Damian Hinds MP: speeches 2025

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Speeches

11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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I am very grateful—
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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We can have the classic, “Oh, the wording is technically flawed” argument—which to be fair to the Government, they have not deployed in this Bill Committee yet. We hope the amendment will be subsumed into the Bill, but the Government would never say, “Oh, we’ll just take that amendment and put it in.” Whoever is in Government never says that; they say, “Right, we accept this point. Now we’ll work on the detailed wording”.
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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There have now been four waves of updates from the children and young people’s mental ill health prevalence survey conducted by the NHS. That invaluable resource has provided annual data and enabled us to look at ourselves against other countries, although the data are not perfectly comparable. I gather that there is no current commitment to wave five. I know the Department of Health and Social Care said that it would keep an open mind, but will the Minister join me in strongly encouraging his colleagues at the Department to maintain that data series, because it is incredibly important?
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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If the hon. Member has counter-examples, let us hear them.
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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Can the hon. Member please explain what she means?
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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Go on.
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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The hon. Lady is quite right. I was only going to speak about this for three minutes or so, but the hon. Gentleman tempted me into other areas. On the promise that he was making one last intervention, I indulged him, and I am grateful to him. In an earlier intervention on the Minister for School Standards, I mentioned the NHS mental health of children and young people survey, which shows us what has happened over time to children’s mental health. There is an inflection point and it comes, contrary to what most people believe, before the covid pandemic. That is the first critical data point to understand. The second critical data point is that when we look beyond that study at other countries’ studies, we see that none of them are perfectly comparable, but studies in countries such as Germany, France and the United States follow basically the same pattern. There is an increase in the prevalence of mental ill health conditions in all the published data that I have seen for other countries. Whatever people say about domestic politics, whichever party was in Government here and whatever they did, that cannot explain what happens in France or the United States. The fact is that there is a global trend, or at least a trend in the western world, of an increasing prevalence of mental ill health conditions among children.
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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I appreciate what the hon. Gentleman says. I had my most recent constituency session with parents on the matter last Friday, and with some things, there is a bit of a grey area. Lots of parents say, “I don’t really mind so much about this”, but others do mind. With tracking technology, for example, some parents say that they really do not like being able to know where their child is. There is some variance, but the one imperative that is common to almost every parent is, “I want my child to be able to call me if they are in trouble, and I want to be able to call them on the way to and from school.” Parents want to hear from children if a club has been cancelled and they will be coming home at a different time, or if they are worried, or whatever it is. It is possible to do that on essentially any phone on the market, from the highest iPhone—I do not know what number they are up to these days—down to the most basic sub-Nokia brick phone. There are other questions about functionality, and about what social media is. The Australians are having a bit of a debate about that at the moment, because to ban social media, they have to know what they are trying to ban. However, to address directly the point that the hon. Member for Bournemouth East made, much of this discussion relates to all manner of electronica that a child might have in their pocket or bag.
11 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Fourteenth sitting) · Hansard source
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I am grateful to my hon. Friend the shadow Minister for refocusing what I was saying, and he is absolutely right. Some of our worries in relation to children apply regardless of the piece of technology. Anything that demands our attention and is ever-present brings such risks.
10 Feb 2025 · Inheritance Tax Relief: Farms · Hansard source
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The Government talk a lot about growth, and we often debate economic growth both here and in the main Chamber, but when we talk about farming, we talk instead about food production, sufficiency and security. We talk about land stewardship, we talk about fairness, and we talk about rural communities and the countryside way of life. All those things are true and relevant, but this is also a debate about economic growth. Economic growth requires productivity gains and productivity gains require investment, and this policy is clearly going to hit investment in the vital rural sector badly. That is intuitively obvious, because there is now a new liability that agricultural businesses have to plan for. It also chimes entirely with what I hear in and around Hampshire from agricultural suppliers and machinery dealers about redundancies, depot closures and projects being cancelled. My question to the Minister is: what monitoring are the Government doing of investment in the agricultural sector and the harm that this policy may do to productivity? It is often said, and it has been said again today, that farming is not a normal business. My East Hampshire farmers are very quick to remind us that it is a business, and they have to be able to make a living, but it is abnormal in one key sense: economists talk about normal profit and supernormal profit, but there is no such thing as sub-normal profit. If a business is not making enough to be economic, the idea is that it is not in business, and many of these farming businesses are not. These are farmers who accept a sub-economic return on capital employed, and they do that because while their farm is a business, it is more than just a business, a job or an investment. Ministers should not