Nick Timothy MP: speeches 2024

Speeches

• 21 Oct 2024 · Employment Rights Bill · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Dover and Deal (Mike Tapp) on his maiden speech. I look forward to the best dog in the world, Monty, taking on Scooby in the Westminster dog of the year competition. Everybody in the House knows that every Labour Government in history have ended with unemployment higher than when they started. Bills like this are part of the reason why, whatever the intention. If the purpose of this Bill really is to improve workers’ rights, and it is not just about paying back £40 million of union donations made over the past few years, why is there no provision addressing one of the worst labour market abuses in our country: substitution clauses, which allow delivery drivers to lend their identities to others? These clauses are in contracts from huge firms such as Amazon and Deliveroo, and they fuel worker exploitation and immigration crime. We know that hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom cannot work here legally, trade identities. By undercutting British workers and exploiting those with no right to be here, these companies are privatising profits and socialising the costs that they cause, so why is that issue missing from the Bill? Why will the Government do nothing about the international trading system? Countries aiming to run trade surpluses, such as China, hold down their labour costs and destroy industry in deficit countries such as ours. Trade wars, as two authors like to say, are class wars, and the Labour party usually likes to fight a class war, yet this Government want to flood Britain with cheap Chinese electric cars because of the Energy Secretary’s obsession with net zero. That is just one way in which our economic model needs to change, because while the Government’s characterisation of their inheritance is, I am afraid, cynical and wrong, there is a case for economic change, if only the Government were prepared to undertake it. I think the Business Secretary might be one of those capable of doing that, but I am not sure that some of his colleagues are. Today, Ministers could be launching a plan for reindustrialisation, for competitive energy prices, for domestic steel manufacturing and for a strategy taking in better infrastructure, skills and training, planning, regulatory reform and more— [ Interruption. ] Would the hon. Lady like to intervene?

• 21 Oct 2024 · Topical Questions · Hansard source

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  The Home Secretary told the House that by ending the retrospective element of the duty to remove she was saving £7 billion in 10 years. The impact assessment assumes that all those subject to the duty would have remained in Britain at a cost to the Home Office, but in his letter to me her permanent secretary said that the sum included the cost of sending the same migrants to Rwanda. I wrote to the Home Secretary about that on 1 September and I have raised it with the Minister for Immigration in Westminster Hall, but I have not had an answer. Can she explain that double counting, and if she cannot, will she apologise for using that statistic in the House of Commons?

• 17 Oct 2024 · Gambling: Harmful Effects · Hansard source

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  The horseracing industry, which is a British success story, is dependent on income from responsible gambling. I was glad to hear what the Secretary of State said about responsibly enjoying a flutter. This is nothing like some of the problem gambling that we see online, and the proportion of bets on horseracing that are deemed to be problematic is comparable to the proportion of problematic users of the national lottery. What plans does she have to reform the betting levy and the affordability checks that have been in train for some time?

• 17 Oct 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  An NHS foundation trust is advertising for psychologists to work with children with gender dysphoria. It says that applicants must practise in a gender-affirming manner. That runs completely contrary to what the Cass review said. May we have a statement from the Health Secretary on the implementation of the Cass review in the NHS?

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

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  Could the hon. Lady tell the House how many life peerages were given out by the California lobbyist Sir Nicholas Clegg?

• 10 Oct 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Many Members, including reportedly the Health Secretary, have grave concerns about the proposal to legalise euthanasia. Changing the law would change our relationship with the elderly, the infirm and the vulnerable, and risk a broadening scope and abuses of power. On such a serious issue, we need proper consultation and real debate, so instead of rushing this measure through in a private Member’s Bill on a Friday, will Ministers commit to a proper, considered consultation, and then make available Government time for us to carefully address this very serious matter?

• 10 Oct 2024 · Universities: Freedom of Speech · Hansard source

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  I appreciate the Minister’s constructive tone. She says that she does not want this to be a culture war issue. When the pause was announced by the Secretary of State, special advisers in her Department described the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act to the media as a Tory “hate speech charter”. Will the Minister disown those comments?

