Jesse Norman MP: speeches

Speeches

• 16 Apr 2026 · Modernisation Committee Report: Access to the House of Commons · Hansard source

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  Thank you very much indeed, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am grateful for the opportunity to say a couple of words about the excellent contributions to the debate. I will, if I may, pick up on a couple of points. I do not think that anything more needs to be added to what the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) said about properly accessible toilets; he was absolutely right about that. The hon. Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) made a well observed point about the diversity of experience and views among wheelchair users. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for his gracious words about his predecessor, the brilliant Robert Halfon. I welcome the support of the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) for the sceptic’s view on restoration and renewal. I ask the Leader of the House whether it might be possible to have two debates on that. We could first have what one might call a digestive debate, to discuss the actual process of R and R, how it will work and what might be involved, and then a second debate on the motion. The figure of £40 billion is so big that it would be helpful for the House to pre-consider the matter, before considering the motion. I thank the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Adam Jogee) very much for his moving remarks about his experience on the assisted dying private Member’s Bill. Finally, the hon. Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes) reminded us how difficult it is to replicate the specific experience of individual disabled MPs, and how important it is to listen to what they have said. With all that in mind, I thank the Committee and the Leader of the House for all the work they have done, and the Administration for its response.

• 16 Apr 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 16 Apr 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  And he is from Northern Ireland to boot. He is an honest man facing his demons and triumphing. What a contrast with the Prime Minister’s failure to answer, or even to engage with, the question at Prime Minister’s questions. The last four Prime Minister’s questions have focused on the Iran war, fuel duty, North sea oil and gas, and the defence review. Of the 24 responses given by the Prime Minister to the Leader of the Opposition, 23 have ignored the question and changed the subject. Yesterday, Mr Speaker, we even saw the Prime Minister hectoring you in your Chair, on live television, just for doing your job. That is a shameful record, for which the Prime Minister should write to you—and therefore by implication to this House—and apologise. This behaviour is contemptuous—of you, Mr Speaker, of the Leader of the Opposition, and of all MPs, now and in years gone by. Our job, however imperfectly we may do it, is to pursue the truth on behalf of those we represent. If we give that up, then heaven help us. It is the Prime Minister’s job to answer, and to hold himself accountable for those answers. No Prime Minister likes to do that, but those are the rules. If the Prime Minister does not like the rules, does not want to offer honest answers, or is not up to it, he should step back and let someone else do the job instead. I thank you, Mr Speaker, on behalf of all of us for maintaining the traditions of this House. I have three questions for the Leader of the House today, and I ask him first if he shares my view that the Prime Minister’s behaviour is wholly inappropriate and disrespectful of this House. This is just part of a wider problem to do with accountability and disrespect for Parliament. My noble Friend Lord Gilbert’s parliamentary question of 16 March asked the Government about authorised Budget briefings to the media. Lord Livermore replied on the Government’s behalf: “Consistent with these principles, there are occasions where the Government will trail and/or announce policy ahead of a Budget to provide context and help the public understand major fiscal events.” This is nonsense. The rules are perfectly clear: major events must be announced first to this House. To do otherwise is a breach of the rules of this House, a flagrant violation of the ministerial code and contempt of Parliament. Previous Governments, as we all know, have done this on occasion, since 1997 at least, and previous Chancellors of the Exchequer have been fired for inadvertent briefings to the media before a Budget, but never before has it been a Government’s declared policy to ignore Parliament. The deeper constitutional point is, of course, that in our representative system of government, the people are Parliament, and Parliament is the people. Nothing good can come of an attempt to undermine the British constitution by this means. I ask the Leader of the House, secondly, to comment on this, and to set out what he will do to get this policy of non-announcement of major measures withdrawn and revoked. Finally, Lord Robertson spoke of the “corrosive complacency” of current political leadership, and of putting our country at risk. He said, “We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.” No one has more experience and expertise on defence across the whole of Parliament, in both Chambers. This man, the noble Lord Robertson, was a political activist for Labour since 1961. Just think. He is the last person one could imagine wanting to offer public criticism of a Labour Prime Minister, let alone in these terms—a man Labour to his boots, but a patriot first. It is impossible to blame previous Governments for this. This Government and this Prime Minister created the defence review and the defence investment plan—no one else. It is their choice and their decision. It matters because in every constituency across the country there are companies wanting to know what the Government have decided. They are waiting for leadership. They need to know the numbers and the commitment, and, of course, our adversaries need to know that we are serious in our resolve, and they need to see the measure of that seriousness. My great fear—perhaps it is also Lord Robertson’s great fear—is that the Government will never publish this document, or they will do so in a completely insubstantial and lightweight way, and that 10 months of delay will end in nothing, and it will all have been a colossal waste of time and energy. The Prime Minister has been utterly hopeless on this. He told the Liaison Committee weeks ago that the document was on his desk, yet nothing has happened. I leave it to colleagues to judge the truth of his remarks. I ask the Leader of the House, thirdly, if he will give this House a cast-iron guarantee on behalf of the Government that the defence investment plan will be published, and not simply shelved and forgotten. The one-year anniversary is in July.

