Simon Hoare MP: speeches

Speeches

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. I think the trend has been pretty clear, and the goalposts have moved. From late 2008 or 2009 through to about 2015 or 2016, I think the Government could and should have been much tougher and more exacting, but we are where we are. I take his point and I understand it, but let us not let the delivery of the good be sacrificed in pursuit of the excellent, which seems unattainable. I think the trend in what the banks are doing is pretty well set, and it is probably irreversible. All sorts of things play into that. What I think is arrestable is the attitude of, “We will pull out even if we are the last branch open, and somebody else will pick up the slack”—principally the Post Office—or “We expect our customers to travel great distances to find a bank that is open and can help them.” That may require a number of visits in the case of something like an overdraft. That is where the idea of a hub comes in. I understand that we are due to have our first hub in Dorset at some point this year—in Sherborne, in the constituency of the hon. Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello)—but North Dorset needs one as well. I will certainly be campaigning for one in Blandford. I would value the support of the Treasury Bench to emphasise to the banks that they have a duty of care to their customers, and they cannot just cut them adrift and say, “Make your own way. Find an alternative. Beat a path to another branch. It is terribly inconvenient for you, but that is what we are telling you to do, because we have no social responsibility at all.” For the sake of our rural communities, economy and businesses, for charities and the farming community, and for a host of other people who want that personal interaction because they do not have access to the internet, or do not want to use online banking or an app and so on, there should be a bank teller, as we used to call them, from a bank, in a hub at set times, to help their customers. By so doing they will not damage our rural and market town economies as much as many of us fear, and as many hon. Members have attested to in this short debate.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  Let me make a little progress and I will give way first to my hon. Friend and then to the hon. Gentleman. At the heart of everything this place does, we must think about social inclusion and trying to deliver services that meet the needs of a wide range of our population. According to Age UK, four in 10 adults over the age of 65 do not bank online, and three quarters of those who are over 65 have expressed the very clear desire that they wish to bank in person. The over-80s, people with disabilities and those on low incomes disproportionately want physical facilities, and yet they are being denied them. As the Royal National Institute of Blind People points out, in my constituency alone there are, I think, 4,170 constituents who are either blind or partially sighted. They are unable to conduct banking online. Why are we excluding them from the personal management of their financial affairs?