• 8 Oct 2024 · SEND Provision: East of England · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Lowestoft (Jess Asato) on securing this debate. I do not want to repeat everything said so far, but by and large the debate has been held in a constructive spirit; I associate myself with the constructive suggestions made by most Members. We all know of examples from our constituencies where special educational needs provision works. My constituency has small primary schools with specialist provision within a mainstream setting; I am thinking of Exning primary school, and specialist schools such as the excellent Churchill school in Haverhill, from which I welcomed pupils to Parliament just before the conference recess. But we all meet constituents who are suffering agony and anxiety caused by the difficulties of screening, assessing and planning for their children who are in need. I associate myself with the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman), who said that the challenge is much greater in rural and semi-rural settings due to issues such as difficulties with the rural transport network. We all know that provision across the country, including the east of England, has not been good enough for some time. We can talk about the reasons why there is growing demand for special educational needs provision, but the response needs to improve. There was already an improvement plan in place before the Ofsted and Care Quality Commission report on the provision of services in Suffolk was published, but there is now a SEND improvement board, a new strategy and a commitment of £4.4 million for SEND services for the year ahead by Suffolk county council. We need to be better nationally, as well as locally, on screening and assessment, and we must address the problems with EHCPs that hon. Members have set out. If the Government and the education team come forward with constructive proposals to improve those things—in particular, the problems with EHCPs—the Minister will receive a constructive and positive response from me and Conservative colleagues.

• 11 Sept 2024 · Port Talbot Transition Project · Hansard source

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  I thank the Secretary of State for his statement. As a supporter of industrial strategy, I welcome the idea of a steel strategy in the future, but I will ask a couple of specific questions on the detail. First, is it the Government’s policy that the domestic manufacture of primary steel is a strategic industry that must be protected and guaranteed? What do the Government intend to do about the sourcing, either domestically or through the import of coking coal? Earlier, he seemed to suggest that he would not intervene to support British Steel in Scunthorpe. Can he confirm that, if we lose that capacity, we may go five, six or seven years without steel manufacture in this country?

• 10 Sept 2024 · Illegal Immigration · Hansard source

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  I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) on securing this debate and on his excellent speech. I also congratulate the Minister on her appointment to the Home Office. She won the lottery with that job. The starting principle of a functioning immigration system is that it has to work in the interests of the citizens of this country and we must decide who comes here. Illegal immigration destroys this principle for all the reasons set out by my hon. Friend in his speech. That is why we must have no tolerance for the channel crossings, and why we need a policy that breaks the link between entering the country illegally and staying here for good thereafter. Just before the summer recess, the Home Secretary made a statement in which she set out the Government’s policy on illegal immigration, including getting rid of deterrents through deportation to third countries and scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove that was set out in the Illegal Migration Act 2023. She said that her policy was instead to consider the asylum claims of all illegal immigrants subject to the retrospective duty and admitted, in the impact assessment if not in her speech, that that meant granting asylum to up to 70% of them. I will come to the cost of that decision, but I want to address the Home Secretary’s claim about the cost of the previous Government’s policy. She claimed that by making the change, she would save the taxpayer £700 million a year for a decade. Labour MPs are repeating that statistic, not knowing that they have been sold a pup, because the claim is clearly ridiculous. After that statement, word soon reached me that Home Office officials were appalled that it had been used. If any Labour MPs want to dispute that, I suggest that their Ministers speak to Home Office civil servants as often as I do. I wrote to the permanent secretary on that news, and went through the impact assessment. The numbers were the result of what might be called the Reeves method, because they were a work of political fiction. We know, for example, that the Home Secretary’s calculation double-counted costs. On the one hand, Sir Matthew Rycroft in his letter to me said it included expenses for implementing the Rwanda policy, while on the other hand, the impact assessment assumed Rwanda would never be implemented. Indeed, the impact assessment assumed not a single migrant would be deported under the Conservative policy and that migrants would have stayed in hotels for 10 years, which is clearly an absurd proposition. However, the Labour policy excluded massive costs from welfare bills and categorised them as housing policy, which it admitted as “significant” and that it “could undermine…this impact assessment”, yet the results of the impact assessment were presented to the House of Commons as unquestionable fact. The impact assessment reveals the real Government policy: to deal with the huge number of claims by accepting them and to deal with the cost by hiding the numbers from the public in the welfare system. The Home Office admits that 63,053 illegal immigrants previously due to be deported will have their asylum claims heard instead, and up to 70% of them—that is 44,137 people—will be successful. But it also admits that, for those refused, “the scale and timing of removals is highly uncertain”, and that “the Home Office may continue to support a number of” them. These figures are just the beginning, because they apply to only one cohort of migrants, with the duty to remove unlikely ever to be implemented by Labour. Unless the Minister corrects me by naming a start date, the Home Office admits its policy “is expected to increase the number of asylum claims”, which “consequently increases…costs”. Instead of facing deportation, hundreds of thousands more migrants will stay here for good. The policy is to shift migrants from the Home Office budget, the costs of which are published clearly, to the welfare and local authority budgets, the costs of which are not published clearly. The impact assessment says: “Any asylum seekers who are granted asylum will have full access to…the welfare system”, and local authorities will also “incur costs”. So lacking in transparency is this approach that the impact assessment says the Home Office has “not been able to establish a generally usable figure.” That is obviously ridiculous. We know from studies in Europe that the average channel migrant will be a net lifetime recipient of public funding, not a contributor. In a Danish Government study, immigrants from the middle east, north Africa, Pakistan and Turkey were shown to cost a net £10,000 per year. A study at the University of Amsterdam calculated that, over a lifetime, the average asylum migrant costs the Dutch public more than £400,000. On that basis, for those granted asylum in just this one cohort, the lifetime cost of Labour’s new policy is £17.8 billion, which is far more than the bogus £7 billion figure cited by the Home Secretary, which she said was the cost of the duty to remove policy. Hundreds of thousands more people will be claiming asylum here in the next four to five years, so the final cost of the new Labour policy will be many multiples more expensive than that. That is the reality of the Government’s illegal immigration policy—more illegal immigration, not less, and vastly higher costs. For that, we will all pay the price.

