Kieran Mullan MP: speeches

Speeches

• 29 Jul 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  A few days ago, the Home Office published a notice about the use of the Northeye detention centre in my constituency, telling residents very little except that no decision had been made. As a matter of urgency, will the Home Office publish what options it is considering for the centre’s use and commit to a timetable for telling residents when it will come to at least a provisional decision that I and my constituents can feed into?

• 29 Jul 2024 · Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill · Hansard source

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  Let me point out to the hon. Gentleman that we also saw an increase of more than 89% in passenger numbers on our railways, and a record level of investment. If taxpayers in other countries want to invest in our railway services, I welcome that. As the shadow Secretary of State said in her opening remarks, we have proved our lack of adherence to ideology by running, when necessary, a number of private sector operators. The point that the Labour Government have to answer is this: if they are so concerned about Avanti and other private sector operators, they have the necessary powers and could do that tomorrow. If they are so convinced of their ability to sort all this out simply through nationalisation—if they are so convinced that Avanti’s performance is one that requires them to step in—let them do it tomorrow. They are not in opposition any more, so they can take steps to do things that they criticise us for not doing. However, I am afraid that this is the same old Labour: more government good, private sector bad; unions first, passengers last. We on this side of the House have seen it and heard it all before, and we will make sure that everyone knows what Labour has spent its time focusing on and what it has put first when legislating here, politics and ideology, instead of focusing on what will actually make a difference to passengers.

• 29 Jul 2024 · Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill · Hansard source

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  The challenge that Labour now has to face is whether they choose taxpayers or fare payers to meet the burden of the cost of the railways. In fact, in recent years we kept rail fare rises below inflation, and we have yet to hear a similar commitment from the Government. The impact assessment on the policy is very clear about what the Government have committed to achieve: absolutely nothing. It says it in black and white, on page 3: “specific quantified targets for each objective have not been set”. So clearly that leaves us on the Conservative Benches to hold them to account. I have a number of questions that I hope the Minister can address in his closing remarks. First, what will be the exact timetable for renationalisation? We might assume that the Government are rushing to do this so that they can begin with Greater Anglia and West Midlands Trains in September, but all they have said is that they want all the contracts nationalised by October 2027. The Minister will understand the uncertainty that will create for the sector, so can he confirm a more detailed plan to the House for making use of the powers they are asking for? Secondly, what will be the approach on nationalising terms and conditions? The Minister will know there are a variety of working practices across the railway network, many of them clearly not in the best interests of passengers and taxpayers—for example, the varied approach on mandatory Sunday working, where clearly passengers would be better served by that becoming standard; or annual leave, where again passengers would experience less delays and cancellations if drivers were required to give a reasonable amount of notice. Will the Government introduce a standard contract that prioritises the terms and conditions across the industry that will benefit passengers and taxpayers, or will they be letting the unions dictate a standardised contract that puts the unions first and passengers last? Thirdly, what plans does the Minister have to secure increased passenger numbers, by how much and by when? We have seen a huge increase in passenger growth since the introduction of the train operating companies. What will take the place of contract incentives to secure that growth in future? Fourthly, on modernisation, people up and down the country have seen the explosion of technology into our workplaces, but all across the network modernisation is blocked and frustrated with demands of more money from the unions for the introduction of technology. What plans do the Government have, as they directly take over running the railways, to ensure that technological innovation can be implemented across the network without undue barriers or union demands getting in the way? Fifthly, when it comes to funding, how will they be reallocating the theoretical money saved? They argue they will save £150 million from management fees. Reinvesting that across track and train would mean, in total, a 0.5% to 0.75% increase in the overall annual budget. They need to tell us what exactly it is they will be doing with that money that is apparently going to radically improve our railways. Sixthly, what are the balance sheet implications? The franchising model allowed the purchase of new trains and other investments to be made with no impact on public debt. Will Labour be adding those costs to public debt in future as yet another excuse for their inevitable tax rises? Finally, what are the Bill’s implications, direct or indirect, for open-access operators? Whatever the Government may say, I am afraid that the implication of their words and actions is that they do not want the private sector running train services, so are they going to turn their sights on those operators next? If they truly believe in what they are doing—if it is not just designed to appease the left wing of their party—they will have to justify their own inconsistency. It seems pretty clear that this, the Government’s political priority, is the wrong approach at the wrong time. They should be focusing on getting their union backers to stop frustrating reform of our railways. They should be focusing on taking forward our plans for Great British Railways. They should, at the very least, be transparent with the public about the implications of this rushed plan for fares, punctuality and reliability. There is consensus in the House that a new way of working was needed, and we had begun the process of bringing that forward, but Labour Members are more concerned with re-fighting the political battles of the 1970s and 1980s. Whatever they may say, these are the same old ideas, this is the same old ideology, and this is the same old Labour party.

• 29 Jul 2024 · Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and congratulations on your new role. I want to begin by paying tribute to the previous Rail Minister, my constituency predecessor Huw Merriman. I saw at first hand how hard he worked with Members across the House to deal with their transport issues, and I have since come to learn how hard he also worked as a constituency MP. It is a pleasure to wind up this debate for the Opposition and to have sat and listened to another set of accomplished maiden speeches across the House. We heard speeches from the hon. Members for Hertford and Stortford (Josh Dean), for South Ribble (Mr Foster), for Taunton and Wellington (Mr Amos), for Stevenage (Kevin Bonavia), for High Peak (Jon Pearce), for Thornbury and Yate (Claire Young), for Smethwick (Gurinder Josan), for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner), for Melksham and Devizes (Brian Mathew), for Watford (Matt Turmaine), for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee), for Crewe and Nantwich (Connor Naismith), for Shipley (Anna Dixon) and for Blackpool South (Chris Webb). There were excellent speakers all round, but I will leave it to the Minister to pay detailed tribute to Members of his party. A consistent theme was the importance of family, which I strongly agree with. It was slightly surreal to hear my successor in Crewe and Nantwich pay tribute to me, and I thank him for his kind words. Sadly, I am not sure what I got wrong because no one there ever asked me if I had finished school before I asked for their vote. To continue with the rail puns, I am sure that he will be a worthy successor to me in Crewe and Nantwich, rather than just a replacement service. On the Opposition Benches it was helpful to hear from the former Rail Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton). She has first-hand experience of the recent changes to our railways, and she explained clearly how this ideological approach is ignoring the reality on the ground, where the franchises should be the focus of the Minister’s attention. She asked where this is leading, and I noted that the Secretary of State referred to the work that the Government will do on the supply chain. Other Members have related their concerns about rolling stock. This is the beginning of the end when it comes to a flourishing rail sector with all sorts of people playing their part. It is clear that we all want to secure better services for passengers alongside value for money for taxpayers. Whatever our differences, we agree on that. The question is how we do it. The catastrophic impact of the covid-19 pandemic has forced a rethink—a necessary and important one. During the pandemic, the previous Government demonstrated clearly their commitment to the railways and to railway staff, providing large amounts of public money to keep the railways running and keep railway staff in their jobs. But that period also hastened the decline of the traditional franchise model as we know it. Passenger journeys plummeted and while there has been a significant recovery travel patterns have changed. That is why we conducted a major review of our railway services and how they operate, and suggested a change of approach as outlined by the shadow Secretary of State during her opening speech. That change of approach, as we heard today, is one the new Government are taking forward in many areas, but what we also heard today is that they are bringing with them not a passenger-first policy, but an ideology-first policy. Their priority is to ban the private sector from operating our main train services. Of all the things they say need doing, and with 14 years of opposition to come up with a list of what needs doing first, they have nationalisation, even though, as the Secretary of State said, it will not make train tickets cheaper or end the strikes. In fact, it is worth reading out the complete non-commitment on rail fares that Labour makes in its plan. It says it wants prices “kept, wherever possible, at a point that works for both passengers and taxpayers”. I can imagine the civil service pen of Sue Gray hovering over that particular sentence. It really is an exemplar of Labour’s modus operandi: using a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. Reformed ticket prices, reformed working practices and increased reliability—that is what all our constituents want, and the consequence of their rush to implement their ideology is that they brought forward this plan without any evidence for why it will deliver any of that.