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  We now have the enjoyable prospect of an Adjournment debate lasting an hour and a half, which I know will fill the Minister with joy. I can see the boyish smile on his face—he just cannot contain himself. I do not intend to take an hour and a half, although a number of colleagues from across the House have indicated that they wish to intervene. I am very pleased to have secured this debate. It is clear that our banking world is going through a period of transition. There are changes in technology; there is the move—some would say at too high a speed—towards a soon-to-be cashless society; and there is the cost of running branches, which includes insurance, business rates, staff costs and the like. I know full well that the closure of a high-street bank hits an area hard, whether the area is urban or rural. However, North Dorset is a rural constituency, and the thrust of my thesis is that the impact is felt disproportionately harder in rural communities than in an urban setting. Why do I say that? I do not believe that North Dorset is unique in how it operates. [ Interruption. ] Heckling from the cheap seats. Our market towns operate on a hub-and-spoke model: the market town grows, and the villages are magnetised towards it, which is good for businesses large and small across the sectors, as we all recognise. It is also good for community cohesion at a time when we are all rightly concerned about rural exclusion and isolation; it brings people together. Our rural areas, by accident rather than by design, contain a disproportionately high number of retired or elderly people.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  For a second time, of course.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. When a bank closed in my constituency on an earlier occasion, I remember it telling me, “If customers need to talk to an actual person, they could use the branch in Poole.” I explained that that was right, but it would take two days out of the week, because those customers would have to get a bus to Poole, book a hotel, stay over and get the return bus the following day. It did sound a little bit nonsensical. I am therefore grateful to my right hon. Friend for underlining the point that I am seeking to make: there must be rural-proofing of the rubric for these decisions in the first instance and a better understanding of the geography of our rural areas as well as of the lack of public transport or other connectivity between the two places. It is easy—dare I say it—if one represents Ealing, where the Minister is from. There are plenty of buses and tubes, and heaven knows what else, that I have no doubt will take the people around Ealing. North Dorset does not have those things, and nor do many of our rural areas, but I just do not think that point is recognised by the banks.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  I agree entirely with my hon. Friend who represents Surrey and part of Hampshire. I would be happy for the Minister to write to me on this point if it is easier, but it strikes me that there is scope for a little bit of wiggle room with regard to the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023. The Act did not give the Financial Conduct Authority powers to reflect on and assess wider banking services. The Minister’s party, when in opposition, was very keen that it should do so. When my party was in government, for some unknown reason we resisted amendments to that effect, and Labour, then in opposition, did not push them to a Division. I just think that there is too gaping a lacuna in all of this, in that it is only access to cash that is assessed, and not access to banking services.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  I will, although the hon. Gentleman is neither retired nor elderly.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my hon. Friend, because again she enhances and underlines the argument that I have been deploying, and for which colleagues across the House have been kind enough to add their support. I suppose my annoyance is that the people who write the policies, whether they are the regulators or those in the bank boardrooms, do not know what living in a rural area is like. If they are in the Square Mile, they are not part of a rural community. They may have a getaway weekend retreat that they dash off to in their personalised number-plated Land Rover or Range Rover, in which they take their food down from Waitrose, before coming back to London on the Sunday, but that is not living in a rural area. That is not running a business in a rural area.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. In many respects— [ Interruption. ] I am beginning to get paranoid; I hear voices. He is absolutely right to make the point that he does. I pay tribute to how the Post Office has stepped up. Very often, in providing that sort of transactional bank service, it has supported the continuance of rural post offices, which can often be marginal and fragile businesses themselves. Again, I think it an easy crutch to lean on to say, “Well, of course, the post office does this.” We can all applaud what post offices do, but customers cannot use them to talk to someone from their bank to discuss their overdraft, loan, mortgage, business credit card maximum or whatever it may happen to be. I say to the Minister that we want our local businesses and small and medium enterprises to flourish—small, micro and family-owned businesses are very much the hallmark of a rural economy—and they have the greatest need, on a more regular basis, for that relationship with their banks. Then, the banks know the nature of the business and its long-term viability, and they can build that relationship.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my hon. Friend. His constituency, and indeed a lot of our coastal communities, will have that profile of constituents that is older and more settled, and they will want to see things delivered in the way that they are used to. That does not mean that they shun change completely, but they do have a legitimate expectation. Let me take the House briefly through the timeline narrative of justification, and then I will give way to the hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer). You and I, Madam Deputy Speaker, as part of that great Tory intake of 2015—those were the days; it is nearly 10 years—will remember being told that there would never be a town without a bank.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  I admire my right hon. Friend’s perseverance in ever trying to change the signatory on a charity bank account. People have died of boredom and exasperation trying to do it. A 60-year-old has to turn up with their great grandparents, their first cat and everything else to prove who they are. The fact that the bank has known them as a private customer for years seems to pass it by. I hope I have made my points to the Minister, but let me rehearse them very briefly in bullet point form. One concerns the rubric to defend a bank closure. The assessment of access to cash needs a rural dimension, and there needs to be a much more granular understanding of the hub-and-spoke geography of a rural economy, which is very different from an urban one. We need to move away pretty quickly from merely assessing as satisfactory access to cash as defined by access to an ATM. We need to turbocharge the delivery of hubs and bring pressure to bear on the banks, and there are a variety to do that. It can be carrot and stick, through tax and other policies, to try to nudge them to move at a faster pace. I hope, however, that the Government will take the lead on social inclusion for our rural areas, reflecting the fact that they have far more small, independent shops and businesses, and that the population is disproportionately older and/or retired and dealing with disabilities, infirmities, frailties and so on. Those things should be taken into account, and I remain to be convinced that they are. I think an opportunity exists to amend the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 to give the FCA greater powers to look at wider banking services, not just cash. Our rural communities struggle. Our economies are fragile, and wages are usually lower than in urban counterparts. Another bank closure is not just another bank closure in a rural market town.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady is again absolutely right. Surely it makes good commercial sense for high street banks, as we used to call them—increasingly, they are not particularly high street banks—to be able to tout their wares to existing or potential customers. That is how to generate business: by having a presence. A hub makes a very good presence for them all, but they seem to move at the speed of the slowest, and if one is not particularly convinced, the whole thing sort of seems to fall down. I know that the Government are trying to do more on that, but I think they could do even more to turbocharge it.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Bank Closures: Rural Areas · Hansard source

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  Let me just finish this point. That was the first promise, but it seemed to disappear quite quickly. Then the Post Office came in, and then there seemed to be an over-reliance on building societies. I notice that Nationwide—I think it is Nationwide; I could be wrong—is saying in its television advertisement that it pledges not to close a branch before 2028, but it is under exactly the same cost and other pressures as its high street competitors. Then we were told that the answer to the maiden’s prayer was going to be the banking hub, but there has been quite a lot of disappointment surrounding that. I suggest to the Minister that that is in part to do with the erroneous conflation of access to cash and access to banking services. Link has assessed, perfectly properly, that in Blandford there are ATMs at the local Tesco, at the local Morrison’s and at Nationwide, but just try asking an ATM to amend or set up a standing order or direct debit. A small businessman or businesswoman who wants to extend their line of credit or has a question mark over something cannot ask an ATM those questions. Saying that there is access to cash, as important as that is, is far too blunt an instrument when trying to assess the impact of these closures.

• 24 Feb 2025 · Breakfast Clubs: Early Adopters · Hansard source

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  The Secretary of State makes a compelling argument on the merits of breakfast for many of our young children and the benefits that it has for learning. Can she say a word or two on two points? First, will she answer the question being raised in the secondary sector about future funding beyond the agreed time period? Secondly, what incentives can she put in place to encourage schools to procure foodstuffs that are produced locally? That would give good support to our local food producers and our farmers.

• 27 Jan 2025 · Draft Airports Slot Allocation (Alleviation of Usage Requirements etc.) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  Congratulations.

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

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  The hon. Gentleman is right, and I wanted to echo the point raised by the hon. Member for South Cotswolds. I note the word “or”, but I like the word “and”. Indeed, I will share with the House that I am on a particularly stringent January diet. It is slightly working, I think, but there is still a long way to go. Ask any member of my family, and they would say, “Now Simon, would you like custard or cream?” and my eyebrows would shoot up at the word “or”, as I much prefer “and”. The hon. Lady was right: climate and nature are two sides of the same coin, and have a close, interwoven symbiotic relationship. I say to the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) in response to his intervention, again echoing the hon. Member for Norwich South, that of course we must have growth, but too often the didacts from both sides of the debate say that it is either/or: we can either have a biodiverse natural environment and address climate change, or we can have growth, but we cannot have both. Well, it depends first on what type and kind of policies we pursue when addressing CO 2 emissions and the drive to net zero, but also on what type of growth one has. It must be a legitimate anxiety, but I am pretty confident that many people who elected the Labour party into government believed that they would get that fact: that the definition of “growth” needed to be reset in order to meet the challenges that we now face. The Budget—I shall be charitable—did not quite land as the Chancellor of the Exchequer hoped or expected, and some of the economic indicators are not pointing in the direction that any Government would like to see. I hope it will not fall on deaf ears—the two Ministers on the Front Bench have a long and respected track record in addressing these issues when they sat on the Opposition Benches, which I hope they will continue now that they sit on the Treasury Bench. I hope that in order to prove this to people who are anxious about economic growth, and the fact that there does not appear to be very much, it will not be foot-to-the-floor growth of any type, anywhere, in order just to nudge the figures. It has to be the right kind of growth, and sustainability has to be at its heart. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich asked: is this Bill perfect? No, and I do not think that the hon. Member for South Cotswolds would claim perfection. My right hon. Friend said that he had never seen a private Member’s Bill that was perfect and beyond amendment; I have to say to him that in my nearly 10 years in this place, I have yet to see a Government Bill that could be described as perfect and without the possibility of improvement by amendment. I say to my right hon. and hon. Friends: let us not sacrifice the good in pursuit of the excellent. We have to make progress. Are many of the issues addressed by the Bill difficult? Yes, but what do we all usually say to our children? “Things which are difficult are usually much more worthwhile seeking to attain than the easy, low-hanging fruit.” Will the Bill come with costs? Let us be frank: we must all be conscious that we have come through or are coming through a cost of living crisis, and inflation has eroded people’s ability to spend and fuel costs are high. But to those who simplistically say, “Well, we can’t afford to do this; now is not the right time in the economic cycle,” I say, with the greatest of politeness: if not now, when? I do not believe that we can afford not to do this. Failure to do so would be the longest suicide note in history for our species. On our coastline, there are places that are built below sea level—one thinks of Canvey Island—so this is not just something that is happening elsewhere, about which we should be slightly anxious but not at all concerned. Rising sea levels and other changes will affect us here at home as well. We need to be careful in our consideration of that. For those who claim a driving concern about the need to control immigration, I say in all sincerity that I do not believe that one can divorce from that addressing the changes to our planet that climate change is introducing, as it will be a major spur for fellow members of our species to pack up their belongings, meagre or otherwise, and try to find a place of safety for themselves and their families, where they are able to grow a bit of food and sustain their lifestyles, meagre as they may be. To those who say, “Hang on a moment, our emissions are not too bad, and we’ve got to look to China and everybody else,” I say: pollution does not respect international boundaries. It moves on the tides and the winds. We have lulled ourselves into a false sense of security, because, in essence, we have exported the production of many of our commodities—needed, desired and wanted—overseas. We have said, “Look, our manufacturing emissions have gone down,” but the production of those products is still creating emissions elsewhere. There are some noble aims in the Bill that we should think about.

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

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  This is getting rather worrying, because I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Either he is doing harm to his political career or I am doing harm to what might be left of mine. I shall leave it to my hon. Friend the shadow Deputy Chief Whip to jot that down in his little red book. I find UK manufacturing really strange in this respect, because the trajectory of policy for the past several years has been very clear. We are not trying to make our petrol combustion engines go faster; we are trying to make electric vehicles more reliable, less costly, travel further and so on. Why has UK plc manufacturing not grabbed hold of that as a fourth industrial revolution and led the way, in the way that our forefathers did at the start of the first industrial revolution? We have to look to private equity and others to invest. I was pleased to see an investment in a solar farm in my constituency. I visited the site to see where it was all going to go and how it was going to plug in, and I asked, “If you broke down a solar panel, where did the component parts come from?” Not a single component had been manufactured in the United Kingdom. They had come from about 12 different countries; the only thing that we had done was assemble them. I say to our entrepreneurs and our leaders of industry and commerce that we are better than that. We are not just assemblers; we are makers and innovators. We are an island race that has worked on free trade and exporting values, ideas and products across the surface of the globe. This is a time for us to lead in the export of actual hard power, and drive forward an international alliance on these important issues.

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

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  The hon. Lady is pushing at an open door. There is much merit in the trade and co-operation agreement that we have with the European Union. That should never have been seen as an event; it should be an evolutionary process, responding to events in a pragmatic and sensible way while always maintaining the integrity of the result of the Brexit referendum. She and I were on the same side in that debate. We lost, and we now have to play the hand of cards that we have been dealt. I have received emails describing me as a “dangerous radical” and a Stalinist. I have been called many things in my time, but a Stalinist dangerous radical was new to me. My North Dorset constituency is about 440 square miles, of which only 12% is built upon; the rest is open farmland, hill land, ancient woodland and so on. I had hoped that I might have been able to finish my speech by now, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I am just getting into the romantic prose. I notice that the clock stands at 10.59 am, and I understand that you want the statement to be given at 11 am. I am now in “Just a Minute”, talking down the clock without hesitation, repetition or deviation— Proceedings interrupted (Standing Order No. 11(4)).

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

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  The hon. Lady needed encouragement; she has got it.

