Joe Powell MP: speeches

Speeches

• 3 Apr 2025 · Gambling Harms · Hansard source

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  I recently met the family of Luke, a devoted husband and father of two and a passionate Leicester City fan. Luke developed a gambling addiction in 2018, and although he self-excluded and repaid debts with his wife’s support, he relapsed during the pandemic and tragically took his own life in 2021, with the inquest finding that his gambling disorder contributed to his death and that Betfair failed to act, and issuing a prevention of future deaths report to Betfair, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Gambling Commission. In the light of that tragic case and of calls today from more than 30 local government and council leaders for reform on betting shops, will the Secretary of State set out what action the Government are taking to restrict gambling advertising and to better protect people like Luke from gambling harms?

• 3 Apr 2025 · Gambling Harms · Hansard source

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  3. What steps her Department is taking to reduce gambling harms.

• 7 Mar 2025 · Protection of Children (Digital Safety and Data Protection) Bill · Hansard source

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  In the brief time available to me, I want to reinforce my tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister) for his excellent work in leading the Bill, which I have been proud to sponsor. In the hearings over the past few months, it has been eye-opening to see parents and campaigners face to face with tech executives, regulators and others, who have been either unwilling or unable to act to tackle this problem head-on. I will pass on three messages to the Minister in the two minutes that I have. On health, at a recent event with local campaigners in Kensington and Bayswater, a doctor shocked the room when she said that the impact of excessive phone and social media use on children is now the main concern among her paediatrician peers—not pollution, not smoking, not diet. It is the issue we are debating today that most worries paediatricians. Although there will always be calls for more evidence of causality, it is time, as others have said, to flip that narrative. We should challenge those who want to go slow on this issue to come up with any plausible alternative cause of the recent mental health trends. Next week, the House will discuss the huge rise in incapacity benefit, including for people with mental health challenges. If we want to tackle that issue, we must tackle the root causes such as the one we are discussing today, which will fail not only our children, but our future prosperity. In the last 30 seconds of my speech, I want to give one story of hope from Andrew O’Neill, headmaster at All Saints Catholic college in north Kensington, who was recently awarded headteacher of the year. When he saw what had happened post-covid, with that toxic combination of isolation and smartphone addiction, he extended the school day, making it a voluntary 12-hour school day, with breakfast at 7 am and supervised study classes, cooking and extracurricular activities in the evening. He has managed to break that cycle—he is a pioneering head. I want that for every child in the country, not just those students. The final word goes to Zayneb, who attends school in my constituency, and who has been watching from the Gallery all day. She said to me: “You say you’re just going to check a message, but suddenly you’ve fallen into the black hole of posts, YouTube videos, and endless scrolling. Next thing you know, two hours have passed, and you’ve done nothing productive.” She asks whether this is truly the future we want for our children, or whether we will look back and regret it. Her message is that young people want control over their screens, not the other way around, and they need our help to make that happen now.

• 26 Feb 2025 · Grenfell Tower Inquiry: Phase 2 Report · Hansard source

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  I thank the Deputy Prime Minister for her statement today and the Prime Minister for his statement on 4 September, which made it clear that the lessons from Grenfell are central to this Government’s missions. Today is another painful step towards truth, justice and change for the bereaved families of the 72 people who lost their lives at Grenfell, the survivors and the community in my constituency of Kensington and Bayswater, many of whom have joined us today. I pay tribute again to their strength and resilience. The fight for justice, now nearly eight years long, will continue after today, and every day, until we have criminal prosecutions and true accountability for those responsible, including those companies referenced in the inquiry report. I know the Government have looked seriously at the inquiry recommendations, and I welcome the commitment to meaningful change across all of them, but too often recommendations from public inquiries fail to be implemented. Indeed, if the lessons from previous fires had been learned, including at Lakanal House in 2009, then lives would have been saved—this was avoidable. Will the Deputy Prime Minister assure me that the Government will consider a strong oversight mechanism to ensure accountability for implementing what has been set out today, so that it lasts beyond any one Government and leads to real change? Will she also provide further detail on how she plans to ensure accountability for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, given their culpability before, during and after the fire? The council’s culture desperately needs to change and there needs to be an improvement in the quality of services in our community today.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Social Media Use: Minimum Age · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his private Member’s Bill, which I wholeheartedly support. On the subject of evidence, pilots are increasingly being undertaken, such as the one in the “Swiped” documentary that was referenced earlier. I met 70 parents at All Saints Catholic college in my constituency two weeks ago to discuss this topic, and they have seen, from the school’s own evidence base, the impact of a much stricter smartphone policy. We are starting to see both the evidence of the harms, as my hon. Friend talked about, and interesting pilots that show the improvements that could be achieved by measures such as the internet age of consent and a stronger policy in schools.

