Lisa Smart MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Sept 2026 · Representation of the People Bill · Hansard source

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  Let me begin by putting on record my thanks to the Minister, who I very much welcome to her place. In particular, I thank her predecessor, the hon. Member for Chester North and Neston (Samantha Dixon), who has shown with her comments today the grace and thoughtfulness with which she conducted herself throughout the whole process. We did not agree on everything in the Bill Committee—indeed, all members of the Bill Committee did not agree—but we conducted our discussions with good grace and occasionally a hint of humour. I am grateful for the work that the other members of the Bill Committee put in, particularly my hon. Friend the Member for Guildford (Zöe Franklin), who led for us on all matters to do with candidate safety and candidates, given her hugely relevant experience as a member of the Speaker’s Conference. It would be remiss of me not to share the gratitude of the House for Philip Rycroft’s efforts in conducting his review, the recommendations from which have given this legislation more teeth than it started out with. I do not think it will surprise anyone, however, that we Liberal Democrats think much more could and should be done. The political freedoms and assurances we have relied upon for decades are increasingly vulnerable to insidious, hostile actors. We saw an entirely unnecessary by-election over the summer. It was a waste of taxpayers’ money and was brought about by a resignation whose circumstances are under investigation by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Our rules should not permit a Member under investigation to trigger a by-election and then walk straight back in here at the public’s expense, and that is precisely what new clause 79 in my name would prevent. However, I do not believe it was selectable, so I will move on. That saga was yet another example of how big money is infiltrating our politics, with millions of pounds paid to politicians, uncapped donations and direct payments for inflammatory social media posts. It is totally disfiguring our politics. We have to tackle big money wherever it comes from, and that is a major omission from the Bill. New clause 88 would require the Secretary of State, within three months of Royal Assent, to publish proposals for a royal commission to consider a cap on political donations and the level at which that cap should be set, and whether existing limits on campaign expenditure and the period over which they bite are still fit for purpose. It would require those proposals to cover terms of reference, membership and funding, and the commission would have to report within 12 months. It is a straightforward request. It does not demand or impose limits without buy-in. It does not ask any Member to sign up to a particular figure. It takes a conversation that has been going on for the better part of 20 years or more, and gives it a proper remit, a proper deadline and a proper independent home. I want to be fair to the Government, because over the summer things have moved in a positive direction. I welcome the Prime Minister’s words about the defending democracy taskforce yesterday, but we need to hear more detail about how it will function, particularly around money coming into political parties in and around our politics, how its recommendations will come into force and, importantly, when they will come into force. The threat is real, the threat is now, and urgent action is vital. We have tabled further amendments on money in politics. New clauses 9 and 10 would introduce barriers on who can donate, preventing donations from those who are or have been members of, or political advisers to, foreign Administrations and those convicted of promoting or inciting political violence. New clauses 11 and 12 would require candidates and parties to declare and mitigate the risk of foreign-linked donations. Taken together, they are a natural extension of the “know your donor” scheme, which this Bill enhances. We should know exactly who funds us, and the public have that right, too. Money is not the only way in which influence is bought. We now live in a world where a handful of people own the platforms and write the algorithms that decide what millions of our constituents see about politics every day. When the owner of a social media platform can openly discuss handing tens of millions of pounds to a British political party, the danger is in plain sight, and the Bill does not meet the moment. The Government chose to reject sensible amendments on deepfakes, AI-generated content and the clear labelling of digital campaign material. Those were not wrecking amendments; they were an offer of cross-party work on a threat that is moving faster than we are legislating. I ask the Government even now to commit to the real-time disclosure of donations and a publicly searchable database of every pound spent on online political advertising, so that voters can see who is trying to influence them and with whose money. That will be more important as we extend the franchise. The Lib Dems warmly welcome the introduction of votes at 16. Indeed, we have campaigned on it for decades, but we are concerned that the current voter registration system does not work well for young people. If we want votes at 16 to be a success, we need the voter registration improvements that the Bill enables to be implemented in time for the next general election. I would welcome hearing some reassurance from the Minister, when she is winding up, that they will be in place for the next general election. My final point is the one that, I feel, matters the most. This Bill tidies the rules of the game, but it leaves the game itself untouched. There is no silver bullet for fixing our politics—it requires will, consensus and graft—but one thing that is shared by dozens and dozens of Members across the House is the understanding of the need for fairer votes. We cannot have a conversation about representing the people without addressing the elephant in the room: we have a voting system that handed one party two thirds of the seats in this House on barely a third of the vote. Millions of people cast ballots that changed nothing and elected no one, and then they are told to have faith in the result. I therefore tabled new clause 8 to bring in proportional representation for elections across the United Kingdom. It details the way in which a fairer voting system could be implemented, and it is disappointing that the Government have not taken the opportunity the Bill presents to rise to the occasion. First past the post is unfair and unrepresentative, and lets Governments take voters for granted. No amount of tightening around the edges fixes a system that was out of date a century ago. Despite identifying the crisis of confidence in our political system in their 2024 manifesto, this Government have yet to back even modest steps towards making our voting system fairer, such as a national commission on electoral reform, as detailed in new clause—

• 2 Sept 2026 · EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK · Hansard source