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

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  I rise in support of the Bill. As a co-sponsor, I congratulate the hon. Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) for not just introducing the Bill but the way in which she introduced it. Echoing the hon. Member for Brent West (Barry Gardiner), I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) on what was a truly outstanding speech. As a number of people have referenced, we only have temporary hold of our planet, so let’s start with a good old biblical quote, Genesis 3:19: “for dust you are and to dust you shall return.” We have only the lightest of steps on our planet, and we need to remind ourselves of that. The arrogance that, as the apex species, we have taken on our shoulders—the idea that we can do anything and some brainbox somewhere will find a way of ameliorating or attenuating it at some point, so it does not matter, should be part of historical political thinking. In that respect, the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis) was absolutely correct. I want to speak to my colleagues and my party and to those who would describe themselves as centre-right in the political spectrum. Conservatives conserve. We are and have been champions of a notion of handing things on to successor generations. That must mean, in today’s parlance, not just physical capital of pounds, shillings and pence and of assets, but natural capital. My party has a proud and innovative track record on these issues. It was Geoffrey Howe’s early 1980s Budget, in response to the issues of acid rain, that, through the carrot and stick policy, sought to make unleaded petrol cheaper than four-star, thereby driving people—another pun, I am afraid—to have catalytic converters. My noble friend John Gummer introduced the landfill tax, and the first hypothecated environmental tax in our country. It was a Conservative Government who introduced the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and a Conservative Government who put through the environment Acts of 1986, 1995 and 2021. The Clean Air Act 1956 was introduced by a Conservative Government. Excellent work was done by former colleagues in this House, such as Michael Gove, Rebecca Pow and others, who took these issues seriously, made the case, and we legislated.

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

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  To my neighbour from West Dorset? Of course.

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

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  Dorset is well represented this morning. I will of course give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch.

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

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  Let me respond to my hon. Friend by quoting one of his great political heroes, the noble Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton: just because we cannot do good everywhere, that does not mean we cannot do a little bit of good here. I understand the point that my hon. Friend makes. Of course we have to be conscious of cost differentials, production costs and all the rest of it, but I say to him respectfully that if the rest of the world does something that is to the good, and one or two countries decide not to, or go at a slower pace or on a different path, I do not believe we should just stop, shrug, throw it up in the air and say, “Oh, well, if not everybody’s doing it, why the hell should we?” We led the abolition of slavery. Nobody else was doing it. We did it because we thought it was right. We introduced factory Acts. Nobody else was doing it. We did it because we thought it was right. We introduced votes for women. [ Interruption. ] Not me personally! I am not as old as my hon. Friend; I have just had a hard life. We have led. It is what the United Kingdom does. We are not a nation that follows; we are a nation that sculps, leads, forms, challenges, cajoles and encourages.

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

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  As I was saying— [ Laughter. ] I was tempted to scare the House by saying, “Having concluded my opening remarks,” but I think I had better not. If I may, I will address directly the Minister on the Treasury Bench, the hon. Member for Coventry East (Mary Creagh). I want to do so sincerely, because I like and admire her enormously, and I hope she knows that. She will know that a vast number of her colleagues on the Benches behind her and elsewhere support the general thrust of the Bill and are looking for a generous response from the Government, both to avoid having to divide the House and, more importantly, to make progress on these issues, which I know full well she holds close to her heart. I say to her—not in the spirit of any sort of ransom or blackmail—that how the Government respond to this debate will, in many ways, shape and sculpt how those of us who support the Bill respond in kind. I will bring my remarks to a conclusion. Some have said that those who support the Bill are dangerous, Stalinistic, anti-farming land grabbers. I opened my speech by saying that I wanted to speak specifically to my fellow Conservatives, both in this place and across the country, where the siren voices of simplistic populism call to us and try to drag us on to the rocks that we would be well advised to avoid. Let me close with the words of a dangerous left-wing activist: “It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways…We must use science to cast a light ahead”. The same dangerous leftie said: “But the threat to our world comes not only from tyrants and their tanks”— appropriate, given the statement we have just had— “It can be more insidious though less visible. The danger of global warming is as yet unseen, but real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations…We must remember our duty to Nature before it is too late.” Which radical Stalinist am I quoting? From which Guardian -writing journalist am I purloining phrases? Well, it is that dangerous leftie herself: Margaret Thatcher. The first quote is from her United Nations speech in 1989; her views, and the views of my party, are formed by science and the facts, with her basic university training at Somerville College, Oxford. The second quote was from the second world climate conference, after she had left office in 1990. I say to Conservatives today that we would still be well advised to heed her caution, her advice and her words.

• 23 Jan 2025 · Plan for Change · Hansard source

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  I welcome the announcement on the judicial review proposals. The Government’s plan for change is an important endeavour, which will need not just Cabinet colleagues but civil servants to row in behind it. Is the Minister able to tell the House how he is marshalling and co-ordinating political and official activities to deliver that, and who will hold the circle to deliver across Government, rather than just in silos?