Ed Davey MP: speeches

Speeches

• 30 Oct 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. May I associate myself with your remarks and those of the Prime Minister about the right hon. Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), and thank him for his service? I wish him and the whole country a happy Diwali. Despite our political differences, I have always felt a certain kinship with him since the general election, when he was the only other party leader to get as wet as I did. [ Laughter. ] I am looking forward to debating the Budget with him and the Chancellor shortly, but may I wish him and his family all the best for the future? Next month’s summit in Baku is a chance for the UK to regain world leadership on climate change—a role disastrously lost under the Conservatives. As this is the final summit before countries must ratchet up their new Paris agreement targets for 2035, will the Prime Minister take this opportunity to seize back world leadership on climate change by committing today to support the targets set out this week by the independent Climate Change Committee and publishing a programme to deliver on them?

• 30 Oct 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I thank the Prime Minister for his reply. I hope we really can take that world leadership back again. Another issue on which the UK needs to show urgent leadership is the escalating war in Sudan. Tens of thousands of people have been killed, and 11 million Sudanese have had to flee from their homes. The reports of mass killings and horrifying sexual violence against women are truly stomach-churning. When the UK takes over the presidency of the UN Security Council this Friday, will the Prime Minister make it a priority to secure a new resolution on preventing future atrocities, including a no-fly zone to stop the Iranian drones?

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  When he was Secretary of State, did the right hon. Gentleman ask what proportion of overpayments were due to egregious fraud and what proportion were due to being a small amount over the earnings limit?

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I will let the right hon. Gentleman in, but then I do want to make some progress.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is absolutely right. I include young carers; indeed, I am a member of the all-party parliamentary group on young carers and young adult carers, and I invite him to join us. It is chaired by a well-established Labour Member. Young carers are very much part of our thinking, but for some, who will not be young—

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That this House recognises the remarkable contributions that the UK’s 5.7 million unpaid carers make to society and the huge financial challenges many face; notes with deep concern that tens of thousands of carers are unfairly punished for overpayments of Carer’s Allowance due to the £151-a-week earnings limit; believes that carers should not be forced to face the stress, humiliation and fear caused by demands for repayments of Carer’s Allowance; condemns the previous Government for failing to address this scandal; calls on the Government to write-off existing overpayments immediately, raise the Carer’s Allowance earnings limit and introduce a taper to end the unfair cliff edge; and further calls on the Government to conduct a comprehensive review of support for carers to help people juggle care and work. It is a great honour to open the first full Liberal Democrat Opposition day in 15 years. I assure the House that we will not waste our precious debates on the sort of political game playing to which Opposition days often fall victim. Instead, we will use them to focus on the things that really matter to ordinary people, and to tell Ministers directly about the real problems that our constituents face. That brings me to our first motion on unpaid carers, or family carers as I prefer to say. They are people looking after relatives, friends or neighbours, and they do a remarkable and important job. Looking after someone they love can be rewarding and full of love—whether they are a parent of a disabled child, a teenager looking after a terminally ill parent or a close relative of an elderly family member—but it is far from glamorous. Caring for a family member can be relentless and exhausting. As the House knows, I have been a carer for much of my life but, more importantly, I have also had the great privilege of meeting and hearing from thousands of carers in my constituency and across the United Kingdom. I have some understanding of the challenges that carers face every single day: the worries, the exhaustion, the lack of breaks and the financial difficulties, too. Britain’s carers deserve our support.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. The hon. Gentleman is of course right and I pay tribute to his constituent, who was lucky enough to be presented the award by Mr Speaker. He is right about the mental health of carers. NHS data shows that the mental health of carers is twice as poor as it is for the population at large because of the isolation, so that issue is absolutely a part of this debate.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the Minister for what she has just said, but will she confirm that the remit of the review will go further into the structure of carer’s allowance? Many of us think that the earnings limit is way too low, and the whole cliff-edge structure has to change. Can she confirm that the review will look at that?

