Meg Hillier MP: speeches

Speeches

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes the point clearly and powerfully. As he has highlighted, there are other areas that the Bill would affect; it is not simply about setting a new immigration policy. There are a raft of contradictions that could play out in the mechanics behind it, making life very chaotic. I will address that point in more detail later. When I was honoured to serve as an Immigration Minister in Her late Majesty’s Government, we had a lot of discussions across the nations of the UK. I sometimes felt that I was the Minister sent to the remotest parts of the UK; I made a lot of interesting visits to ports. Although the links between Stranraer or Cairnryan in Scotland and Larne in Northern Ireland were intra-UK, we had a very big challenge with illegal immigrants moving between them. The role of the UK immigration service—now Border Force—was to ensure that that was managed. Having a border at Scotland, with a different agency dealing with things, would mean an awful lot of cross-collaboration. It would make things clunky and very complicated. For some time after the Labour Government left office—it became a problem for the Conservative party in government—people would get on a coach at London Victoria station and go to the Republic of Ireland, sometimes to claim benefits. There was benefit fraud, there were immigration issues and increasingly there were issues around drugs crime, which I know has been a problem for colleagues in Northern Ireland. People on the coach would get a text message telling them whether there were more immigration officers and police at Stranraer or at Cairnryan, so they would get off at the one at which the fewest checks were taking place on the day. It was a very well-worn route. At the time, the route was managed by the police and Border Force—this was before Police Scotland was set up—but it was a very thinly stretched team. It was intelligence-led by a UK-wide service, with support from the local force in Scotland.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend makes the point.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  I plan to do so later in my speech, but my hon. Friend is absolutely right. Modifications under section 30 of the Scotland Act 1998 —that is, Orders in Council—require Scottish, as well as UK, parliamentary approval. However, modifications via primary legislation only require approval from both Houses of the UK Parliament. By taking this approach, the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry is saying that this is a matter entirely for this Parliament—this House and the other place—cutting out his colleagues in Holyrood. That is an interesting take on events, given that we already have a good relationship between Holyrood and Whitehall on many of the issues we are discussing today. The most significant and long-term changes to the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament have been made by Acts of Parliament, rather than Orders in Council. That is also interesting; we could have a long discussion about that, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I suspect that I would be trying your patience if I started discussing the constitutional settlement for Scotland, so I will resist that temptation. However, the Scotland Acts 2012 and 2016 implemented recommendations made by the Calman commission and the Smith commission respectively, so there has been change along the way. Devolution was never intended to be a static thing; it was intended to reward the competencies, skills and needs of our devolved bodies, but those bodies need to play properly and professionally, not engage in cheap political gimmicks. I enormously respect the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, but the flimsiness of this Bill suggests that it has not been properly thought through. If the Bill were to omit some or all of paragraph B6 of part II of schedule 5 to the Scotland Act 1998, it would transfer responsibilities for those matters to the Scottish Parliament. There is a really big issue here, which is why I believe we should not adopt the Bill. We have seen how the different tax rates in Scotland can create challenges, for example with how the armed forces are paid. The Ministry of Defence has a formula for different branches of the armed forces, so someone on a tour in Scotland is paid more to take account of the tax rate. We cannot have two members of our armed forces personnel doing the same job with the same title but earning differently. They are UK armed forces.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  Or an Isle of Wight visa! I give way.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  The hon. Gentleman skirted over the question of the cost of doing this. The burden is not the individuals, but there is a huge cost to the UK Home Office of delivering the system and helping people through it—everything from detention centres at airports and elsewhere, to the processing of the claims, the greeting and receiving of people when they sadly arrive on boats and by other routes, and the management of the borders. All those things are costs, and that is a burden to the taxpayer—it is a fact of life that it does cost the taxpayer. I am wondering where the hon. Gentleman thinks the money will come from and what they are going to cut in Scotland to fund this.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  As ever, my hon. Friend talks enormous sense. Let us talk through the practicalities of the proposal that I have just outlined. A person graduating from a Scottish university would be able to stay on and work in Scotland without sponsorship for four years in total. To remind the House, that means two years on a UK graduate visa—or three for a PhD—followed by two years on a Scottish graduate visa.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  If the cap fits, maybe the hon. Gentleman should consider his position. I am not suggesting for a minute that we would see border guards and towers, but once there is a land border there is a risk. We have seen in other parts of the world and among allies of ours more recently quite intemperate discussion about borders, walls and security. We would not want to go down that route.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  I have been listening with great interest to the hon. Gentleman. We see from other countries that there are ways of dealing with the issue without having full devolution, for many of the reasons that my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight West (Mr Quigley) laid out. As was highlighted earlier, the Home Secretary made the Scottish Government an offer to work with the Migration Advisory Committee on solutions. Full devolution would be expensive and time consuming, and it would not deliver.