Roger Gale MP: speeches

Speeches

• 13 Mar 2025 · Farming · Hansard source

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  I would like to take the right hon. Gentleman back to the point that he was making before he was interrupted. Earlier today, at Business and Trade questions, the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) asked what the Government are doing to assist the rural economy, but answer came there none. Is it not the case that the rural economy is interlinked and that if we damage one part of that economy—farming—we damage all of it? On the right hon. Gentleman’s point about the supply of goods and equipment to farmers, there will be so many other industries affected if this persecution is allowed to continue.

• 13 Mar 2025 · High Street Businesses · Hansard source

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  The high street trader John Lewis Partnership is announcing its annual results today. It is a highly successful business but this year it will not be paying a dividend to its partners, the workforce, because it has to absorb national insurance costs. Does the Minister understand the real impact that NI contributions are having on what his party likes to describe as “ordinary working people”?

• 3 Mar 2025 · Ukraine · Hansard source

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  The Leader of the Opposition has quite rightly and properly shown her support for the Prime Minister’s position, and I hope he will take comfort from the fact that he has the support of at least these Back Benches as well. Those of us who have had dealings with the Russians—in my case that is through the Council of Europe—know only too well that Putin’s Administration cannot be trusted, and that security guarantees are therefore absolutely vital if we are to succeed in getting a peace agreement, not a surrender. A surrender would lead to inevitable further activities in Georgia and Moldova, and then possibly in the Baltic states as well. Is that not right?

• 27 Feb 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I understand that the Home Secretary is visiting Calais today. I hope that she will not only see the beaches from which illegal immigrants depart for the United Kingdom, but visit the facility that I saw myself a week ago today, with Michael Keohan and Jack Valpy from BBC South East, where we discovered some 800 migrants from Sudan living in total squalor, with no sanitation of any kind. I hope that the Home Secretary will have raised this matter with the Mayor of Calais, with the député for Calais, and with her counterpart, the Interior Minister of France. I appreciate that Monday is likely to be a busy day, with the Prime Minister returning from Washington, but will the Leader of the House ask the Home Secretary to come to the House at the earliest opportunity to make a statement on what she has found?

• 24 Feb 2025 · Ukraine · Hansard source

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  Some of us are old enough to remember Hungary in 1956 and some of us are old enough to remember Czechoslovakia in 1968. None of us wants to see Ukraine sacrificed on the same altar of expediency. When the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister go to Washington, they will know that they will carry with them the good wishes of—almost—all of this House. Ukraine is not for sale, and it can never be for sale; this is not a transaction. The United Kingdom will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Points of Order · Hansard source

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  On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. First, I should declare a non-pecuniary interest as a freeman of the City of London. A constituent has raised with me the concern that the City of London is seeking by means of a private Bill—the City of London (Markets) Bill—the ability to sell and redevelop without replacement the historic meat market of Smithfield and the fish market of Billingsgate. A petition against this proposal with many hundreds of signatures has been denied an audience and blocked by the corporation on the grounds that the petitioners do not have a direct interest in the proposed legislation. Smithfield and Billingsgate have for centuries provided meat and fish that is consumed throughout the country, and it is therefore fair to argue that every citizen of the United Kingdom has a direct interest in these markets, for which the corporation has acquired and prepared alternative sites that it is now seeking to abandon. My question to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, is: is it correct, proper and orderly that the petition against this Bill should not be heard?

• 10 Feb 2025 · Biomass Generation · Hansard source

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  I suppose we shall be told that half a loaf is better than none, but this strikes me as a half-baked half-loaf, to say the least. The Minister has spent an hour this afternoon lecturing the House about why it was better to import oil and gas from overseas than to extend the production of at least some home-grown material. The bottom line is that, clearly, the Minister has not read the KPMG report, the Prime Minister has not read the KPMG report, and we are still going to pay billions of pounds in subsidy to import pellets created in Canada and then shipped across the Atlantic at God knows what carbon cost. Where, please, is the sense in that?

• 5 Feb 2025 · English Devolution and Local Government · Hansard source

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  Some of us have been around the local government reform circus on a number of occasions in the past, and I fear that the Secretary of State will find that this piecemeal approach will be disastrous. One of the oldest local government unions in the country, the Federation of Cinque Ports, may heave a sigh of relief, but I suspect that the district, city and county councils in Kent will find themselves between a rock and a hard place. We have one unitary authority—Medway—and two that we thought were going to be unitary authorities, which it now seems will not be unitary authorities, so how can the Secretary of State reassure me that we will not be left with a lot of lame duck local authorities for the foreseeable future?

• 4 Feb 2025 · Clean Power by 2030 · Hansard source

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  Given that the British taxpayer is paying billions of pounds in subsidies to fell trees in Canada and ship the wood across the Atlantic to burn in the Drax power station, can the Secretary of State tell the House where the clean energy lies within that? Has he read the KPMG report? If he has, will he come to the House and make a statement on his assessment of it?

• 30 Jan 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I thank the Leader of the House for her further commitment to the development of aviation in the south-east, which I am sure will extend to the development of Manston airport in my constituency. It already has a development consent order and is, in common parlance, shovel-ready. During the debate on the Climate and Nature Bill last Friday, I raised the subject of public funding for the Drax power station, an environmentally wholly unacceptable operation. At Prime Minister’s questions yesterday, the hon. Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield) again raised the issue of Drax and pointed to a KPMG report that suggests that the funding for Drax had been claimed illegally. Can we have a debate on that report and on the funding of Drax in Government time?

• 28 Jan 2025 · Airport Expansion · Hansard source

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  Manston airport in Kent in my constituency has been fallow and the subject of legal action for far too long, but that is happily now behind us. We hope and expect that within the next few weeks, there will be announcements on funding that will lead to the development of a state-of-the-art net zero airport in Kent. Manston does not appear to feature in the Government’s plans. Can the Minister assure me that his eye is on that ball, and that Manston will become part of the growth programme?

• 24 Jan 2025 · Climate and Nature Bill · Hansard source

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  Give me time, young man. At the risk of going down that path, I should like to take a short ramble down memory lane. I was brought up in Poole, in Dorset. My grandparents’ house had a lilac tree in the garden. In flower, it was smothered in red admirals, peacocks, tortoiseshells and all manner of butterflies. At night, the garden was full of moths. These days, we are lucky if we see a cabbage white. The little house that we lived in was on the edge of Poole Park lake. I played in the park daily; I used to pluck conkers from under the trees during the season for it. I saw stag beetles in abundance. Hedgehogs, which we have heard referred to, roamed free. Out in the hills alongside Cerne Abbas in Dorset, I walked along country paths where my father and I saw foxes, voles, stoats, weasels, rabbits and, up in the sky, birds of prey feeding on them. Where are they now? The World Wildlife Fund says that in the past 50 years—well within my lifetime, but sadly not within the lifetime of most, albeit not all, hon. Members present—our wildlife has been depleted by 73%.

• 24 Jan 2025 · Climate and Nature Bill · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) on her good fortune in having secured a place in the ballot and been able to introduce a Bill that I believe will be very important. I am proud to be a sponsor of it. It is deeply flawed in places; we all know that. I have been in this place for quite a long time and I know of no private Member’s Bill that was perfect when it started its journey. However, I hope and believe that it will receive a Second Reading. If it comes to a vote, I shall most certainly support it. Old men can bore for Britain. As the grandfather of the House, I am probably just as capable of that as anybody else in this place.

• 24 Jan 2025 · Climate and Nature Bill · Hansard source

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  With great respect to the hon. Lady, who is fortunate to represent a beautiful place, the Poole that I knew is not the Poole that she now knows—not even in the town, never mind in the countryside. Although one or two places such as Branksea island, to give it its proper name, may have improved—the overgrowth was taken down about 20 years ago in a fire—a lot of our national habitat has nevertheless been lost. That is the point that I am trying to make. I am blessed with five grandchildren. Additionally, I have five surrogate Ukrainian grandchildren and one infant—Florence, the daughter of two of my dearest young friends—whom I care about passionately. I want them to be able to grow up in at least some of the world that I knew, and to enjoy the natural environment that I enjoyed. That is why I am standing here today; I have no other reason. Sadly, I believe that a lot of that is at risk. The planning changes that have been partially announced this week—I assume that there will in due course be a further statement to the House—seek effectively to abolish the right to judicial review. In my constituency, National Grid is planning to build a monstrosity, 90 feet high and the size of five football pitches, on the Thanet marshes—which it has just discovered are wet—immediately adjacent to a site of special scientific interest. If built, it will indeed be a monstrosity, and will be accompanied by a string of high-powered, high-voltage pylons. If we are denied the right to challenge that, to whom do we look for redress in the future? Like the last Government, this Government are subsidising Drax, to the tune of billions of pounds. For why? To transport millions of trees, felled and shipped across the Atlantic at God knows what carbon cost, to burn in the interest of some sort of future carbon-free fuel—which, of course, it is not. Why are we allowing this, and why are we paying for it? Those who oppose the Bill—which, as I have already mentioned, is flawed and will need to be amended—have described it as ideological rhetoric, an assault on our individual freedom, and a direct threat to our way of life that will lead to food rationing. One constituent wrote to me to say that only 50% of our food is produced naturally. Why should we be dependent on importing the other 50%? The answer to that, I am afraid, now lies with the Government’s house building policies. If the planners have their way, acres of farmland in Thanet that are now producing, this year, grade 1 agricultural wheat from which bread is made will, in a couple of years’ time, be growing houses, not food. The National Farmers Union has said, “Please do not undermine UK agriculture by importing agricultural products produced to environmental standards that are different from ours here.” A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting a friend in Thanet who allowed me to hold a facsimile of part of the skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The teeth were about nine inches to a foot long. Those beasts that ruled the Earth have been extinct for millions of years. We are supremely arrogant if we believe that “Drill, baby, drill” is the answer; if we believe that we have a right—someone who wrote to me described it as a God-given right—to carbon fuels. A couple of weeks ago there was an exhibition in the House organised by Helping Rhinos, which seeks to defend the black rhino, and someone who attended made the case that the black rhino could outlive the human race. We are about to become—if we do not listen today—the authors of our own demise, and that is why I believe that the Bill deserves, at the very least, a Second Reading.

• 24 Jan 2025 · Climate and Nature Bill · Hansard source

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  As one of few who can remember when the dinosaurs became extinct, I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her generous remarks earlier. Is this not about the future of our children and our grandchildren, and about the kind of world we grow up in? Let me take her back to her remarks about farming, as the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is present. We will not save our agriculture if we smother our fields in so-called solar farms and things such as the converter station that the National Grid wants to build on farmland in east Kent. We must strike a balance between the need to get to net zero and protecting our natural environment. It is quite clear that the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are not talking to each other properly.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Listed Places of Worship Scheme · Hansard source

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  Mr Western, I probably ought to indicate that I have proudly served in the past as a member of the Ecclesiastical Committee, although I do not regard this as just an Anglican issue at all. Further to the point raised by my right hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (John Glen), the support for these buildings—for our churches—comes from generous donations by members of the public, which are given for a very specific purpose. Does my hon. Friend agree that this money is freely given, but that it is not freely given to be taxed? I hope the Minister will be able to comment on that later.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Listed Places of Worship Scheme · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman makes a very fair point. It has been raised earlier in this debate, and it worried me. Our parish churches are, of course, important, but is it not true that our cathedrals are also monumentally expensive to maintain? Is not the grant every bit as valuable to, for example, Canterbury cathedral in the see of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

• 22 Jan 2025 · Listed Places of Worship Scheme · Hansard source

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  Will the Minister accept that the volume of tourists that he has just referred to is essential to many listed buildings, particularly places such as Canterbury cathedral? That volume of tourism also, of course, adds to the cost of maintenance.

• 20 Jan 2025 · UK-Ukraine 100-year Partnership · Hansard source

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  I am sure that the Foreign Secretary’s statement will be as welcome in Kyiv as it is in this House. He referred to the 200,000 refugees in this country. Further to the point that the hon. Member for Milton Keynes Central (Emily Darlington) made, many of those people would like to return home, but home is a war zone, particularly in the east, and they cannot do so. They therefore have children in school here, and have built lives here. It would reassure them to know that they are safe and secure in the United Kingdom for not just the future but the immediate future, and will be able to be here for as long as it takes.

• 20 Jan 2025 · New Hospital Programme Review · Hansard source

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  Before the general election was called, there was a clear indication from the Government that they intended to fund the—only—£25 million reconstruction of the maternity unit at the QEQM hospital in Margate, which emerged from the Bill Kirkup report. I will be grateful if the Secretary of State can tell me whether it is his intention to ensure that that funding is made available. The right hon. Gentleman referred to the number of houses that the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government is determined to see built. Could he explain, for the sake of East Kent, how the primary and secondary healthcare services will be provided to meet the needs of the people who will live in those houses?