• 16 Apr 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  As the House will know, this has been a week of sporting triumph. I think of the Lionesses’ 1-0 world cup qualifier against the world champions, Italy—or former world champions, I should say—and Rory McIlroy defending his Masters title, which was another great moment. Whether or not we play, watch, or even like golf, it was an extraordinary, gripping achievement.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I would be grateful if you could clarify that the House’s position is, and has always been, that we expect Members to show courtesy by informing other Members if they intend to mention them, not their constituency, and that in the normal course of business, Members of this House may always refer to places without any intention of discourtesy towards the Members of Parliament who represents them.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 19 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Let me begin by paying tribute to President Zelensky. Thanks to you, Mr Speaker, he gave an extraordinary speech here this week. Like Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles”, it was a speech of poetry and hope, but also of steel. He showed that Ukraine, far from being bowed by Russia, is now sharing its expertise in counter-drone defence with nations across the Gulf and elsewhere. I give thanks for the swift action that the Government have taken to support households that are now facing sharp and unexpected increases in the cost of heating oil, including many in Herefordshire. As Herefordshire goes, so goes the UK. The events in the middle east have exposed a hard truth: this country is dangerously exposed on energy, and the Government’s policies are compounding that vulnerability. Around a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes through the strait of Hormuz. When that is threatened, prices spike, and when prices spike, everything else is hit—heating, electricity, industry and jobs. Every industrialised economy relies on secure and affordable energy, yet this country imports around 60% of the gas we use. We pay far more for it than our competitor nations do—around three times US prices—so when shocks come, the benefits of higher gas prices go to other countries, but our citizens bear the higher costs and added insecurity. That structural vulnerability has built up over decades under Governments of all the major parties, but this Government are negligently or deliberately making it much worse. They have blocked new North sea licences, and sent a clear signal that domestic oil and gas production is to be run down, regardless of demand. The consequences of these decisions are already visible. The CF Fertilisers plant near Chester has closed thanks to high energy costs, so this country now imports ammonia instead. The Grangemouth refinery is ceasing its refining operations and becoming an import terminal. In Aberdeen, Scunthorpe and Teesside, investment is falling and companies are failing. Thousands of jobs have been lost, and tens of thousands more put at risk. Little wonder that a host of businesses and unions, including Unite, the GMB and even RenewableUK, have expressed their concern. These are not isolated events; they are the predictable effects of policy decisions taken by Ministers without any serious consideration of the economic and strategic consequences in the current context. The Energy Secretary often says that the problem is global gas prices, and that increasing domestic production makes no difference. Of course that is nonsense, because domestic production actually boosts jobs, public revenues and national resilience while lowering emissions. But that line is also dangerously misleading. Gas prices are regional, not global, because gas, unlike oil, is relatively expensive to ship and store. The Energy Secretary is confusing a global market with global pricing. It is a basic error. Alas, the Chancellor is no less confused. On Tuesday, she said: “You see countries like Canada and Norway increasing their production, and every country’s got to play their part”. But, in her view, that does not include the UK. Her policy is precisely the opposite: not to increase but to reduce oil and gas production. You could not make it up. Shortly we will hear the Business Secretary make a statement on how the Government want to increase domestic steel production, even while they are stopping the domestic oil and gas on which that steel production relies. It is an absolute nonsense. If we cut domestic production in the face of steady demand, imports will fill the gap, but an increasingly import-dependent system is forced to rely ever more on pipelines, LNG cargoes and interconnectors. These are vulnerable fixed assets that are open to damage and disruption from abroad, and there is a further consequence. Modern conflict is determined by industrial capacity in steel, chemicals, fuels and supply chains, yet the Government are allowing these national sovereign capabilities to erode. So this is a policy that increases carbon emissions, deprives Britain of tax revenues, worsens the balance of payments, hurts consumers and businesses, and weakens both our energy resources and our national security—that is quite an achievement. It is hard to imagine a more confused or dangerous approach. I do not want a debate on this topic as we can all see what is happening: at some point there must be a U-turn, because Iran is making a fool of the Energy Secretary. No, I desperately want the Leader of the House to get the Prime Minister to see the madness of this approach and get the policy changed as soon as he possibly can.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Pre-1997 Pensions: Discretionary Increases · Hansard source