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I made it very clear in my speech that there could be examples of fraud, so I ask the right hon. Gentleman to check the record. I could not have been clearer, and we have talked about this at length in other fora—indeed, we made it clear at the general election. I am afraid that the right hon. Gentleman has shown to the House that he failed to get a grip of this issue when he was Secretary of State. He recognises that the vast majority of overpayments were small amounts, often because the DWP, in which he was Secretary of State, did not pass on information to HMRC. I am afraid that he is digging a hole for himself.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will correct the record, because the unpaid carers’ break was brought in by the private Member’s Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain). It was not brought in by the Conservative Government.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that point. That should certainly be part of the review, but one or two other issues, which I will talk about, are critical to reform probably even before that. At just £81.90 a week, carer’s allowance is the lowest benefit of its kind. For someone doing 35 hours of caring a week—the minimum period for eligibility—that is just £2.34 an hour. It is not just the low rate of the carer’s allowance that worries me but the fact that the eligibility rules are inflexible and very badly designed, chief among them being the earnings limit of £151 a week. Even for someone on minimum wage, that is just 13 hours and 20 minutes a week. The earning limit operates like a cliff edge. As soon as someone makes £151.01 a week, they lose the whole carer’s allowance—every penny of the £81.90. It acts as a significant barrier and a major disincentive to work. It means carers on low incomes cannot work a bit more to help make ends meet, so it is bad for them, bad for the person they are caring for, bad for their employers and bad for the economy. But here is where things get worse. There are tens of thousands of carers who go slightly over the earnings limit, mostly without realising it. Maybe they pick up an extra shift, happen to get an end-of-year bonus, or understandably do not realise the way carer’s allowance operates in such a daft way. Even though the Department for Work and Pensions gets regular alerts from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs when people go over the earnings limit, it has not been telling carers and it keeps paying carer’s allowance until one day, out of the blue, the carer gets hit with demands to repay those overpayments, which may have built up over months and years due to the DWP’s own inaction. Back in July, I told the Prime Minister about one of my constituents, Andrea, who lives in Chessington. She is a full-time carer for her mum. Back in 2019, Andrea decided to go back to work part-time in a charity shop—mainly for her mental health, she told me. She informed the DWP at the time and it continued her payments. Five years later, it wrote to her and said that no, she now had to repay £4,600. Andrea says she feels “harassed, bullied and overwhelmed.” She now does just six hours’ unpaid work a month to avoid going over the earnings limit and getting into more debt. She says the whole thing makes her “want to give up work and give up caring.”

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  For carers who can receive carer’s allowance, which does not include young carers, it is a lifeline. Carer’s allowance is the main financial support available but, frankly, as the main way that we support family carers, it is not fit for purpose.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Carer’s Allowance · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Gentleman makes exactly the right point and as her MP I am pursuing that line of argument, but we need a change of culture and attitude at the DWP to be able to proceed with these cases on behalf of our constituents. She told me that the whole thing makes her want to give up caring and give up working. That is how affected she has been. Who is it helping, when carers feel like that? I am sure that someone, somewhere in the DWP or the Treasury, thinks this sort of penny pinching saves the Government money, but they could not be more wrong. It is millions of carers like Andrea who save the Government money: £162 billion a year, according to Carers UK, through the vital work they do for free. When badly designed Government policies fail to support carers and instead push them over the edge, the real cost—an enormous cost—is to taxpayers and the economy. There are so many stories like Andrea’s. Government figures suggest that more than 130,000 people have outstanding carer’s allowance debt, some going back years. According to the DWP’s own figures, last year alone there were 34,500 overpayments due to the earnings limit. We have heard how carers have even been threatened with prosecution. This is a terrible scandal: tens of thousands of carers becoming victims of a system that is supposed to be there to support them. Although the stories we have heard in recent months have been truly shocking, they are not new. The Work and Pensions Committee launched an inquiry into this issue almost six years ago, back in 2018. The National Audit Office published its own report in 2019. The last Government should have acted then, but they did nothing. I raised it with the last Prime Minister. He did nothing. Conservative Ministers failed to tackle it for the entirety of the last Parliament. They just passed it on to the new Government, as yet another part of their legacy. I raised the matter, therefore, at the new Prime Minister’s first oral questions in July. Although he was non-committal, I am genuinely pleased and grateful that Ministers have now announced a review, at least into the scandal of carer’s allowance overpayments. Whether that was in response to our motion, I will let others decide. I hope the Minister will say a lot more about the review when she speaks and how the Government are thinking about that. I hope the debate can be seen as the first input to, or kick-off of, that review. I certainly hope the Minister will make it clear that the review will not be a repeat of the type of review we had in the last Parliament, when Conservative reviews were set up primarily for delay and kicking issues into the long grass. As I hinted at during today’s Question Time, my concern about the review is that the evidence to make a decision is already well-founded, with two recent Select Committee reports and mountains of evidence immediately available from organisations such as Carers UK or Carers Trust, and the National Audit Office carrying out its second review in just five years over the last four months. I ask the Secretary of State, therefore, to reshape the review that she has announced, because it is self-evident that the vast majority of overpayments of carer’s allowance should be written off immediately. I accept that there may be a few cases of genuine fraud in which that would not be appropriate, but the DWP should not be persecuting tens of thousands of carers whose overpayments were caused by the crazy cliff edge in the current carer’s allowance system, and by the DWP’s own incompetence in failing to notify them of overpayments immediately. Some changes could be made to the rules that are just common sense, making it easier for carers to juggle work and care and thus boost our economy, such as raising the earnings limit and replacing the cliff edge with a taper. There are changes that do not need a long review; there are decisions that can be taken now, or at least very quickly. However, as our motion says, we need to go further for carers than these obvious and relatively simple decisions. The Government should conduct a full-scale review of all support for carers, so that we can make it easier for them to carry on caring and to juggle caring with work. That will be better for them, better for their loved ones, and better for our economy. I urge the House to pass the motion. Let us not allow carers to be forgotten and ignored any longer.

