Bobby Dean MP: speeches

Speeches

• 25 Nov 2025 · Pension Investment in UK Equities · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen) for securing this debate. We are colleagues on the Treasury Committee, and I always find his contributions extremely thoughtful. He has the best interests of the country at heart, so I thank him for securing this debate. We probably all agree that the UK investment system is broken, and not because of a lack of capital. There is £2.2 trillion-worth of capital locked up in UK pensions, and I think the consensus is that it is just not targeted well from the perspective of UK growth. We have already heard some figures cited: less than 5% of the funds are being allocated to UK assets, down from the highs of 50% in the ’90s, and that compares poorly with a lot of our international peers. Of course, there is not one way to fix this problem. Other hon. Members have highlighted other structural issues to do with regulation, culture, tax and demand for capital—people often speak to me about the need to get the pipeline of investable projects up in the UK—but mobilising these pools better through pensions reform is surely part of the solution. UK pensions put too much into low-performing bonds and far too much into global passive indices. The effect is that funds such as the MSCI are putting more into Apple than they are into the entire UK market—I think 4.9% is allocated to Apple and 3.4% in the UK. That leads to a vicious circle, which other hon. Members have alluded to. Time and again, the UK’s best are sold to US big tech: we have heard references to Apple buying some of our best semiconductor and fintech firms, and another example is Google purchasing DeepMind. There are other factors here, including how the London stock exchange operates and the troubles with initial public offerings, which we have spoken about. However, it is worth thinking about how the role of passive indices amplifies that effect. I worry that with the advent of artificial intelligence-driven algorithms in the financial sector, it may be amplified further. What we see is that the capital goes to the US tech giants, they buy the most innovative UK companies, that makes the UK market less attractive, and that means that UK pensions feel like they need to put more money into US companies—and the doom loop continues. I fear that unless we break the doom loop, we will see complete and utter dependence on a handful of US tech companies. All this happens while UK pension funds receive around £49 billion-worth of tax benefits, so the Government have every right to do something about this issue and act in the interests of our own country. More than that, as the right hon. Member for Salisbury noted, UK pension savers are demanding this. They expect more of their money to be put into British funds, even if it means declining returns. I empathise with the reasons why the Government want to go down the route of reserve powers and mandation. There has been lots of talk of an industry backlash, but some funds I have spoken to say that they want much stronger guardrails in relation to any mandation. They worry about mandation being used as a substitute for the wider structural reforms that we have spoken about. They also worry about future—perhaps more interventionist—Governments, and they want a much stronger set of guardrails for mandation, if it is to come. In place of mandation, there is a middle ground. The right hon. Member referred already to the enormous power of default settings, which we have seen with auto-enrolment. Behavioural science and behavioural economics tell us a lot more about how people actually respond; what works is not always rational self-interest and incentives. If we change the default options about UK equities and allow an opt-out, we will probably find that most people do not opt out. Research from New Financial states that a 25% allocation to the UK in these default funds could be worth up to £95 billion. That alone would be transformative, without the need for mandation. At the moment, UK savers are losing out twice: not only because they are getting poorer returns over the long term, but because we are choking off investment in the areas where they choose to live and retire. We should keep both those things in mind.

• 24 Nov 2025 · Ministerial Code · Hansard source

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  It seems that the urgent question has been in part fuelled by rampant pre-Budget briefing, but I would argue that it is a symptom of wider dysfunction in our Budget scrutiny process. Parliament is generally relegated to the sidelines and has no real power to challenge or amend the Budget, unlike in other democracies. Will the Minister look to review the UK Budget scrutiny process and see what we can learn from other countries? More broadly, will he look to enshrine the ministerial code into law? Will he also look at the role of the ethics adviser and ensure that it is truly independent, able to initiate its own investigations, come to its own conclusions and publish reports in its own time?

• 20 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I join the Leader of the House in thanking Mr Speaker for the seriousness with which he is taking Chinese interference in our democracy. I represent many Hongkongers in my constituency, and they are deeply concerned about this issue. It was a relief to hear confirmation that the Budget will be taking place on the Floor of the House next week. I am sure it is also a huge relief to advisers in the Treasury, who have just days before they start leaking the 2026 Budget. One thing that people will be looking out for in the Budget next week is the provisions that will be made for children with special educational needs and disabilities. I am fully aware that this is a crisis that was inherited by this Government, but it was not an unforeseen crisis. Eighteen months into this Government, we hear that their major reform plans have been pushed back again, which is a disappointment to us on the Liberal Democrat Benches. We are seeing councils go bankrupt, teachers in despair and families held in legal limbo—and ultimately, children being failed. I appreciate that there are some really tricky issues to resolve—balancing legal entitlements on paper with quality provision in reality, and adjusting to a world with higher diagnosis rates—but there are some actions that the Government could take right away, in particular in relation to private placements. Those have trebled in the past decade, and they cost more than double a state placement—about £60,000. We know that private equity is really aggressive in this space; it is taking on institutions and eating up market share, and its profit margins are reportedly around 20%. In the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, the Government introduced the idea of profit caps on those who are being exploitative in the children’s social care sector. Will the Leader of the House ask the relevant Minister whether that can be extended to SEND schools?

• 20 Nov 2025 · Migration: Settlement Pathway · Hansard source

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  I thank the Home Secretary for her confirmation about the five-year pathway for Hongkongers—that is a promise kept to them. The statement was otherwise a series of push measures. I am always fascinated by how much more difficult it gets, when it comes to the individual decisions made within the system. To push the Home Secretary on the Boriswave, which she has criticised, the vast majority of those figures were made up of Hongkongers arriving here under the BNO scheme, Ukrainian refugees, and deferred student visas after the covid pandemic. Which of those measures does she think was a mistake?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Budget: Press Briefings · Hansard source

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  The Minister is right to point out that speculation ahead of a Budget is not abnormal, but we have had speculation throughout most of this year. I wonder whether he will accept that part of the reason for that is how the Chancellor has both constructed and applied her fiscal rules. She set them up, with good intentions—we do need fiscal rules in place—but left herself with minimal headroom in a pretty volatile global economy, which has driven speculation all year round about how she would fill the gaps that have emerged throughout the year. Does he think that was a mistake?

• 17 Nov 2025 · Illegal Waste: Organised Crime · Hansard source

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  Residents in the Woodcote area of my constituency have been living with the misery of being opposite an illegal waste dump for years. Despite all the photographic and video evidence that they produce, nobody seems to be able to shut the site down. Can the Minister look into what level of proof is required to take action, because it seems obvious to everyone that what is going on is wrong, but nobody seems to be able to put an end to it?

• 13 Nov 2025 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Thank you, Mr Speaker. May I join the Leader of the House and the shadow Leader of the House in thanking you and all the staff for playing a role in organising the remembrance events of the past week? I, too, would like to focus on Ukraine this week. Russia’s war is rumbling on and we are about to enter a long and cold winter, in which it looks like temperatures will drop below minus 20°C. We hear that Vladimir Putin has a vicious plot to attack the energy infrastructure of Ukraine, threatening the heat supply to the very homes in which families are trying to survive. As Russia makes advances, it feels like Britain and its allies have reached a bit of a stalling point. We are standing around worrying whether it is legitimate to seize Russian assets, and we are worried about potential future legal claims by the Russian state. All the while, Putin is pouring petrol into his war machine. I feel that the time for deliberation is surely over. Several legal routes have been proposed, and it is now time to act. In the meantime, one of the weapons that we have in our armoury is the sanctions regime against Russia. It is important not only to impose these sanctions, but to enforce them. It was quite shocking to learn this week that the Government were unable to explain why over £30 million-worth of Russian planes were imported into the UK. I note that the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation is much smaller than its equivalents in the US and the EU. In the debate that we may have about Ukraine before the end of the year, I wonder whether we could focus on the role of OFSI and determine whether it is adequate, and whether it has the resources to properly deal with the scale and importance of the UK sanctions regime.