• 10 Sept 2024 · Illegal Immigration · Hansard source

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  Can the Minister explain why, in calculating the figure the Home Secretary presented to the House of Commons—as part of the claim that scrapping the retrospective element of the duty to remove would save £700 million a year for 10 years—the impact assessment assumes absolutely no deportations to Rwanda at all? In a letter to me, the Home Office permanent secretary said that the cost of removing people to Rwanda is included in the number.

• 10 Sept 2024 · Winter Fuel Payment · Hansard source

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  Let us be absolutely clear about what has happened today: every single Labour MP who voted to cut the winter fuel allowance has broken their promise to the country. Pensioners know that before the election Labour denied that it was going to do this, but they might not know that the Chancellor had been planning it for 10 years. In 2014 she said: “we will cut the winter fuel allowance for the richest pensioners and means-test that benefit to save money”. —[ Official Report , 25 March 2014; Vol. 578, c. 174.] Are we supposed to believe that she changed her mind after that and then changed it back again shortly after the general election? I do not think so. There may be a case for means-testing, but the Chancellor is cutting the payment not just for the richest pensioners, but for pensioners on very modest incomes. She is also not making the case for it. She is asking the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to do her dirty work for her. If winter fuel payments are to be means-tested, surely the proceeds should go towards low-income pensioners and the cost of social care, but they are not. They are going on above-inflation pay rises for the likes of Labour donors ASLEF.

• 10 Sept 2024 · Winter Fuel Payment · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I would like advice from the Chair, please. Reportedly, more than 200 Labour MPs received more than £2 million in donations before the election from the trade unions. Before other Members give speeches about issues such as public sector pay, would it not be in order for them to declare that interest at the beginning of their speeches?

• 9 Sept 2024 · Government Policy on Health · Hansard source

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  How many meetings has Alan Milburn had in the Department? Will the Secretary of State place a list of all those meetings in the House of Commons Library? Knowing that the former Secretary of State has extensive financial interests in healthcare, did the Secretary of State ask him to declare those interests and publish them?

• 5 Sept 2024 · UK Steel Manufacturing · Hansard source

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  I do not think the Minister answered the question asked by the right hon. Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne), so let me repeat it. Do the Government consider the manufacture of primary steel to be a strategic domestic industry that must be protected, yes or no?

• 5 Sept 2024 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  In his recent letter to local councils, the Minister for Housing and Planning, the hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Matthew Pennycook) appeared to kill off the previous Government’s plan for Cambridge. Will the Minister come to the House and make a statement on the urgent need for improved infrastructure linking Cambridge to various communities, including Haverhill in my constituency, which desperately needs a rail link to Cambridge?

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

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  Earlier, the Chancellor quoted Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, but she omitted the end of his comments. He said that half of the spending hole she claims is public sector pay “over which govt made a choice”. That is the truth, is it not? The Chancellor does a good shocked face, but she chose to create her own spending hole, did she not?

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

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  Around three years ago, two of my constituents, Paul and Joanne Snodden, bought a new home in a residential park. The park turned out to have no licence and now, unable to sell apart from to the park owner, they stand to lose £100,000. Park owners often impose punitive increases in pitch fees, and there are complaints of basic maintenance failures. Could we have a debate on how to toughen laws and enforcement on residential parks?