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  My point is that there were no small boat crossings before the 2016 referendum. I think the hon. Gentleman is agreeing with me on that. British GDP is between 6% and 8% smaller than it would otherwise have been. Investment has been reduced by between 12% and 18%. Employment and productivity are each down by 3% to 4%. Estimates from the House of Commons Library, those well-known doughty remain campaigners, put the cost to the Exchequer somewhere in the region of £90 billion a year in tax revenue that is simply not there. Every Minister who stands at the Dispatch Box and says that money is not available is describing a hole that has been enlarged as a result of Brexit. That is £90 billion a year that could be used for projects across the country to support our constituents. It could be used to fund renovations to my Stepping Hill hospital, the rail services my constituents wait for every morning or cleaning up our waterways so that sewage stops being pumped into the Goyt or the Mersey. My hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Clive Jones) mentioned the nearly 2 billion extra pieces of paperwork that now sit on British firms—enough to wrap around the world 15 times. Tighter border restrictions with our European neighbours devastated our hauliers, with more than double the number of insolvencies seen between 2021 and 2025 than in the previous five years. In our food and farming sector, exports to the EU have fallen by 22% since 2018, which is close to £4 billion in lost trade. The question for the House is, “What do we do now?” Ministers know that the relationship with Europe is the biggest lever available to them. Their response so far has been to make small adjustments around the edges of a bad deal. They have ruled out the single market and a customs union, drawing red lines around two things that would make a material difference. On fisheries, the Government have made things worse. The EU came asking for a five-year extension to the arrangements in the 2020 trade and co-operation agreement, and this Government agreed to 12 years. That is a loss worth around £6 billion over the period at today’s prices, down not only to the previous Government but to this Labour Government. Being timid is a political choice, and it has political consequences. When mainstream parties refuse to name the cause of a problem, the field is left to those who offer easy answers and no substantive solutions. The Lib Dems are offering something different. We want a growth and defence partnership with Europe. That would mean joining the single market and a UK-EU customs union, so that our businesses can trade again without drowning in red tape. It would mean a proper UK-EU defence pact. We currently sit outside EU decision making and outside funding streams such as the European Defence Fund and the Security Action for Europe loan programme, at the precise moment when Vladimir Putin is testing this continent’s resolve and the White House is reneging on international commitments. We want a new European security council, British participation in SAFE and a European rearmament bank to support collective rearmament. Our security does not stop at Dover, and it never has. We are also calling for the UK to join the EU’s migration and asylum pact, so that we can return people who arrive by small boat to the first EU country they entered, and so that we can see the biometric data that tells us whether someone has already been refused asylum elsewhere. That is how we actually take back control of our borders, rather than shouting about it on a beach. Finally, we should fix the politics that produced this. A system that hands total power to a party with a minority of the vote and then dares it to govern for everyone will keep generating exactly this kind of instability. The Liberal Democrats want proportional representation through the single transferable vote at local and general elections. We want a second Chamber with a democratic mandate. We want the big money taken out of politics. We want the Electoral Commission protected from ministerial direction and serious measures against foreign interference in our elections and referendums. From the cost of living to our broken public services, the result of the 2016 EU referendum stands in the way of making things better, and we have to fix it. Ten years on, it is clear that it has negatively impacted the UK, and I would be really grateful if the Minister could tell us today just what it would take for this Government to move their red lines.

• 1 Sept 2026 · Sovereign Grant · Hansard source

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  The sovereign grant does not provide personal income for the King, the Queen or any member of the royal family. It funds the work of the institution, and the largest part of it funds buildings. Between 2025 and 2026, £67.5 million went on property maintenance alone, including the Buckingham Palace reservicing programme and the installation of more energy-efficient heating. These are heritage sites carrying a maintenance backlog that has built up over decades, and the purpose of the reservicing work is to stop a serious risk of fire and flood. We should, of course, take the action that is needed to protect these national heritage assets. The grant is also funding green infrastructure across the estate and better cyber-security, which, in the current international climate, is not an optional extra for any national institution. However, we should treat the increase as temporary in nature, and it is right that the sovereign grant will be readjusted once those projects have been completed. The Government have already committed to legislating for exactly that when the reservicing works finish. That brings me to a key issue: transparency. The taxpayer is funding this grant. Taxpayers are entitled to see where their money goes, and as the hon. Member for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) has already mentioned, Parliament is entitled to hold the Government and the Treasury to account for it. Some of that framework already exists, and it works. Under the Sovereign Grant Act, the royal household’s accounts are audited by the Comptroller and Auditor General and laid before this House, and the royal household sits within the National Audit Office’s value-for-money remit. But that is not the whole picture. We have an institution spending more than £130 million of public money a year, and its published accounts are the beginning and end of what the public can ask for. If one of my Hazel Grove constituents wants to know how a figure in the report came to be, there is no route for them to find out. May I encourage the Minister to let us know whether he has any plans to review the reporting requirements attached to the grant, so that Parliament and the public get spending detail at a level that allows genuine scrutiny? It is right that taxpayers will have questions about where and, importantly, whom this money goes to. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor holds no title, no office and no public role; as far as the state is concerned, he is a private citizen. As such, not a penny of this grant should reach him. Neither should any other taxpayer funding, and that has to include what happens at the end of his life. Frequently, members of the royal family have received publicly funded funerals, having either ceremonial funerals or state funerals. For context, the Queen Mother’s ceremonial funeral in 2002 cost more than £5.4 million, of which £4.3 million was spent on policing. Can the Minister confirm that no public money from the sovereign grant or any departmental budget will fund a ceremonial funeral, a lying-in-state or state honours of any kind for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor?