Siân Berry MP: speeches

Speeches

• 1 Sept 2026 · Criminal Justice Reform · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State has spoken about sentenced prisoners, but he has not yet spoken about the 15,000 prisoners who are being held on remand, which includes one in four of all women in prison, particularly young women; those held for non-violent crimes, including protesters; and a higher proportion of people from minority groups. When will we see real action on remand decisions, and especially on the relevant recommendations from the Women’s Justice Board earlier this year?

• 1 Sept 2026 · Direction of Government · Hansard source

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  The extremes of this summer cannot simply be wished away with emollient phrases like it not being all “one or the other” when it comes to new fossil fuel drilling. Can the Prime Minister tell us whether he meant that all our climate commitments are at risk from his Government, or just this one?

• 14 Jul 2026 · Freedom of Information Act 2000 (Amendment) · Hansard source

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  I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to omit section 37 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000; to provide that the Sovereign, the Royal Family, the Royal Household, the Royal Archives and the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster are public authorities for the purposes of that Act; and for connected purposes. I am grateful to have the chance to introduce this Bill alongside colleagues from parties across the House. I am very grateful for the breadth of support across many parties for the measures that it contains; that shows how much Members of the House recognise the importance of transparency and accountability in public office. Today the people of France celebrate Bastille Day, to commemorate when they were driven to revolt because they were fed up of an aloof regime that they had no way of holding to account. One particular member of the royal family was travelling to shady destinations to meet secretly with foreign men of extreme wealth for reasons that would have shocked the common people if they had known. There is no record we can find to say whether or not Marie Antoinette spent three days visiting any of these men to tell them that she could not be their friend any more. Meanwhile, the elected representatives of the country—the Third Estate—were being blocked from having any say in the behaviour of the French royal family or even being able to investigate what members like that were up to. To be clear, at this stage I do not believe that we in this place should be calling for an insurrection, as the Third Estate did then. Instead, the Bill I present today will go some way to adding a brick of transparency to the wall of secrecy and privilege that surrounds our own monarchy nearly 250 years later. The Bill also has support from the Campaign for Freedom of Information, Republic, the general committee of Labour International, and the National Union of Journalists. There are two questions that we must ask in connection with the royal family and freedom of information. Under our constitution, which needs modernising in so many ways, are the royal family public servants or not? If they are, is it reasonable for one set of public servants to have such a blanket exemption from the rules that all others have to follow? As MPs and Ministers, we are expected to follow the Nolan principles of public life, as are all public bodies and servants. The fifth Nolan principle is openness. It says: “Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for doing so.” Clearly, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 was created in that spirit. But despite meeting the criteria of a public body, and despite the royal family unarguably being public servants, the monarchy has its own special exemption carved out in the Act. Can that in any way be right? Some right hon. and hon. Members may be concerned that the Bill is not perfectly reasonable in what it asks for, but I assure them that it is. It is about providing the bare minimum of accountability to the royal family and closing loopholes that I think we all agree should not be carved out just for members of one privileged lineage. The Bill will address section 37 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which gives a more or less blanket exemption to communications between relevant authorities and members of the broader royal family, not just the King. That provision too often prevents communications from being released under freedom of information requests to other public authorities. In practice, the section 37 exemption has meant that perfectly reasonable questions about trips on the RAF’s royal flight have been refused, including the question of who flew with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor when he was not only a member of the royal family but employed as our trade envoy. We now have a former Prime Minister pressing for information about whether Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor used taxpayer-funded jets or RAF bases to meet the paedophile and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Countless other questions along those lines should have been answered long ago. Andrew Lownie, who wrote the biography of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has seen the exemption at work time and again. He told me last week: “It’s a scandal the royal family are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act—this was never intended to be an absolute exemption, and in practice the public interest test that should be applied has never come down in favour of disclosure, in my experience from scores of requests over a decade.” This is really just one arbitrary and absurd rule for the rich and powerful and another for the rest of us. My Bill would remove section 37 from the Freedom of Information Act completely. The second part of my Bill would add a number of relevant institutions to the list of public authorities in the 2000 Act. That is because none of the main royal institutions is listed in the Act, so freedom of information requests cannot be made of them directly. My Bill proposes to fix that by adding the royal family, the royal household, the Royal Archives, and the ex-officio royal duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster to the list of public authorities covered by the Act. We should be able to ask questions to those undoubtedly public authorities. Currently listed in schedule 1 of the 2000 Act are such institutions as the Advisory Board on the Registration of Homoeopathic Products, the British Wool Marketing Board, the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses and the Government Hospitality Advisory Committee for the Purchase of Wine. The Act is very comprehensive, because we rightly expect transparency from the whole range of public bodies that owe us the Nolan duty of openness in exchange for our funding, patronage and respect—and we should of the royal family too. All the usual exemptions would still apply—those relating to junior staff and national security, for example—but my Bill would go further. With reasonable measures similar to those that protect MPs from disclosures that might pose a danger to us from a security perspective, my Bill will allow for non-disclosure where data such as future travel details appear. Finally, I want to say a few words about the uses and abuses of the secrecy currently afforded to the Royal Archives and why that must be included in schedule 1 to the 2000 Act. Under the Public Records Act 1958, UK Government Departments must identify records of historic interest and release all possible content to the National Archives. Many closed Government records have been made public this way through the 30-year rule—now the 20-year rule. MI5 now declassifies and releases historical records to the National Archives after 50 years, but the royal family operates with no such rule around its own archives. The Royal Archives operates broadly reign by reign, but nearly four years after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, still no historical records since 1952 can currently be accessed from the archives. Even when records are unlocked within the archives, as those from previous monarchs have been, it is still left to the archive gatekeepers to decide which historians can be given the keys—in private and without the public interest tests of the Freedom of Information Act. History should not be curated, but the preservation of royal image—even many years after a monarch’s death—seems to take precedence over academic inquiry. We need all historians, not just those within a certain circle, to have access to these records so that we can have a truthful account of our own history. This sounds like a Bill only for republicans, but I believe that monarchists should be its most fervent supporters. No one has damaged the reputation of the monarchy in this country and abroad more than Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was able to carry on his nefarious activities in the comfort of knowing that he was protected by this shroud of secrecy. Yes, we found him out many years later and took away his offices, but the sunlight of Nolan is not only disinfectant in retrospect, but also preventive. If he had had to be open, would he have been as bad? We will never know. Question put and agreed to. Ordered, That Siân Berry, Ian Byrne, Rachael Maskell, Tom Gordon, Pete Wishart, Kirsty Blackman, Claire Hanna, Jeremy Corbyn, Dr Ellie Chowns, Hannah Spencer, Liz Saville Roberts and David Davis present the Bill. Siân Berry accordingly presented the Bill. Bill read the F irst time; to be read a S econd time on Friday 13 November , and to be printed (Bill 119).