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  I congratulate the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) on his excellent speech and on securing this debate, and all those who have participated in it. I thank the Minister for allowing me a few words. On your behalf, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will mention your constituent Steve Mawby, because he has been a key campaigner in this important and very difficult area. I first got involved in it before I became a Member of Parliament in 2007, and I pay particular tribute to the late Roy Harries and Les Collard, because they brought to my attention the injustice that had been perpetrated on older pensioners by the Special Metals Wiggin pension fund. Hundreds of people were affected by that, and, alas, many of them are now dead. They were almost invariably widows, who were left receiving half of a much-diminished pension. These pensioners have not received a single penny in top-up payments since the legislation kicked in, because the company’s trustees have decided not to pay any discretionary bonuses at any point. The result is that those pensioners’ incomes are 55% lower than they would have been, and, for widows, half of that. It is an absolute outrage and a great historical injustice, and as the hon. Member says, the fact that an injustice occurred in the past does not mean that it is not important to address it now. Of course, there was a clear blunder in the legislation. I have raised this issue in the House over the years, and it is a matter of great embarrassment that previous Conservative Administrations and the coalition Government did not address it, but there is now the opportunity to do so. On the Special Metals Wiggin pension fund, I recognise that the trustees are often directly or indirectly controlled by the company, regardless of whether they are formally independent. The company has not paid any bonuses or top-ups, and it is now owned by a large American company, Precision Castparts Corp., which is itself owned by Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway. I have written to Buffett, who has said that he is not willing to help either. It is a source of great sadness to me that even such a great philanthropist and entrepreneur such should have failed to do so. My question to the Minister is this: given that the Special Metals Wiggin pension fund has been in surplus for many years, could he, as well as considering the question of historical injustice, consider the question of whether the trustees should be required, out of the surpluses they have, to pay top-ups to the pensioners? I hope they will consider doing so retrospectively but, if not, they should do so in way that is generous, that recognises the terrible injustice that has been done, and that pays proper tribute to Les Collard, Roy Harries and all the great men and women of the Wiggin pensioners, who we justly celebrate and whose injustice we seek to fight.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Pre-1997 Pensions: Discretionary Increases · Hansard source

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  I will not detain the Minister long. If a group of trustees never pays a discretionary bonus, even though the scheme is in surplus, it starts to look like it is a policy of theirs to discriminate against a subset of their beneficiaries, and I think that is illegal. I would be grateful for his guidance on that.

• 19 Mar 2026 · Pre-1997 Pensions: Discretionary Increases · Hansard source

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  I can understand why the Minister thinks those cases are harder; in some respects, they are less hard, because in those cases changes have been made reflecting circumstances. In the cases that I am talking about, there is a policy to discriminate against a settled group of beneficiaries. That is the bit that I think is potentially illegal.