• 16 Oct 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I echo the Prime Minister’s tributes to Alex Salmond, Sir David Amess and Lily Ebert. I welcome the news that Ministers are going to review the carer’s allowance repayment scandal, after campaigns by carers organisations, The Guardian and the Liberal Democrats, culminating in our motion on the Order Paper today, but does the Prime Minister agree that the evidence needed for the review is already long established, and many of the decisions self-evident? Will he and his colleagues vote for our motion today, so that we can write off the overpayments, end the crazy cliff edge to the earnings limit now, and have a fuller review of the support that carers deserve?

• 16 Oct 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I thank the Prime Minister for that answer, and ask him that Ministers listen to the voices of carers throughout the review. Let me turn to the middle east. Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich has said that starving 2 million people in Gaza might be “justified and moral”. National Security Minister Ben-Gvir called settlers who killed a 19-year-old on the west bank “heroes”. After my visit to Israel and Palestine last February, having witnessed the damaged that those extremist Ministers in the Netanyahu Government are doing, I called on the last UK Government to sanction them. They refused, but we now learn that the former Foreign Secretary was considering it. Will the Prime Minister now sanction Ministers Ben-Gvir and Smotrich?

• 16 Oct 2024 · Access to Primary Healthcare · Hansard source

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  Other opticians are available.

• 9 Oct 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  Across this House, we all agree that we need to get our economy growing strongly again so that we can improve people’s lives and raise the money for our public services. The Liberal Democrats believe that one of the best ways of doing that is to improve our relationship with our European neighbours on things like trade, and I welcome the fact that the Prime Minister has made that a priority in his first few weeks, but what I just do not understand is that he has ruled out negotiating a youth mobility scheme with our European partners. This could be so good for young people, for businesses and for re-establishing that relationship. Will he reconsider?

• 9 Oct 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I am disappointed about the youth mobility scheme—maybe we can come back to that—but the Prime Minister is right to say that one of the many problems for our economy coming from the dreadful Brexit deal is the red tape that has been put on businesses. There are many examples of that, but a new example came to me earlier this week. It affects fishermen in the Falklands, who are having to pay huge amounts in tariffs to be able to sell their produce into the European market, or sail under a Spanish flag. When the Prime Minister renegotiates the trade deal, can he remember the overseas territories and ensure that British citizens fishing off the Falklands can sail proudly under the Union Jack?

• 7 Oct 2024 · Anniversary of 7 October Attacks: Middle East · Hansard source

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  I thank the Prime Minister for advance sight of his statement. On the anniversary of the horrific attacks in Israel, we remember the victims, the people taken hostage and their families, and we stand with the whole Jewish community. Earlier this year, I visited Israel and Palestine, and saw how both peoples were experiencing trauma. We must never forget the trauma of the hostages and their families. In Tel Aviv, I met Itzik Horn, a father still praying for his two sons, Yair and Eitan, to come home. We must urge all actors to take the steps most likely to get the hostages home quickly and safely. The past year has seen terrible violence in the middle east, a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and an appalling spike in hate crimes here in the UK. We must stand firm against antisemitism and Islamophobia, we must press for an immediate bilateral ceasefire to end the terrible cycle of violence and bring about lasting peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians, and we must do all we can to prevent a regional war in the middle east. UK forces rightly played their part in helping Israel to neutralise Iran’s outrageous attacks, and I hope that the Government will now try to convince Israel that keeping her citizens safe and secure is best achieved by restraint, not retaliation and the risk of a regional war. As we do that, let us take a tougher stance on Iran and all her proxies, from Hezbollah to the Houthis. Will the Prime Minister finally proscribe Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? We are horrified by the new crisis unfolding in Lebanon. Will the Government go further on humanitarian aid? Most importantly, we join the Prime Minister in calling for the cessation of rocket fire, the protection of civilians, and an immediate bilateral ceasefire, just like the one that we so desperately need in Gaza.