• 4 Nov 2025 · Official Development Assistance Reductions · Hansard source

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  The right hon. Lady is making an excellent case for international aid and is talking about the need for it to evolve and to be better and bigger in some ways. Why therefore is her party proposing cutting the aid budget to 0.1%?

• 4 Nov 2025 · Official Development Assistance Reductions · Hansard source

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  I declare an interest in that my wife works for Save the Children. Indeed, I met her while working in the sector almost 11 years ago to this day. I start by setting out some context around the erosion of the budget, because it has not just been reduced in absolute terms but as a proportion. That makes some of the arguments about not being able to afford official development assistance due to the lack of growth in the economy slightly disingenuous—because, of course, when the economy does not perform, the amount that we contribute goes down anyway. There has also been a lot of salami-slicing of the budget. The merger with the FCDO was bad for the amount of aid being directed to the global south; we have also heard about the Home Office eating into the budget. With regard to the latest reason for reducing the aid budget—which is about defence—a lot of the uplift in the defence budget has been on the capital side. We are borrowing to invest in that capital. Therefore it is also slightly disingenuous to say that there is a direct transfer between the international aid budget and the money that is going into defence. That needs to be made clear. The public misunderstand how much we commit to spending on international aid. In polls, they consistently overestimate it. I believe that if the British public truly understood that the commitment was 0.7%, they would stand by that commitment. It is like asking somebody who is down to their last £100 if they would give 70p to somebody more needy than them. I know that the British public are generous, and that they would not baulk at that figure. I think that they would maintain that commitment. I now move to the points that were excellently put by the right hon. Member for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale (David Mundell) on how we have allowed public support to erode over time. The public’s perception of international aid is that a lot of it is wasted, that some of it is spent on woke projects, that it goes to corrupt Governments, and that the trade-off between investment in the poor overseas and the poor in the UK is a zero-sum game. It would be easy for me to say that it is the fault of right-wing populists, the media and so on. However, I think that the sector itself has failed to communicate properly. It has failed to tell a long-term story of its success. For 30 years, we have had the same images on our screens—starving African children with flies hovering around their noses. That is the image that we consistently feed to the public, instead of telling some of the stories of progress, such as how we have halved infant mortality and lifted a billion people out of destitution. Those are the stories that we should have been telling the public all along. I believe that the development sector was one of the most scrutinised in terms of its monitoring and evaluation. From time to time, I am sure that there have been pet projects that were useless. However, generally speaking we have achieved so much from our investment in international aid, so we need to get that message across. The following points were made by the hon. Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law), so I will not go into them in detail. However, we need to sell the changing purpose of aid—how it is about not dependency but creating independence, how we work in partnership because it is not mere charity, and how it is based on shared values because we all want a good future for our children. It is about telling those stories of progress. Other Members have already made good points about how this is also in our self-interest—the raw, naked interest of Britain. If we vacate this field, it will be filled by others. When I lived in Uganda for a period, I saw how China is moving in where the UK is moving out, so this has an impact on soft power all over the world. The points made about conflict security have been well put; whether we feel it in inflation or migration, these problems arrive back on our shores. The arguments against the aid budget are rooted in moral confusion, they demonstrate a poor analysis of the efficacy of aid, and they are strategically short-sighted. That is why we need to restore the 0.7% budget and recreate an independent Department for International Development, so that we can start marshalling that money towards the good, effective and important work that it has always done.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Israel-Palestine Conflict: Government Response · Hansard source

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  I thank the Chair for her Committee’s report. She mentioned the possible determination of genocide and said that, in her personal view, that is what has taken place. Of course, a UN report has reached that conclusion as well. I am fairly certain that that should place certain obligations on the UK, so will the Committee commit to investigating exactly what the UK’s obligations are to any kind of international accountability process?