• 12 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Hon. Members may wish, if they like, to consult works by the shadow Leader of the House on this topic. I doubt whether any other book or any single body of thought has had more effect in improving the lives and livelihoods of people across the world in the intervening 250 years. We celebrate the service of our armed forces and we rightly treat defence matters, wherever possible, as bound by a united focus on the national interest, but it is precisely that focus on the national interest that requires us now to acknowledge that the past two weeks have been a disaster for this country. Our allies in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and across the Gulf have criticised this country for its “slow” and “weak” response to date. The Cypriot high commissioner and the President of Cyprus have publicly expressed their disappointment and dissatisfaction. Why? Because we have exposed their people and our people to drone attacks as targets, placed weapons systems on their territories, made solemn undertakings to them over many years and now failed to come to their defence in time. It did not have to be this way, so we must ask how this can possibly have happened. Let us review the history. It was being publicly reported by 15 January that America was starting to build a carrier strike force around the USS Abraham Lincoln, targeted at Iran. On 26 January, The Washington Post reported that this force had arrived in the middle east. On 31 January, our own Prime Minister told the BBC: “The aim is that Iran shouldn’t be able to develop nuclear weapons…we support the goal and we are talking to allies about how we get to that goal.” Those remarks come close to an explicit endorsement of the United States on its operation, as they were doubtless intended to. The key point is this: all this happened four full weeks before the start of the attack. Last week, at this Dispatch Box, I highlighted the gaps and inconsistencies in the Government’s position, between their supposedly settled legal view and the last-ditch political decision reportedly taken in Cabinet on the Friday before hostilities began, and secondly between the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, whose original instinct was to support the USA but who was overruled. It is now clear that there has also been a disastrous failure of political leadership. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet knew, or should have known, for a full month that the USA was mustering a vast body of forces to attack Iran, that it could not remain on high readiness indefinitely, and so an attack must surely follow. The Prime Minister himself said last week that the Government had pre-deployed some weapons to the region, yet he failed to give instructions in time to the Navy to prepare HMS Dragon, he failed to notify the Cypriots, and he failed to warn our allies and other friends across the region. Now that they are engaged, our armed forces are discharging their duties with distinction, but the result of this political incompetence has been a fiasco, which brought shame and dishonour on this country. We have the disgraceful sight now of the Government anonymously trashing the Chief of the Defence Staff, in a desperate attempt to deflect responsibility for their own inadequacies, not just via an anonymous leak in The Spectator , repeated in The Telegraph , but by a quoted, but of course unnamed, official to the Financial Times . I cannot recall that a political hatchet job of this kind has ever been performed on a commanding officer in the course of a military operation. It is deeply dishonourable and itself a further sign of failure in No. 10. Will the Leader of the House support an inquiry into these leaks and briefings? Will he support an investigation, in due course, as to how this embarrassing fiasco can have been allowed to happen and what can be done to prevent it from ever happening again?

• 12 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Mr Speaker, let me start by associating myself with your remarks just now from the Chair. It is plain to all Members of the House that the Government Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip have badly mis-stepped. Indeed, there has been scant respect for the House more generally from the Government Whips Office. I cannot believe that such a thing would have happened when the Leader of the House was Chief Whip. If I may, let me join the Prime Minister yesterday, and I am sure the whole House today, in remembering the dreadful events of 30 years ago in Dunblane and paying tribute to the victims and their families. On a happier note, last Monday saw the 250th anniversary of Adam Smith’s immortal masterpiece “The Wealth of Nations”.