• 6 Jan 2025 · Frozen Russian Assets: Ukraine · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member is absolutely right. There are things the UK can do to be the trailblazer and there are things we need to do in partnership with our international partners, and shortly I will move on to how I think we can do more on the assets specifically. I also want to take the opportunity to welcome the personal and relentless campaign by the Foreign Secretary and the Minister in relation to sanctions, including the recent action on the shadow fleet. However, in order for those measures to be fully effective, we must ensure that sanctions cannot be evaded, and there are still loopholes that need to be closed. My hon. Friend the Minister will know that I have been following closely the progress of our overseas territories and Crown dependencies in finally following the will of Parliament by establishing public registers of company ownership, allowing us to follow the money and detect where sanctions evasion may be taking place, for example in places such as the British Virgin Islands. It also means that we need to consider incorporating trust-owned property into our registers of overseas entities, ensuring that trusts cannot be used to conceal property that could be subject to sanctions. As we have said, our residents deserve better than living in these communities hollowed out by wealth and built on corruption, where my constituents are suffering at the sharp end of London’s housing crisis. In the next-door constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Chelsea and Fulham (Ben Coleman) there is the case of Chelsea football club. Over two years ago, Roman Abramovich was forced to sell the club, with approximately £2.5 billion pledged to humanitarian programmes for victims of the war, yet not a single penny of that money has been spent. Those Chelsea funds amount to five times the UK’s total humanitarian assistance to Ukraine since 2022, and they remain stuck in an escrow account. That is a travesty, given that releasing those funds would not cost the British taxpayer a penny. It would save countless lives, at a time when 15 million people require urgent assistance in eastern Ukraine alone and humanitarian agencies face a shortfall of £1.3 billion. I welcome the UK’s leadership in the G7 on securing the additional $50 billion of support to Ukraine using the profits from the holdings of immobilised Russian sovereign assets, with over £2 billion coming from the UK’s share. We have led on sanctions, we have led on freezing assets and we have led on mobilising the interest on assets, and now I believe it is time for the UK to lead a coalition of willing nations to take decisive action to seize those sovereign assets in full.