expect the same approach to be taken if family farms are broken up and replaced by something else. The Government have repeatedly said, “Don’t worry. The effect of this will be reduced because couples can pass on assets between them.” However, we know from a written question tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Cambridgeshire (Steve Barclay), that only half of farmers are in couples. Almost half are individuals, and this policy will affect far more farms than I think, to be fair to them, the Treasury or officials even realised to begin with, and certainly far more than the numbers we have discussed in this House. There are reasons why agricultural relief was first brought in. It was not a loophole or an accident; it was brought in to achieve a purpose, and there are reasons why it has been retained all these years. It is not unheard of for a Government to discover that when they bring in a tax, its effect in practice is not quite as they expected when they did the spreadsheet and when the Minister signed off the sub. It is not too late for this Minister and this Government to change their minds and to make significant changes. There is no shame in it, and I urge them to do so.
10 Feb 2025 · Inheritance Tax Relief: Farms · Hansard source
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Will the Minister give way?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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I seek some clarity. The Minister seems to be saying, “Leave it up to the independent adjudicator. They will decide.” Is she saying that the Government will not issue guidance on the criteria on which an independent adjudicator should decide?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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Just before she does, will the Minister give way?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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Who said that?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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So it is not the local authority; it is the adjudicator. I am wondering, as we are talking about serving communities, where the line of democratic accountability is.
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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It is a different but related question. There are falling rolls, initially in primary over the next few years, and then it will happen in secondary. There will be some difficult choices that someone will need to make. Sometimes that will mean varying the numbers in every school, but I am afraid that the scale of the change in some local authorities, particularly in urban areas and this city, is such that some schools may convert and become special schools, for which there is demand and need. Some may become early years settings. It might be the case—I hope it will not be, as it is always a difficult thing to do—that total education capacity has to reduce. Will it be the schools adjudicator who decides the school that closes?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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Does the adjudicator also have a say in allowing a school to open?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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No, I am asking directly: could the adjudicator stop a new school opening on the grounds that we have tasked the adjudicator with making sure that there is not excess capacity in an area, which might make one or more schools unviable? Logically, surely the adjudicator ought to be able to stop the problem getting even worse—in the eyes of Ministers—by refusing a new school opening.
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. I do mean these questions genuinely, in the spirit of line-by-line scrutiny of the Bill and trying to ascertain unintended consequences, intent and so on. If the adjudicator now has responsibility for ensuring that the number of school places in an area is what is needed and is fair, does the adjudicator also have a say in allowing a school to open?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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It may help if I say why I asked the question. The adjudicator will be worrying, “I need to make sure that a school over here isn’t creating unfairness or making another school unviable because there are too many school places in this area.” If someone else comes along and says, “I’m going to open a new one,” that will make the school even more unviable. Logically, if I am the adjudicator and the Government are tasking me with making sure that we are not making schools unviable, surely I should be able to veto a new school coming into the community.
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Eleventh sitting) · Hansard source
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Will the Minister give way?
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source
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I know! [ Laughter. ]
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source
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I have never been so warmly welcomed. [ Laughter .] We talked a few sittings ago about the NHS number and the database of children, and there are a lot of wide-open questions about the scope of that. Is that all children? How will it be used? In turn, that could potentially affect a lot of other pieces of legislation. Bearing in mind the massive controversies we have had in this country in the past over ID cards, privacy and so on, will the Minister write to the Committee setting out specifically what some of the issues in relation to that might be? We do not want find ourselves having agreed to do something that we did not realise we were agreeing to do.
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source
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I rise to speak to amendment 48, which stands in the name of the hon. Member for Twickenham. There are two main reasons people seek to limit school admissions on the basis of faith. The first is that some people do not like religion, organised religion, or the involvement of the state with organised religion. That is a matter of belief for some people. The second is that it is sometimes said that faith-based admission policies shut out others from good schools. There is sometimes a sense that it is academic or social selection by the back door. The hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale alluded to that. Some people—I am not saying this is the case with the hon. Lady—talk about the second issue when really they have in mind the first. One can be a proxy for the other.
6 Feb 2025 · Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill (Twelfth sitting) · Hansard source
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I suppose, having said that the hon. Lady can correct me, I cannot really stop her.

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