• 12 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 5 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 5 Mar 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I will, if I may, start by adding my very warm thanks to, and recognition of, our magnificent Clerk, Tom Goldsmith. Mr Speaker has already been indelicate enough to mention Tom’s extraordinary skill at the jazz piano, but as someone who eats very much at the opposite end of the jazz food chain, may I just say that our loss of him as a Clerk will be more than made up for by his forthcoming history of British jazz? I hope the House will join me in welcoming that, because it will not write itself. Let me start by recognising, on behalf of the whole House, all those men and women from our country and our allies who are engaged in the conflict in and around Iran. We thank them for their bravery and their service. Let us not also forget that our great ally, Ukraine, is fighting for her life in the face of an attempted and unprovoked Russian war of conquest. NATO and this country must not allow themselves to be distracted now from giving Ukraine all the support that we can. As we approach International Women’s Day this Saturday, I note that this week marks the anniversary of Nancy Astor taking her seat in 1919 as the first woman Member of Parliament—a milestone in the long journey towards wider political representation in this House. This was a week in which three current or former members of the Labour party were arrested on charges of spying for China. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gave a spring statement that explicitly reserved any policy substance for her forthcoming Mais lecture, not for Parliament, and badly misrepresented the economic position that this country is in. We would never know from what she said that we have the highest unemployment in this country since the pandemic and that youth unemployment is in a state of crisis. Meanwhile, the Chancellor failed to mention, let alone publish, the defence investment plan, which her Department, the Treasury, has held up for nine months. The House will note the irony that a Government who have never been willing to acknowledge the economic cost of the pandemic and the energy spike resulting from the war in Ukraine will now have to explain the economic effects of rapidly rising oil and gas prices due to the present conflict in the Gulf. We can only hope against hope that recent events will cause the Energy Secretary—a man with the worst judgment in politics, whom the Prime Minister wanted to sack in the last reshuffle but was too weak to do so—to rethink his dangerously inadequate energy policy and refusal to develop North sea oil and gas. Perhaps we will hear a U-turn in his statement later today. Unlike the Energy Secretary, the Leader of the House is a serious man, and I want to ask him a serious question. The Government’s official story, set out by the Prime Minister at the Dispatch Box yesterday, is that they have been preparing for a US attack for several weeks. These preparations include pre-locating missile and other weapons systems in the middle east, though not sending a Type 45 frigate, which remains in dock at Portsmouth and will not depart for more than a week after the start of the conflict. It is little wonder that our allies have been so critical of the UK response. The Prime Minister has also offered us a pre-prepared line on the legal position, which is that the present Government regard defensive operations as legal, but that it is against international law for the UK, and so presumably in his judgment for the United States and Israel, to take pre-emptive action to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, when it is the avowed policy of that state to use those weapons to destroy another sovereign state—Israel. This is, of course, the second time in a year that the US and Israel have acted against Iran, so all these issues have already been widely discussed across Government. Yet it is now reported with some authority, across the newspapers, that the Prime Minister was actually minded to support the US attack on Friday evening but was forced to back down by a group of Ministers including the Home Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and, yes, the Energy Secretary. It is hard to see how these things could all be true, and they raise a host of questions. If the Government have been preparing for an attack by the US and Israel for weeks, how can it be true that their policy was still undecided on Friday night? If the Prime Minister’s view was that he was minded to support the attack, where does that leave the legal position? Legal experts, including the noble Lord Pannick, have criticised the Government’s position as not legally “rational”—that is a quote—but my concern is more basic: whether the Government are making the legal position up as they go along, just as the Blair Government did with the Iraq war in 2003. Finally, it now looks like the Cabinet has taken a decision with which the Prime Minister fundamentally does not agree. How can he exercise leadership under such circumstances? I do not expect the Leader of the House to comment on Cabinet discussions in any detail, of course, but I am sure that the whole House will be grateful for any explanation he can give.

• 12 Feb 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  On behalf of all Members, I thank the Leader of the House for giving us those recess dates, which will be widely welcomed. Today is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the greatest of all United States Presidents, so perhaps this is a fitting moment to talk a little bit about public service. I congratulate the Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Rev. Mark Birch, on his new job at Westminster Abbey, and I welcome his successor, the Venerable Andrew Hillier. We thank them for their service. I note that the International Olympic Committee has banned a Ukrainian athlete from wearing a helmet of remembrance for his fellow athletes who have been killed by Russia—talk about public service. Otherwise, the news has once again been filled by a succession of the most appalling misjudgments by the Prime Minister. These include decisions by him to ignore both public evidence and private advice, and to appoint to the House of Lords not one but two men with continuing connections to convicted paedophiles. It has been confirmed today that the Prime Minister was aware that his nominee, Matthew Boyle, had campaigned for a man charged with distributing indecent images of children two months before the Prime Minister appointed him. The fallout from the Mandelson scandal has so far included the departures of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and his head of communications, one after 18 months and the other after just a few weeks in post. We now have the leaked news that the Prime Minister’s personal choice of Cabinet Secretary is being forced to step down after barely a year in post. As they say at the BBC, deputy heads must roll. Of course, no Government are free from scandal—goodness knows, I can say that from personal experience—and certainly not the previous ones, as the House will know well, but let there be no deflection or fudge on this matter. There has been nothing to compare with this catalogue of personal misjudgments by a Prime Minister for perhaps 60 years. Every sitting day, the chaplain leads the House in prayer for public service, that we as a House may “never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices”. Every Member of the House knows those words, but that is precisely what these people have failed to do. I will end on a positive note with a truly uplifting story from this week. Some years ago, my constituents, Sam and Emily Stables, set up a brilliant charity called We are Farming Minds in Herefordshire. It is dedicated to supporting farmers struggling with poor mental health. Sam is a sheep farmer himself, and he knows only too well from personal experience how immensely difficult, stressful and lonely life can be on a farm—still more, given all the recent troubles that farmers have had to endure, including outbreaks of tuberculosis and other diseases, a dysfunctional farm payments system, increasingly burdensome regulations, and of course, most recently, the farm tax. On average, a farmer commits suicide every week in this country. On Monday, however, Sam embarked on a walk of hope from Ross-on-Wye to London in support of Yellow Wellies’ Mind Your Head Week and of greater public awareness of mental health in the farming community. By my calculations, he is coming through the Chilterns right about now, heading for High Wycombe. With luck, I will find him this afternoon on the trail around Beaconsfield. That is what real public service looks like. Let us all take this opportunity to send our deep thanks to Sam and Emily, and to their volunteers and supporters, for their extraordinary work.

