Desmond Swayne MP: speeches

Speeches

• 12 Nov 2024 · Clean Energy by 2030 · Hansard source

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  What is the beef behind the Government’s reluctance to embrace with enthusiasm locally generated community energy? Why did they vote against the amendment tabled to the Great British Energy Bill by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse)?

• 11 Nov 2024 · Rural Affairs · Hansard source

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  What estimate has the right hon. Gentleman made of the impact on capital investment, which will be reduced as farmers consider the inheritance tax implications of those investments and adjust their plans accordingly?

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Much of it reannounced, and much of it put at risk by the behaviour of the Transport Secretary, but nevertheless an achievement. Of course I welcome any inward investment. What I think is a huge risk is a great borrowing binge for exactly the sort of investment that we saw throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which never delivered. Real investment—investment that improves productivity—is that which is undertaken largely by medium and small firms to invest in their own enterprises, but it is crowded out by the increased costs that are entirely a consequence of the Government’s great borrowing binge. On that basis, this Budget is a disaster.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  The reality, as the right hon. Gentleman knows because he wrote to his successor about it, is that he left us with a deficit that stood at fully 10%, as against the 4.3%—and in sharp decline—that we have bequeathed to this Government.

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  rose —

• 30 Oct 2024 · Budget Resolutions · Hansard source

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  It is an enormous pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Motherwell, Wishaw and Carluke (Pamela Nash). Until recently, my cousin was a minister in Carluke. Let me give the House a piece of Swahili wisdom. Howezi kuwafukuza swala wawili: you cannot chase two antelope. That, however, is exactly what the Government have been doing since they were elected. They announced immediately after the election, and repeated today, that their overriding priority was to secure economic growth by investing, investing, investing, but in reality their main effort was elsewhere. Their main effort was a creating a narrative in the public mind that they had inherited a wasteland, the worst inheritance of any Government since kingdom come: that the wicked Tories had operated a scorched earth policy leaving absolutely everything broken, nothing working, and a huge black hole. As a consequence, things would have to get worse before they could get better, and there would be implications for tax in the forthcoming Budget—and, of course, we have discovered that today. The reality is that investment requires an optimistic outlook. By pouring such a bucket of cold water on the British economy, what the Government achieved was to reverse what was soaring business confidence and turn it into absolutely collapsing business confidence; and business confidence is the key to investment, not the great binge of borrowing that the Government are about to enter into.

• 29 Oct 2024 · Economic Investment and Growth · Hansard source

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  Investment requires a measure of optimism, not the collapse in business confidence that the Chancellor has engineered. She would have done better to stress some of the positives that she inherited, wouldn’t she?

• 22 Oct 2024 · Sentencing Review and Prison Capacity · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the Lord Chancellor on recognising that for some prisoners, the shortcomings of short sentences are properly remedied by providing for longer ones. On the review and David Gauke, it is difficult not to like him and even admire him, but I am not alone in regarding him as a notorious wet, am I?

• 21 Oct 2024 · St Helena: UK Immigration · Hansard source

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  The opportunities available to any migrant are vastly greater in Rwanda, aren’t they?

• 15 Oct 2024 · House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill · Hansard source

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  The Conservative Government introduced a comprehensive Bill involving the election of peers. I was the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Private Secretary at the time. It failed—notwithstanding the fact that I thought it was awful—because Labour withdrew its support for the timetable motion, which meant, as a constitutional Bill, it would have taken the Government’s entire timetable. For that reason, the Government withdrew the measure.

• 15 Oct 2024 · House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill · Hansard source

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  At least those peers were elected by someone, unlike all the other placemen.

• 14 Oct 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  T7. Does the Secretary of State share my incredulity that he has not been told the cost of leasing the facilities in the Chagos?

• 14 Oct 2024 · Points of Order · Hansard source

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  Further to those points of order, Mr Speaker. Alex Salmond was a great friend at university and also in this House. Despite political differences, I speak from personal experience when I say that he was a man capable of very great kindness. I shall certainly miss him, and Moira certainly has my condolences.

• 9 Oct 2024 · Renters’ Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  Changing tenants involves significant expense for both tenant and landlord—my interests can be found in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests—and the ability of a tenant to end a tenancy after two months presents a significant risk to the landlord, particularly in the student rental market, where re-letting a property within the academic year can present a considerable difficulty. Will the Secretary of State at least consider amendments in Committee to address that issue?

• 8 Oct 2024 · Energy Social Tariffs · Hansard source

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  Would it not have been better to put that proper package of support in place before the Government withdrew the winter fuel allowance from so many pensioners?

• 7 Oct 2024 · British Indian Ocean Territory: Negotiations · Hansard source

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  How does the cost of leasing compare with the savings that the Government are making on the winter fuel allowance?