• 25 Jul 2024 · Criminal Law · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Member thinks that the Labour Government are now going to have to release 5,000 prisoners they would not want to release, how would he describe the fact that the previous Labour Government had to release 80,000 prisoners they did not want to release?

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

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  I begin by congratulating the hon. Member for Ashford (Sojan Joseph) on his maiden speech, in which he spoke about his constituency with passion. Having NHS experience myself, I welcome any Member with frontline experience of our public services, which I am sure he will put to very good use during his time in the House. I welcome the opportunity to speak in today’s debate on immigration and home affairs, which are two areas that are important to me. I believe that how we tackle illegal migration will be a totemic political issue in the coming decades, not just because of its probable global scale but because it will test whether Governments in the UK and elsewhere are willing to face down often well-meaning but misplaced ideas about how best to protect the rights and welfare of individuals while preserving community cohesion and overall fairness in society. Criminal justice was one of my primary reasons for wanting to come to this place because, despite recent good progress under the previous Government, I feel that our criminal justice system does not do enough to secure justice for the victims of serious crime. At the end of 2023, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the number of people who had been forced to flee their home stood at 117 million. Irregular migration to Europe is rising. According to the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, there was a significant increase in irregular border crossings last year, estimated at approximately 380,000 people, driven, it says, by economic, social and security instability in parts of Africa. Over the last 15 years, Frontex has detected 1.4 million irregular border crossings into the EU. The United States has seen even bigger increases of migrant flows from South America. The question is what to do about it. First, I do not demonise people who make the journey—that is something we should avoid. People naturally want to improve their lives and their family’s lives. For those arriving from conflict zones, their original motivation for leaving was, of course, to protect themselves, but Governments and politicians cannot afford the luxury of blind sympathy for people in difficult circumstances. We have to act rationally. What is sustainable? What are voters in democratic countries, who have to pay to provide refuge for people, willing to accept? I supported the Rwanda plan because I believed it was both fair and rational. Right now, who gets asylum in this country and who the British taxpayers pay to support is determined by the ability of people to make the journey into Europe and the UK. That is not fair. I believe that the agencies that placed people in Rwanda for re-homing were against the plan, because they failed to move with the times in understanding the changing nature of the issue. This is no longer the same problem that the European Convention on Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights and the refugee agencies were set up to address. The scale of the problem has, and will, continue to grow. There is a fear that if the UK implements such a policy, as Australia did, it will become more and more difficult for anyone to apply successfully for asylum in a western country. I understand that concern, but these agencies and well-meaning human rights advocates need to wake up to what will happen if we do not control these movements of people. We will see a surge in far right support and risk even more unpalatable solutions. Providing safe and legal routes is, by no means, an answer. Whatever safe and legal routes we set up will have criteria and, inevitably, not all people will be able to make it here on that basis. The fit and young will continue to make small boat crossings to overcome that barrier, so we will be right back to where we started. Labour may have some short-term successes, for example on some obvious thing we may not have done when it comes to tackling gangs, but let us look at Labour’s track record. Labour Members opposed all of our measures to increase sentences for people trafficking and the Prime Minister himself opposed the deportation of foreign criminals. That is not an encouraging track record. I wish them luck in the proposals they have put forward, but none represents a sustainable solution. As a number of EU countries have recognised, moving people and offshore processing are the way forward. I pay tribute to the good progress we made on crime and justice in the previous Government. We introduced a whole-life tariff for premediated child murder. We introduced Harper’s law, a mandatory life sentence for the manslaughter of emergency service workers. Importantly, we reformed Labour’s halfway release, bringing it up to two thirds for the most serious offenders. There is no doubt that the pandemic, the associated court backlog and the increase of thousands of prisoners being kept on remand have made other difficult decisions necessary. I take the Justice Secretary at her word when she says these are “temporary” solutions, although if she had sunsetted them she might have had more credibility. However, I send her my goodwill. More generally, there is an intellectual snobbery towards people who think the punishment of offenders is a public good, a positive thing that is necessary for the functioning of our society. In my experience, the Ministry of Justice is happy to focus on the experience of victims but not so much on whether they actually get justice. I will continue to campaign and push this Government, as I did the last Government, to move the whole-life sentence for child murder away from just significant premeditated child murder to all child murder. We will all have been horrified by stories of parents murdering their own children, very often not in premeditated circumstances. I think people like that deserve to face justice with a whole-life order. I will also campaign on the use of life sentences. The term is misleading, often reported as jail for life, when it almost never is, which is an insult to victims. Those are my priorities. I will welcome the new Government’s progress in those areas, but I will be there as a sceptical champion for victims of crime along the way.