• 12 Feb 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 5 Feb 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 5 Feb 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I do not think that this is a moment for normal business. I am sure that you, Mr Speaker, and the Leader of the House and all Members, will join me in taking this moment to remember the victims of Jeffrey Epstein: the young women and girls who were systematically trafficked and abused by him and his associates over many years—both those who have come forward and those who have not felt able to do so. Today, I will talk about Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein. I have no doubt that the Leader of the House and colleagues across this Chamber feel the same way that I do. He and they will understand that this is a matter that far transcends party politics. Peter Mandelson, when Business Secretary, advised Jeffrey Epstein that Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J. P. Morgan, should “mildly threaten” the Chancellor at the time—his colleague, Alistair Darling—over the planned tax on bankers’ bonuses, as Jamie Dimon, still the chief executive of J. P. Morgan, duly did. Mandelson forwarded market-sensitive information to Epstein that related to the 2009 sale of up to £20 billion in state assets, describing the internal Downing Street memo—internal, I stress—as an “Interesting note that’s gone to the PM.” Mandelson gave Epstein advance notice of the EU’s 2010 €500 billion bail-out the night before the official announcement, and he warned him in advance of the departure of Gordon Brown from No. 10 Downing Street —a further highly market-sensitive piece of information. In 2008, Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in Florida under a state plea bargain on two sample felony counts: solicitation of prostitution from a minor and procurement of a minor for prostitution. The Prime Minister was specifically asked at Prime Minister’s questions yesterday whether he knew that Mandelson had continued his friendship with Epstein after the conviction. He said: “when we drafted Humble Addresses in opposition, we always included an exemption for national security”. —[ Official Report , 4 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 259.] Unfortunately, that is plainly untrue—it must be inadvertent. When the Labour party presented its Humble Address for impact assessments on Brexit to be released on 1 November 2017, that address did not mention national security at all. The second name on that motion was that of the Prime Minister. I hope the Leader of the House will encourage the Prime Minister to correct the record when he next appears at the Dispatch Box. The Prime Minister also said yesterday: “we went through a process. There was a due diligence exercise, and then there was security vetting by the security services. What was not known was the sheer depth and the extent of the relationship. Mandelson lied about that to everyone for years.” —[ Official Report , 4 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 259.] Let us think about that for a moment. The Prime Minister is saying that if only he had known about the depth and the extent of the relationship between Mandelson and Epstein as it continued after 2008, he would have rejected the appointment. It was not enough that he knew Mandelson had a continuing relationship with this convicted paedophile and sex trafficker. He knew it—indeed, the fact that Mandelson had stayed in Epstein’s mansion had been reported to him by public sources, and he ignored it. Not only that, but the Prime Minister had the public information further confirmed and reinforced by the security vetting that was done after the appointment but before Mandelson had signed his contract of employment. That was a further chance for the Prime Minister to reject the appointment, and he ignored that too. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, the right hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Ed Davey), asked the Prime Minister yesterday: “can he tell us whether he thought at all about Epstein’s victims?” —[ Official Report , 4 February 2026; Vol. 780, c. 262.] Those victims are the many dozens—perhaps hundreds—of girls and young women who were trafficked and abused by and through Jeffrey Epstein. It is clear that the Prime Minister did not consider them at all, or he could not have possibly taken the decision he did. So why did he choose Mandelson? Why did he take that decision? He did so because Morgan McSweeney told him to. McSweeney was Mandelson’s protégé, and McSweeney was paying back his long-time mentor and political sponsor for all those good works with his appointment. This whole episode has done incredible damage to the already fragile nature of trust in politics. Every Labour Prime Minister since 1997 has given Peter Mandelson a senior job and been betrayed by him. The present Prime Minister will be seen to have had his own reputation destroyed by this scandal. But let us be clear: every Member of this House and our entire political system have been harmed by it and will continue to be until effective measures are taken to clean it up. I ask two questions. Can the Leader of the House give an undertaking that the documents to be provided to the Intelligence and Security Committee will not be redacted? In order to reassure the House, can he ask the Cabinet Secretary to review the appointment procedure undertaken in this case—both the public due diligence and the developed vetting process—and set out in writing why those failed so badly in this case and how they will be improved?