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

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  Moving on to fraud—speaking of— I would like to focus on how fraud destroys lives. It eradicates people’s savings, it plunges people into debt and it diminishes people’s faith in human nature. Fraud is on the rise—it is up by almost a fifth—and it makes up nearly half of all crime in the UK. I know that the Government are set to release a fraud strategy soon, but there are worrying reports that a key component is about to be ditched. British banks pick up the tab for fraud in this country. They are the ones who reimburse the victims, even though the vast majority of fraud these days happens on online platforms. The Prime Minister himself recognises this, saying before the election that tech companies have a clear obligation and should have a clear financial incentive to tackle fraud. That commitment is what we are worried about being dropped—apparently to appease American President Donald Trump. The Government sent a gushing letter to big tech CEOs over the summer congratulating them on their efforts in tackling fraud, but UK Finance and the Financial Conduct Authority both disagree and say that big tech companies are not doing enough. Can the Government publish their fraud strategy and commit to holding big tech companies to account, ensuring that they are hit in the pocket for not tackling fraud?

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

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  I associate myself with the comments about hurricane victims and, indeed, with the comments about Prunella Scales. Earlier this week, we were treated to the delight of a Conservative Opposition day, and the main thing we learned is that the Conservatives do enjoy being in opposition. We had the shadow Housing Secretary, the right hon. Member for Braintree (Sir James Cleverly), decrying the housing crisis that their Government left behind, and the former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), committing to reducing the welfare bill that went up on their watch. We hear that we are to get yet another Conservative Opposition day next week. The Conservatives are set to get 17 days to the Liberal Democrats’ three in this parliamentary Session. We would just gently suggest that, if we want to elevate the debate in this Chamber, we may want to redress that balance in the next Session.

• 30 Oct 2025 · Property Service Charges · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady is making some excellent points. I really think it is the radical solutions that we need to consider. I should probably declare an interest as a director of a right-to-manage company—we got so fed up with the freeholder failing to manage our building properly that we took back control. However, as she points out, that is not the end of the story, and we still need to get a lot of people to agree on a lot of things, and building up the reserve fund is particularly difficult. I encourage the hon. Lady to keep coming up with ideas that are bolder than the ones that are out there at the moment, because it is a sticky problem to fix.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  Surprise, surprise, I do not. I will come on to the reasons why. Mortgage companies will lend around four times someone’s income, so we can see how big the problem is. A couple may stand a chance of getting a mortgage; someone on their own has no chance. The other problem with house prices accelerating away from wages so much is that the 10% deposit that people often need to raise is completely out of reach. To put this in context, in 1990 the average wage was around £8,000 a year, and a person might have needed to save about £2,000 for a deposit. Today, a person on the average wage of £33,000 would have to try to save £28,000. People simply cannot do it unless they have the support of their mum or dad, or others in their family. This is the death of meritocracy in our country. We now live in a society where a person’s family wealth, not their work or talent, defines their future financial security. We are back to Victorian-era levels of social mobility. That is absolutely abhorrent, and no amount of tinkering around the edges is sufficient to fix it. Scrapping stamp duty will not be a silver bullet. In fact, on its own, it might represent a bit of a giveaway to those who are already faring better than most in society. If we are serious about fixing the housing crisis in our country, we need a generational change in the level of house building, and a holistic approach to redesigning the property tax system.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  When the hon. Gentleman refers to covid, I think he is referring to total debt, which has increased. We are talking specifically about why the civil service has increased in size. A lot of that can be attributed to the new functions that the UK Government have had to take on. On the welfare budget, yes, the Government struggled to get through their welfare reforms, but so did the previous Conservative Government. That is why the proposal that half of the £47 billion will come from welfare cuts lacks credibility.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I think the hon. Member will find that across the country there will be opposition politicians opposing developments. In Sutton council in my borough, where we are in control, we are outstripping all of London in house building, and I am very proud of that record. In order to fix the housing crisis, we need sustained wage growth, so that wages come up against the increase in house prices. I do not hear that on offer from the Conservative party today. I am sorry to say that we have a Trussite proposal on the table: an unfunded tax cut that lacks real credibility.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  Exactly. He obviously was not paying enough attention to our argument. Yes, we did agree with the analysis that stamp duty is a poor tax, but we could not support the motion, because we do not think there is a credible plan for abolishing it. We would like to see a much more holistic review of property taxes, alongside a credible plan. There is no credible plan in the motion. We do not trust the public spending cut proposals that have been put forward.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  Ask any economist, or indeed most Members in the Chamber today, and they would say that stamp duty is a bad tax. It creates friction in the market, whether we are talking about someone in a one-bedroom flat who is trying to take the step up to a family home, but who finds that their savings goal is now that much more, or whether we are talking about someone whose kids have flown the nest, and who is considering downsizing but finds the bill a disincentive. It is important that we do not overstate what abolishing stamp duty will do. There have been lots of claims about how it will help millions of young people on to the ladder. For most people, this would not be the case. There is an exemption for first-time buyers of properties worth up to £300,000, and a further discount all the way up to half a million. It is important that we recognise that the proposal would not make a difference for huge numbers of people, including young people. I appreciate the points made about the fluidity of the market as well, but that is not the critical point. The central problem in the housing market is the disparity between people’s wages and house prices. People have said to me, “I had to save hard to get my home,” and “You should have seen the interest rates back in the day.” I have no doubt that it has always been hard and a struggle to save up to buy a property, but the extent to which it has become out of reach today is not properly understood. Around the time I was born—1990, if Members are interested—the difference between the average wage and the average house price was about three times a person’s income, but today that average difference is eight times a person’s income. I represent a London constituency, and for people in London, that difference is 15 times the average income. That means that people in the top 10% of earners in the capital cannot afford the average home. It is an absolute disgrace that we have allowed ourselves to get to this situation.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I wholeheartedly agree with my hon. Friend. I made the point earlier that the welfare bill went up on the Conservative Government’s watch, not least because they cut back NHS funding.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way after his fantastic punchline, which everybody really enjoyed.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I will make some progress; I have been intervened on quite a few times. In the Chamber, we may agree on the analysis of stamp duty’s failings, but the Liberal Democrats cannot support the motion, because it is not a credible plan. Also, if a stamp duty cut were made in isolation, it might not deliver what Conservative Members say it would. It might just gum up the housing market further for the next generation. It is high time that we had a serious debate about property tax reform. Some of that has happened in the Chamber today, but the motion does not reflect that serious debate, so I will not support it.