• 13 Jul 2026 · Immigration and Asylum Bill · Hansard source

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  I support the reasoned amendment tabled in the name of the hon. Member for Perth and Kinross-shire (Pete Wishart), which has not been selected, alongside me, my Green party colleagues and a cross-party grouping. I associate myself with the comments made already by Members on the Opposition Benches; we must reject division, not feed it. I believe that our reasoned amendment represents the views of the majority of the UK public, who reject the far right, delight in the strong reputation that this country has for welcoming refugees and believe in human rights. We must treat those fleeing war, danger, discrimination and oppression the same as we would want to be treated if circumstances changed in this country. I believe the majority of the UK public are proud of the many, many migrant families of all kinds over the years, who are not only well-settled and well-integrated, but integral to our British identity. This Bill will do the opposite of maintaining our proud British tradition of integration and community cohesion. It is designed to make it harder for families to form, reunite or remain together, and it is clearly designed to prevent refugees from finding a permanent safe new home here, which will damage community cohesion by preventing long-term integration. The conclusions of Liberty around the impact of the Bill on children are stark. It says that more children will face separation, either from their parent or their home. It has huge concerns about the proposals to force no weight to be given to relationships formed by people in the UK in irregular circumstances. Banning people from falling in love is unlikely to work, so many children will undoubtedly be seriously harmed by this blunt and bad-faith proposal. In addition, the proposals in part 4 of the Bill to force payments from financially vulnerable refugees are misconceived and cruel. Remember, these proposals will apply to the very poorest refugees, so it is a tax on poverty and on being a victim of war or persecution. It is a tax on free speech exercised by those who end up as political prisoners. It is a tax on LGBT+ people and on women fighting for education. It is a tax on discriminated-against minorities under authoritarian regimes. The Bill does nothing to increase the right to work for people seeking asylum, which is the most obvious way of closing the hotels, reducing poverty and destitution and reducing the costs to the state of the long waits that refugees face. Above all, the Bill does nothing to improve the poor initial decision making that every MP’s caseworkers know all too much about. It does not fix the problems caused by Brexit or provide any new safe routes for seeking asylum here. It does not reduce the number of small boats or prevent the criminal exploitation of those with clear and legitimate claims, but no safe way to reach the UK at all. The Home Secretary must reconsider and withdraw this Bill.