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I thank the Leader of the House very much for the business. As the House will know, this is the week of Holocaust Memorial Day, and I am delighted that we will be debating it in this Chamber later today. I am sure colleagues will have visited the extraordinary exhibition of shoes in Portcullis House. I visited Auschwitz in 1988, when Poland was under communist control, and saw the originals of that exhibition—it was a profoundly moving experience. I know that everyone present will share my sense of sorrow and remembrance for all those who died. This is also the week in which we note with great sadness the death of Captain Philip Muldowney in a live-fire exercise. We send our very best to his fellow soldiers, his friends and his family. I also put on record my personal sadness on the death of Howard Flight, Lord Flight, a dedicated servant of this House and the other place over many years. This week, the Prime Minister demonstrated his genius and political touch once again by getting Andy Burnham barred from standing in the Gorton and Denton by-election, in which he would almost certainly have been hammered if he had stood—problem solved. Meanwhile, the Resolution Foundation has calculated that the extra uncertainty created by the Chancellor’s repeated U-turns has already cost, or will cost, this country £8.2 billion, which will only increase over time. The figure is based on official Office for Budget Responsibility numbers and includes the Government’s U-turns on personal independence payments, universal credit and the winter fuel allowance, but not the additional uncertainty created by their recent U-turns on business rates for pubs and inheritance tax rules for farmers. Those will take the cost closer to £9 billion-worth of unnecessary extra burden on the people of this country created by the Government since July 2024. And lest we forget, even without any U-turns, the extra cost of servicing UK Government debt since July 2024 has been, and remains—again, thanks to the Chancellor of the Exchequer —higher than in either the US or the eurozone. That is according to Labour’s own friendly think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. Finally, extraordinarily—irony of ironies—we hear that Sir Tony Blair will sit on President Trump’s so-called board of peace for the reconstruction of Gaza, to which one can only say, in the words of the late, great Tom Lehrer, “Satire is dead.” This is the man who took this country to war in the middle east on a false prospectus. One must ask: have the people of Gaza not suffered enough? I note that AstraZeneca is accompanying the Prime Minister on his trip to China. As the House will know, AstraZeneca is the single biggest investor in research and development in the United Kingdom. Its best-selling, global best-in-class breast cancer drug, Enhertu, is available for reimbursement in America, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia and Japan. Within these islands, it is available for reimbursement in Scotland, but not in England, outside a few special cases. That is an insult to AstraZeneca, but still more to the 46,000 women a year who are diagnosed with breast cancer in England, and the millions more who have had breast cancer, who are at risk and who are unable to be treated affordably as a result. There is deep concern among all Members of the House about this issue. Does the Leader of the House share my view of it, and will he take up the matter urgently with his Cabinet colleagues? Finally, data from this week shows that over the last year police numbers have fallen sharply. Between September 2024 and September 2025, the number of full-time equivalent police officers fell by 1,318. Police staff were down 529, and police community support officers were down 204. The number of special constables was down 514, and police volunteers were down 429. In total, around 3,000 fewer people are now involved in policing our communities. Those figures compare the same point in both years, precisely because recruitment happens in cycles, so there can be no statistical disguising. I actually rather agree with Commissioner Rowley, who has said that police should be judged by outputs rather than inputs—a very welcome corrective to the endless tendency started, I am afraid, under Messrs Blair and Brown to trumpet increased spending as though it is the same thing as results—but that hardly applies to the number of volunteers and specials, both of which are down. In general, fewer officers and staff mean fewer crimes investigated, fewer patrols on our streets and slower responses to 999 calls. The Home Secretary’s announcement earlier this week was silent on protecting overall police numbers, so could the Leader of the House spell out whether the Government’s policy is to allow police numbers to decline over time? Could the House have an up-to-date statement on that specific issue?