• 28 Oct 2025 · Stamp Duty Land Tax · Hansard source

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  I thank the hon. Member for bringing me on to my next point early. I want to address this proposed £47 billion in public spending cuts. If the Conservatives were to hand over that proposal in its current form to the Office for Budget Responsibility, it would laugh them out of the front door. Those cuts are not credible at all. Over half of that figure is based on welfare cuts—a welfare bill, by the way, that rose on the watch of the Conservative Government, not least because of the defunding of the NHS, which caused people to be in ill health in the first place. The Conservatives are also talking about reducing the size of the civil service. Can any Member hazard a guess as to why the civil service has grown since 2016? It is because we have in-housed a lot of bureaucracy that we used to outsource to Brussels. One of the primary reasons why the civil service has grown is the number of services that we now have to deliver in this country.

• 27 Oct 2025 · Access to Work Scheme · Hansard source

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  2. What steps his Department is taking to assess the effectiveness of the Access to Work scheme in helping to enable long-term career progression for disabled people.

• 27 Oct 2025 · Access to Work Scheme · Hansard source

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  A constituent came to my surgery the other week who felt pretty frustrated that the Access to Work scheme, which once supported him, was pulling the rug from beneath his feet as he progressed in his career. He has been a model example; he has not let his multiple neurodivergent diagnoses hold him back. He has worked hard and, with support, has earned a promotion to a deputy leadership position. At that point, the DWP decided to reassess him, and it downgraded his support—right at the moment when he felt he needed to maintain that support, given his new responsibilities. Can the Minister assure us that when the reforms come, they will ensure that people are supported over the progression of their career, as well as into work in the first place?