• 21 Nov 2024 · Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Lloyd Hatton) for securing this important debate. I declare an interest, as I spent more than a decade working on open government transparency and accountability around the world, supporting journalists and civil society to hold Governments to account, often in countries where people could be locked up for speaking truth to power. Indeed, I worked as an investigative journalist reporting on corruption in Uganda many years ago, standing up to people who wanted to silence our stories. I begin by recognising and paying tribute to the brave reporters, investigative journalists and victims of SLAPPs in the UK and around the world. People look to us to lead by example on democracy and free speech—I thank the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale) for all his work on media freedom—but our leadership is undermined by the use of these lawsuits to harass, intimidate and silence critics of the corrupt and powerful in this country. As we have already heard, the UK legal system has become fertile ground for SLAPPs, particularly for those who wish to conceal money laundering and economic crime. A survey by the Foreign Policy Centre, to which my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset referred, found that international reporters on financial crime and corruption face as many threats of court action in England as they do from all other European countries and the US combined. Other Members have mentioned the case of Catherine Belton, the investigative journalist who received multiple legal threats following the publication of her book, “Putin’s People”. Four oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich, who owns frozen assets in my constituency, and a Russian state oil company launched lawsuits against her and her publisher HarperCollins. Abramovich sued over a number of claims, including that he bought Chelsea football club on Putin’s orders. That libel was settled, but had that trial gone ahead, the legal bill would likely have exceeded £10 million. Similarly, the journalist Tom Burgis faced legal action for his book “Kleptopia” from the mining company the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation. ENRC sued Burgis personally and also targeted his publisher, again HarperCollins. It even went so far as suing the Financial Times over an article related to Burgis’s book. The defence for Burgis and his publisher cost nearly £340,000. As the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) mentioned, many organisations without that financial firepower would never be able to fight those lawsuits as the Financial Times did. That claim was dismissed by the judge, but had the case gone to trial and been lost, the estimated costs including ENRC’s legal fees and damages would have risen to £1.5 million. For these journalists, the mere threat of losing their home or public disgrace shows how SLAPPs are not just about winning cases in court; they are about silencing dissent and a chilling effect on free speech. It is welcome that there is support from across the House on this topic. Provisions introduced through the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 were a welcome step. However, those measures apply only to cases involving economic crime and have not yet been fully implemented in the civil procedure rules. We must move swiftly to enact those provisions so that, in cases around corruption and kleptocracy, people cannot exploit the UK legal system to silence those who seek to expose their crimes. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith and Chiswick (Andy Slaughter) and the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) mentioned, we must go further. I warmly welcome the Prime Minister’s pledge just last month in an article in The Guardian that the Government will “tackle the use of Slapps to protect investigative journalism”. I turn to perhaps the most harrowing recent example of the danger posed by SLAPPs: that of Mohammed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, which is in my constituency of Kensington and Bayswater. In September, the BBC aired allegations that al-Fayed raped five women and sexually assaulted over a dozen others while they worked for him. Since then, over 200 women have come forward with allegations, but, for decades, efforts to hold al-Fayed accountable were thwarted by legal threats and intimidation. As far back as 1995, Vanity Fair published an article about al-Fayed that detailed how he had sued The Observer over a story about the sources of his wealth. Other journalists were also threatened or sued. At the time, the journalist Maureen Orth wrote: “All critical reporting outside The Observer virtually stopped”. Allegations in the press of sexual abuse were suppressed. In 2008, The Mail on Sunday prepared a report stating that al-Fayed was under investigation for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old. Legal threats forced it to remove his name and refer instead to a “senior Harrods executive”. That is how SLAPPs work—they do not just protect reputations; they shield individuals from accountability and allow abuse to continue unchecked. Al-Fayed died before he could face justice. Imagine how many women’s lives would not have been ruined if anti-SLAPP legislation had been in place and journalists had been able to report freely on the case. My thoughts are with all the victims of Mohammed al-Fayed; I am sure the whole House will join me in that. Their bravery in coming forward now deserves our utmost respect. It is not least for them that we must ensure that men like al-Fayed can no longer use these lawsuits to conceal their horrific crimes. I ask the Minister: how can we ensure that this Parliament will act decisively to finish the job, following the Prime Minister’s commitment? As I mentioned, the current economic crime legislation is a step forward, but the existing SLAPPs provisions must be implemented swiftly and the scope of provisions must go further to cover other forms of wrongdoing, including sexual misconduct, war crimes and harassment, as we have heard from Members across the House. First, further legislation in this Parliament will be needed to ensure that, for example, we have a filter mechanism that empowers courts to dispose swiftly of SLAPPs without the need for a subjective inquiry into the state of mind of the SLAPP filer. Where there may be ongoing abuse, there must be a very high threshold. Secondly, there must be penalties that are sufficient to deter the use of SLAPPs and provide full compensation to those targeted. Those penalties should take into account both the harm caused to the defendant and the conduct and resources available to the claimant. The level playing field argument needs to be made clearly. Finally, there must be protective measures for SLAPP victims, including cost protections, safeguards and measures to reduce the ability of SLAPP claimants to weaponise the litigation process, including against investigative journalists. SLAPPs are not just a legal tactic; they are weapons against transparency, accountability and justice. We have the power and the responsibility to ensure that the UK legal system cannot be hijacked by the corrupt and powerful. We must ensure that those trying to uncover crimes and corruption of the wealthy and powerful—journalists, academics and whistleblowers—are protected and not persecuted. Let us send a clear message today as a united House that the UK will no longer be a safe haven for those seeking to silence their critics.

• 19 Nov 2024 · Ukraine: 1,000 Days · Hansard source

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  I thank my right hon. Friend for his personal and relentless leadership on sanctions against those aiding and abetting Russia’s illegal invasion. He will agree that it is vital that those sanctions are well enforced. In his review, will he include the credible allegations of sanctions evasion via Hong Kong? Closer to home, will he do his utmost to end the continued delay to the release of the £2.5 billion from the sale of Chelsea football club, which remains untapped at a time when the humanitarian need is so high?

• 22 Oct 2024 · Ukraine · Hansard source

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  I warmly thank the Secretary of State and the full ministerial team for their hard work mobilising the additional money from frozen Russian sovereign assets. I hope that other countries will follow UK leadership on this. In mobilising every tool across the Government, and with winter approaching, may I ask the Secretary of State to continue the push to realise the assets from the sale of Chelsea football club—the £2.5 billion from Roman Abramovich that could go towards humanitarian needs, which are also increasingly urgent in Ukraine?