1998, the age of 16 became 13, and those reasons came up again here in the debates over GDPR. As such, I worded new clause 12 to demonstrate how we could do it without losing anything, by having very broad categories of exemption. However, even with those exemptions, the Government would still be able to say—I am sure they will, and will say some of the same things about new clause 1 shortly—that new clause 12 is technically inadequate, worded badly and contains the wrong exemptions, and that there would be unintended consequences. New clause 19, though, which was tabled by the official Opposition, is almost impossible to argue against, because it contains the default position that these exemptions will change; under its provision, those changes would be subject to review, which would ensure that all those considerations were taken into account.

• 7 May 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman tempts me to broaden the debate, which I do not think you would encourage me to do at this late stage, Madam Deputy Speaker. However, he makes a very important point about self-regulation in this sector. The public, parents, and indeed children look to us to make sure we have their best interests at heart. The Online Safety Act may only say that age minima should be enforced “consistently” rather than well, but I do not think the will of this Parliament was that it would be okay to enforce a minimum age limit consistently badly. What we meant was that if the law says right now that the age minimum is 13, or if it is 16 in the future—or whatever other age it might be—companies should take reasonable steps to enforce it. There is more checking than there used to be, but it is still very limited. The recent 5Rights report on Instagram’s teen accounts said that all its avatars were able to get into social media with only self-reported birth dates and no additional checks. That means that many thousands of children under the nominal age of 13 are on social media, and that there are many more thousands who are just over 13 but who the platform thinks are 15, 16 or 17, or perhaps 18 or 19. That, of course, affects the content that is served to them. Either Ofcom or the ICO could tighten up the rules on the minimum age, but amendment 9 would require that to happen in order for companies to be compliant with the ICO regulation. The technology does exist, although it is harder to implement at the age 13 than at 18—of course, the recent Ofcom changes are all about those under the age of 18—but it is possible, and that technology will develop further. Ultimately, this is about backing parents who have a balance to strike: they want to make sure that their children are fully part of their friendship groups and can access all those opportunities, but also want to protect them from harm. Parents have a reasonable expectation that their children will be protected from wholly inappropriate content.

• 7 May 2025 · Data (Use and Access) Bill [Lords] · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister give way?

• 2 Apr 2025 · Digital Landlines: Rural Communities · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is absolutely right to identify the importance of network resilience as well as individual household connectivity—and, in a more general sense, to keep reminding us of the linkage between landline and mobile telephony. For so much of the country there is an assumption that if someone cannot get on the phone at home, they can still use a mobile phone. That just is not the case in some places, and certainly not in cases of storm damage.