• 29 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  Will the Leader of the House give us the forthcoming business?

• 22 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 22 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I thank the Leader of the House for that update. The House will know that I am obsessive about improving education, skills and life opportunities for young people; I know that the Leader of the House, with his own background, shares that passion. I cannot let this week pass without noting that on Tuesday our new specialist technology and engineering university in Hereford, the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering, formally launched its new autonomous robotics degree, which is sponsored, designed and delivered in collaboration with the British Army. I thank the Defence ministerial team, and in particular the Minister for the Armed Forces, for coming up to Hereford and supporting that. I believe that it is the UK’s first undergraduate drones technologies degree. It starts in September 2026, which is light speed compared with the normal progression of these things in higher education. It will be of inestimable value not only to young people up and down the country, but to the defence of the realm and in a host of other sectors, including food and agriculture, infrastructure and energy. Otherwise, what a week this has been! Rising international tensions, heated public disagreement, desperate attempts at diplomatic solutions—and that is just Brooklyn Beckham’s Instagram account. Talking of elites, we have had the amusing spectacle this week of that self-proclaimed friend of the people, the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), hoovering up the free food and glugging down the champagne with the global bullshiterati in Davos.

• 22 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  rose—

• 22 Jan 2026 · Business of the House · Hansard source

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  I thank you, Mr Speaker, for allowing me to exercise my quadriceps on several occasions. Yes, of course I unhesitatingly withdraw that appalling term from the record. All this, I should say, comes from the hon. Member for Clacton after a lifetime spent denouncing Davos as a hub of evil globalist elites where, in his words, there is “no space for the little man”. At least we know that that is not true any more. Oh, the irony of it all, Mr Speaker! A wildly anti-establishment figure and long-time member of the Reform club—no relation—now joining the globalist elites. Can it be long before he aspires to join the Garrick club, or indeed joins the Prime Minister in professing publicly that he prefers Davos to Westminster? Amid all this nonsense, other, very serious changes are under way. Last week, the Government published the results of the latest auction for renewable energy, which set a floor price for renewables of £91 per kilowatt-hour. No one in this House disputes the importance of green energy, or the importance of renewables in the energy mix— [ Interruption. ] Few sane people dispute the value of green energy, but energy prices are already unfeasibly high for British businesses and, despite the Government’s promises, are set to go higher still, especially once the cost of new nuclear is added in. The effect of the policy will be to punish taxpayers, and of course bill payers, but it is also a form of corporate welfare, because the only benefits will come to the better-off. Meanwhile, the Government have decided to ignore North sea oil and gas, gravely damage the north-east of Scotland, undermine the employment of thousands of skilled workers, in disagreement with their own unions, and import gas from overseas at greater cost, with more carbon and more carbon miles. In its own way, this is a repetition of the private finance initiative scandal of 30 years ago, in which the country paid tens of billions of pounds more than it should have for public infrastructure, and a lot of wealthy people in the City of London—now resident in overseas countries—made out like bandits. In 1919, John Maynard Keynes wrote a little book called “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” about the disastrous effects of the treaty of Versailles and the demands that it made for payment from the other side in the first world war. I am not suggesting for a second that there is any comparison between these times and those, in Weimar Germany and the rest of it, but I will say that we are facing severe economic constraints as a result of energy prices. I therefore ask the Leader of the House whether we can have a debate on the economic consequences of the Energy Secretary.