• 10 Sept 2024 · Criminal Justice System: Progress of Cases · Hansard source

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  Perhaps too many barristers have become politicians, but however caused, how will the Minister address the shortage at the criminal Bar?

• 10 Sept 2024 · Criminal Justice System: Progress of Cases · Hansard source

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  13. What steps she is taking to help reduce the time taken for criminal cases to be heard at court.

• 30 Jul 2024 · Building Homes · Hansard source

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  New Forest district council has recently had its local plan agreed on the basis of local housing need. When will it be required to reopen that assessment on the basis of the right hon. Lady’s new algorithm, and when will the target become mandatory?

• 29 Jul 2024 · Public Spending: Inheritance · Hansard source

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  When the Chancellor’s legislation enables illegal entrants to leave their current accommodation, where will they go?

• 24 Jul 2024 · Windsor Framework Agreement · Hansard source

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  6. Whether he plans to review the Windsor framework agreement.

• 24 Jul 2024 · Windsor Framework Agreement · Hansard source

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  Will the Secretary of State commit to all the provisions of the “Safeguarding the Union” agreement?

• 23 Jul 2024 · Immigration and Home Affairs · Hansard source

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  It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I spent 13 years on these Benches in opposition, and I know how frustrating it can be. The reality is that when the sheer size of our defeat became apparent, I had some difficulty in coming to terms with it. In order to characterise it, I do not think one can do better than our late colleague Peter Brooke, who, when describing a similar calamity, said, “the battle of Isandlwana is lost, so now begins the defence of the mission station at Rorke’s Drift.” I had no doubt that the Government were always going to abandon the Rwanda scheme—they made that absolutely clear, and they have every right to do it—but I do think that the House will ultimately come to regret not having such a deterrent to hand. Had it been allowed to develop, it could have been such a deterrent. It was never a silver bullet but always part of a complex jigsaw of measures, of which, of course, the holy grail would be returns agreements. The previous Government should be utterly congratulated on the returns agreement they made with Albania, which has been a tremendous success. Such agreements are hard to come by. I remember being sent to negotiate with President Ghani in Afghanistan to try to get him to take a more helpful approach, given the blood and treasure that we were expending on behalf of his regime and the people of Afghanistan. He turned to me and said, “My priority is the young men and women who are taking the battle to the Taliban, and you want me to give time and resource to those people who’ve chosen to run away?” Well, it was a fair point—of course, ultimately he ran away himself. But I had little more success in negotiations on returns agreements with other Commonwealth members. These agreements are extraordinarily hard to achieve. I think that we would have wanted a third country where we could have settled people, because ultimately our ability to do so will be finite and limited. I want to draw attention to what the Prime Minister said yesterday in his statement, when he pointed out that he had just authorised a very significant increase in money to regimes in Africa. Ultimately, that has to be the long-term answer—the very long-term answer. We made an agreement back in 1970 with the wealthy countries of the world to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development in the economies of those countries from which so many people are now coming and will continue to come as long as the incentive of life being so much better here exists. It took us until the coalition Government in 2011 to actually honour that commitment to spending 0.7% of our national income, and we subsequently abandoned it—or certainly reduced it. If all the nations that had entered that agreement had honoured it and delivered it when they made it, perhaps the flow of population from the developing world would have abated substantially and we would be dealing with a different situation. Ultimately, it is all about jobs. Take Zaatari, the huge refugee camp on the borders of Jordan and Syria: a great city now, made from scratch. Those who are accommodated in Zaatari will find that the housing provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is of a substantially better quality than that available in many cities and shanty towns across the world. They will find that the World Food Programme will feed them, and their children will be educated by the UN children’s agencies. Perhaps most importantly, security will be supplied by the Jordanian forces and be of a much greater standard than they might enjoy in many other parts of the world. Despite all those advantages, people from Zaatari will spend every penny they have, and borrow, in order to escape and get the one thing that Zaatari cannot supply them: a livelihood and a future for their family. That is the driver of so much migration. Ultimately, we must return to that original policy, restore the 0.7%, and start building for the long term a world that is much more secure as a consequence of the economic developments available in those other places.

• 23 Jul 2024 · Immigration and Home Affairs · Hansard source

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  That is absolutely right, but we did not do that. We did not spend our money in that way. We supported people under desperate regimes, not by giving money to those regimes but by providing sustenance through third parties and NGOs, which delivered that. Some of the greatest damage done by much of our own press was how our international development aid effort was painted as destructive in the way that was just described. It never was. I return to my original point: we cannot take everybody, and we certainly needed somewhere else where they could have gone. Rwanda struck me as somewhere that that possibility could blossom.