• 22 Jul 2024 · Border Security and Asylum · Hansard source

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  I know the Labour party managed to go an entire election campaign without answering this question, and the Home Secretary failed to answer it again when asked by the shadow Home Secretary, but I will give it one more try. Where does the Home Secretary intend to send failed asylum seekers from Afghanistan, Syria and Iran?

• 18 Jul 2024 · Prison Capacity · Hansard source

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  I welcome the Lord Chancellor to her post. I just want to push her slightly on the description of this scheme as a temporary scheme. Whatever she may say, the legislative impact of what the Government are doing will be a permanent change. If she wants to be subject to scrutiny and to have a temporary scheme, there is absolutely no reason why she cannot sunset the legislation to be a genuinely temporary change, and come back later if she thinks she needs to reintroduce it. That is a way to welcome scrutiny and be true to what she says about its being a temporary scheme.

• 18 Jul 2024 · Post Office Horizon Scandal · Hansard source

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  The legislation that we passed was a blanket measure. It might be clear to us who is or is not included, but for the individuals affected it will not necessarily have been clear. Will the Minister update the House on the progress that has been made in identifying them and writing to them to confirm that their convictions have been quashed?

• 18 Jul 2024 · Points of Order · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. In the statement on prison capacity, the issue of the Friday release of prisoners was raised. I recognise it was raised by hon. Members sincerely and with good intentions. However, private Members’ Bills are an incredibly important part of the work of this House, something we all recognise and value, and during the previous Parliament the former Member for Barrow and Furness steered through, with cross-party support, the Offenders (Day of Release from Detention) Bill, to stop the routine release of prisoners on a Friday. I seek your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, on how we can ensure that the record accurately reflects the incredibly important work on that private Member’s Bill, which contributed to that issue and was not mentioned in the statement earlier.

• 18 Jul 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  In one of her first acts, our new Deputy Prime Minister cut “Levelling Up” from her Department’s title. The Leader of the House will know that there are dozens of town boards up and down the country that are populated by community leaders, business leaders and charity leaders. Whether it was intended or otherwise, the change has genuinely caused anxiety among many of them about whether their funding might also be cut in future. Can we have an urgent statement in the House so that the new Deputy Prime Minister can reassure them that the levelling-up funding they are due to receive will still be delivered?

• 18 Jul 2024 · Clean Energy Superpower Mission · Hansard source

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  In the last Parliament, I was lucky enough to be the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on deep geothermal. I felt that we made good progress in convincing the Government of its merits in helping the climate change transition. Will the new Secretary of State commit to a meeting with the REA—the Association for Renewable Energy and Clean Technology, which acts as the secretariat for the APPG—and me to see what more we can do to convince the new Government of the role that deep geothermal can play?