• 22 Jul 2024 · Economy, Welfare and Public Services · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the other new Members on their excellent maiden speeches, in particular the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Brash), where I know his predecessor, Lord Mandelson, recommends the mushy peas. It is an honour to be called to speak for the first time. I pay tribute to the last MP for West Suffolk, Matt Hancock, who oversaw the delivery of the covid vaccines, a vital achievement for our country. Less well known is that Matt once rode in, and won, the Blue Square Cavalry Charge horserace in Newmarket, a feat that required him not only to be propelled forward by a thoroughbred horse at 30 miles per hour, but to train for three months and lose 2 stone. For all these reasons, not least the dubiousness of the idea that I have 2 stone to lose, I can assure the House that I will not be stepping into my predecessor’s stirrups. Newmarket is the best-known town in my constituency. It is most famous for horseracing, an international success story that brings thousands of jobs and hundreds of millions of pounds to the local economy every year. From Charles I to Charles III, racing gives West Suffolk its long connection to royalty, but unfortunately ours is not an unblemished record, for Newmarket was once the home of Oliver Cromwell’s new model army. Old Ironsides championed free expression yet persecuted his enemies. He attacked aristocratic privilege and patronage, but handed power to his cronies. Censorious, joyless and puritanical—it is like he wrote the Labour manifesto. Fortunately, we have left those days of self-denial behind, and from the Star in Lidgate to the Queen’s Head in Hawkedon, the Affleck Arms in Dalham to the White Horse in Withersfield, and many others, we have some of the best pubs in Britain. And we have plenty more besides: beautiful villages, vibrant towns and farms that feed the country; Anglo-Saxon settlements and ancient churches; rolling countryside and big Suffolk skies; dense forest and the world-famous gallops; businesses doing everything from seed drills to particle engineering; charities such as Reach in Haverhill and the day centres in Brandon and Newmarket; Highpoint prison near Stradishall; the airbases at Lakenheath and Mildenhall; and public servants working for their communities every day. I look forward to championing them all and addressing our challenges too, including dealing with flooding in Clare, Cavendish and elsewhere, and fighting the appalling decision to approve the Sunnica solar and battery farm, due to be built on high-quality agricultural land. In Brandon, lorry traffic is a problem. We need the Ely and Haughley junctions sorted to get freight on to the railways. In Mildenhall, where 1,300 new homes are coming, we need a relief road. We are not against new house building in West Suffolk—we have had 3,000 new homes built in the last five years—but we need attractive family homes in the right places. We need services and infrastructure to keep pace. We need to get tougher with the developers and reform the construction market. We need to drastically cut immigration, not just for the economic and cultural reasons that should by now be obvious, but to limit new demand for housing. Our largest town, Haverhill, has doubled in size in only 30 years, to almost 30,000 residents. It has an incredible community spirit, but the town centre is struggling. We need a new start for our high streets, and I will fight for a railway linking Haverhill to Cambridge. The development of Cambridge looms large for us, but I want us to embrace the opportunities, not just fear the risks. If we get it right, we have the chance to get better infrastructure, new investment and more jobs. That is why I wanted to speak in today’s debate. From potholes to public sector pay, the thread that runs through all our challenges is an inconvenient truth. While it is plainly incorrect to claim that the new Government have the worst economic inheritance since the war— [ Interruption. ] It is incorrect, but we are less prosperous than we often tend to assume. This is not a question of party politics, but of the decline and failure of our country’s long-established economic model. Put simply: we do not make, do or sell enough of what the world needs. Our £33 billion trade deficit—1.2% of GDP—means we sell off valuable assets and build up external debt to limit the current account deficit. We end up with less control over our economy, and more exposed to global risks and shocks. From low pay to regional inequality, poor productivity to the funding of public services, all the things we worry about are symptoms of this wider problem. We need to question economic theory, challenge Treasury orthodoxy and think beyond the intellectual limits of ideological liberalism. Theories like comparative advantage have led us to offshore industry and grow dependent on hostile states, like China. But international trade is neither free nor fair, and net zero cannot mean sacrificing our prosperity and security. Being a services superpower is a great advantage, but alone it is not enough. We need a serious strategy to reindustrialise, narrow the trade deficit and rebalance the economy. We need to change and, in the months and years ahead, I look forward to debating how we do so.

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

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  There were 1,360 submissions from interested parties against the Sunnica application in West Suffolk, and the technical report recommending against the application is 339 pages long. Has the Secretary of State visited the Sunnica site? How many hours did it take him to read all the submissions and evidence to make his own detailed technical and legal judgment to overrule them.