• 17 Jan 2025 · Licensing Hours Extension Bill · Hansard source

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  As we are in the business of name-checking, I am delighted to say that after a period of lamentable closure, the Half Moon and Seven Stars in Preston, the village I live in, will be reopening its doors at 5 o’clock tonight, celebrating, I think, Pubs Day today—neither the hon. Gentleman nor I will be there, unfortunately. More seriously, the implications of this Bill are considerable for an industry that has been under great pressure for a long time, particularly since covid. Is it not the case that it is extraordinary that these hoops have to be jumped through to do what most people would regard as normal and sensible?

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  If the hon. Gentleman can tell me of a photovoltaic tile that is acceptable to the people who are enforcing regulations relating to listed buildings, I would be delighted to hear it. That is what I was trying to come on to before I was interrupted. Kent, a wonderful county, has very many grade II listed buildings, and at present, it is not permitted to use solar panels—or solar tiles, as I would like to see them—on those listed buildings. It is not even permitted on other buildings, outbuildings, cottages or whatever within the curtilage of a listed building. That rules out a considerable quantity of property that can and should accommodate solar panels.

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  The Bill does accommodate exemptions, and my hon. Friend makes a case in point. In the village I live in, we have thatched buildings, and I would like to see more of them. There may be cases where an exemption should be permitted, but looking at the Bill as it stands, it seems that these loopholes are wide open to exploitation, and they will have to be tightened up. That, however, is the purpose of the Committee. Let us give the Bill its Second Reading, get it into Committee, amend it and bring it back on Report and Third Reading, and then let us see it become law.

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Max Wilkinson) on his good fortune in securing a place in the ballot in order to introduce what is, without doubt, a very important Bill. I am, however, concerned about the scope of the Bill, and I will come to that in a moment, if I may—I do not propose to take very long. For many years, I have consistently opposed the installation of solar farms—of course, they are not farms at all—on agricultural land. In east Kent, we are losing grade 1 agricultural land far too frequently, both to development and to be used for solar power generation. It is completely unnecessary. As I have said many times, both in this House and outside it, we have acres and acres of rooftops in public ownership, on public buildings—schools, hospitals and prisons—in addition to acres of car park space, which the French would be covering in solar panels. If we use all of that, I can see no need whatsoever to use for these purposes fine agricultural land that should be used for growing crops for feeding people. That is why I think that the scope of the Bill, good though it may be, does not go far enough. We must look, not just at new build, but at what exists and what can and should be done. By the bye, I would go a stage further and say that we should not only be looking at solar panels, but at grey water systems. We waste gallons and gallons of water off the rooftops of this country, which of course cannot then soak into the land because we have covered it in tarmac, so it is not replenishing the aquifers. That water ought to be used for flushing lavatories and matters that do not require potable water. Again, I think there is a trick that may have been missed. Quite clearly, what is going to happen is that the developers and the builders will scream like stuck pigs. For why? Let us take a development in Herne Bay in my constituency. I will not name the developer, because I would hate to upset Taylor Wimpey, but it has avoided installing electric vehicle charging points because there is a bit of wriggle room—the amount that it would add to the cost of the property—that allows it to get off the hook. I do not doubt that installing solar panels initially would add to the first purchase price of the property, which of course might eat into profit, and we would hate to see that. But this is essential. We have to do this, and it is long past time. I notice that the Bill gives 2026 as the start date; I can see no reason whatsoever why we should not start immediately and say that, from now on, every new build should be fitted with photovoltaic panels. There is another issue, which is the design of the technology. We all know that retrofitted solar panels are pretty unattractive—hideous, to be blunt about it. It surprises me that, in this day and age, those developing this technology have not gone far enough and fast enough to develop attractive panels that are simply roofs like any other roof. It has got to be possible to develop a photovoltaic tile that could be used on listed buildings, but that has not happened.

• 17 Jan 2025 · New Homes (Solar Generation) Bill · Hansard source

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  Does my hon. Friend not accept that, while it is not remotely surprising that some developers are resistant on the grounds that the Bill will add to the costs of building property—it indubitably will—we should recognise the flipside of that coin, which is that it will enhance the value of the property and make its management and running much more affordable?