• 11 Sept 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I associate myself and my party with the earlier comments from the Prime Minister about our amazing late Queen, and join him in sending our best wishes to her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales. I do not think anyone could not have been moved by her powerful video, and we hope that she will make a full and speedy recovery. When it comes to fighting cancer, we know all too well that every day counts. In the last year of the last Government, over 100,000 patients waited more than two months just to start their urgent cancer treatment—the worst on record. Will the Prime Minister help boost cancer survival rates by guaranteeing that every patient can start their cancer treatment within 62 days?

• 11 Sept 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I thank the Prime Minister for that answer. I will look at the plans the Government are putting forward. Last night, Liberal Democrats voted against withdrawing winter fuel payments. We believe it is just wrong to balance the books by removing this support from pensioners, but we do understand that there are difficult choices to be made to clear up the appalling financial mess left by the last Conservative Government. One of the many reasons for that mess was the Conservatives prioritising tax cuts for the big banks, costing £4 billion a year. Will the Prime Minister instead reverse those cuts, so we can afford to support millions of struggling pensioners through this very hard winter?

• 4 Sept 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  I echo the Prime Minister’s words about the terrible tragedy at Grenfell. I welcome the inquiry and look forward to discussing the statement shortly. For the past 18 years, Norman has been a full-time carer for his wife, Ros, who has multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease. Earlier this year, he was forced to go back to work to earn the extra money for the cost of caring for his wife. As their income is just a few hundred pounds above the limit for pension credit, they are set to lose their winter fuel allowance, unless the Prime Minister listens to the Liberal Democrats and others and changes that plan. If he does not, what advice does he have for Norman and Ros, and millions of struggling pensioners, as they face rising heating bills this winter?

• 4 Sept 2024 · Engagements · Hansard source

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  We recognise the appalling financial problems left to the Prime Minister by the last Conservative Government, but no one understands the difficult decisions required to balance the books as much as unpaid family carers such as Norman. Many millions of pensioners have struggled over recent years thanks to the last Government—the number who cannot afford to heat their homes has doubled since 2019—so will the Prime Minister support our campaign for more urgent action to invest in insulation and renewables, so that we can help pensioners and all families make it cheaper to heat their homes every winter?

• 4 Sept 2024 · Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report · Hansard source

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  I thank the Prime Minister for his extremely powerful comments and associate my party with all of them. The Grenfell disaster is a tragedy that shames our whole society. The report lays bare failings of Governments of all parties over decades, and on behalf of my party, I am sorry. We must all learn from it and do everything we can to change the system, in order to prevent more horrifying tragedies like this from happening in the future. It is right that we pause today and remember the 72 people who lost their lives, as well as the survivors and bereaved families and friends who have fought so long and so hard for justice. This is their day. They have waited far too long to get the truth, and many will remain frustrated that even after today they will still be waiting for justice and meaningful action. Let me therefore raise three of the many issues that the families have raised. First, in order to get the justice that the families crave, criminality must be investigated, tried and punished, whether it is corporate manslaughter, fraud or misconduct in public office. Will the Prime Minister confirm that the police, prosecutors and courts will have all the resources they need to bring those responsible swiftly to justice? Secondly, what more can the Prime Minister do—what more can we all do—to bring about greater urgency when it comes to acting on all these recommendations, so that the report does not just gather dust on a Whitehall shelf? Even now, seven years on, essential work to make more than 2,300 buildings safe has not even started. Can the Prime Minister tell the House what more will be done to remove dangerous cladding as quickly as possible, forcing those responsible to pay, not the tenants and leaseholders? Finally, we must tackle the big systemic issues that come up time and again in such scandals, from Hillsborough to Horizon to infected blood. Like the victims of other scandals, the bereaved and survivors of Grenfell have called for a duty of candour on public officials, and we welcomed its inclusion in the King’s Speech. Can the Prime Minister tell us when that legislation will be published, and whether the duty will cover all public officials?