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker, it is important that we have debate in this place. People have made points to me and I am simply responding to those points. As I said, I am not suggesting that we would want, or would see, watchtowers with armed guards, and in my area of the country we had the second-largest anti-Brexit vote, so I know where I and my constituents stand on that issue. However, we do not want to add extra borders where we do not need to.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  I hope that I am beginning to explain how some of these interactions— [ Laughter. ] I am only just beginning. [Hon. Members: “More!”] I fear I might be cut off, which is a great shame, because I had really looked forward to going into this in more detail. If the person completed undergraduate and postgraduate in Scotland, they would qualify for permanent residence simply by having been in the country. We might want to support that, but we ought to debate, it rather than sleepwalking into the challenges of having two systems set up for different purposes. That would be confusing for the individual and for the businesses employing them, as they might not know whether visas were needed. It would be very complicated. On the tax code, I have spent quite a lot of time considering how our tax system works, and every time a Chancellor of any party stands up at the Dispatch Box to announce something, it adds complexity to the tax system, which can be very confusing for people. One of the last things that we wanted to do in the previous Labour Government, but which was too complicated to deliver in time, was codify all immigration law into one Bill—but, boy, was that a big task. It is the sort of thing that a Government would need to start at the beginning of a 15-year Government. Perhaps I should suggest it to the Home Secretary, because I am sure that this Government have the prospect of seeing it through. People come to my constituency surgery—and to those of many other Members, I am sure—to ask for information about their immigration status. They could not possibly work through the system on their own without professional advice, which is costly. That is discriminatory, really. They find it very difficult. The more complication we add, the harder it will be.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend has hit the nail on the head. I absolutely take what the hon. Member for Arbroath and Broughty Ferry highlighted. As I said, there are really challenging issues with the demographics in the Scottish population. We all need to put our shoulder to the wheel to deal with those things, rather than saying, “If only the SNP Scottish Government were in charge of immigration, it would all be fine.” This Bill is a gimmick, and the hon. Gentleman knows that it will not work. I will touch on the higher education figures. In the last two years, we have seen the number of home Scottish students drop. In 2021-22, the figure was just over 183,000, and it has dropped to just shy of 174,000. The number of non-UK students has gone down in the past couple of years, but it is nevertheless a significant number at 73,915. The Government are not against foreign students coming here—that is important—but we need to strike a balance, so that there are enough places for the young people in Scotland and across the UK who want to attend Scottish universities, and who are perhaps being squeezed out by the imbalance and the cost of going.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  I give way to a former member of the Committee, who looked at those details, too.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  Indeed. My hon. Friend was not an MP when we were discussing Brexit, but oh my word, there was a lack of thought about the issues with the land border prior to that. Madam Deputy Speaker, you may recall that when the former Prime Minister, now Baroness May, was proposing her Brexit deal, only 17% of Members of Parliament had been Members of Parliament when the Northern Ireland agreement was signed, so there was a distinct lack of understanding in this place. We all expect and hope that Members will read into these issues, but often that got missed, and there was a distinct lack of understanding about the border. We do not want to go down that route again.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend took the words out of my mouth; he says it better than I could. Let me turn for a moment to what the SNP-led Scottish Government wish to deliver. In 2020—I think this was referred to—they published a paper arguing for some devolution of immigration policy to Scotland. I remember well before then, when I was a Minister, having discussions about that and—I would not normally be so crass—slapping down the idea that there could be a separate immigration policy for Scotland. The paper argued that Scotland was more reliant on migration than other parts of the UK, and noted that the population of Scotland would be falling if it were not for migration from the rest of the UK and overseas. An Opposition day debate on a motion condemning the UK Government’s response to that paper took place on 11 February 2020. At the time, Brexit was widely expected, and the Scottish Government’s expert advisory group discussed a possible fall in net migration to Scotland of between 30% and 50%, but so far the opposite has happened, as it has in the rest of the UK. Net international migration to Scotland in 2022-23 was an estimated 48,000, according to the most recent figures from National Records of Scotland. That is about four times the pre-pandemic average of 12,000. In January 2025, the Scottish Government said that the recent increase in net migration to Scotland could be largely explained by international students, but might not be sustained when restrictions introduced by the last Government feed through. There is an important point there about the education system. We have seen the Scottish Government introduce free tuition. That sounds like an absolutely wonderful policy, and a lot of people lobby for it, but the reality is that it squeezes the funding of our higher education institutions, so that they have no option but to find overseas students who will pay more. We have seen an element of that in England, but the problem is exacerbated in Scotland because of the proposals of the Scottish Government.

• 25 Apr 2025 · Devolution (Immigration) (Scotland) Bill · Hansard source

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  I have absolute confidence and faith that my Scottish Labour colleagues will have done the maths, will know where the money will come from, and will have looked at the matter in the round, and will be more willing to work with Whitehall on these issues. We will no doubt discuss with the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Home Secretary and others in Government, as necessary, how they will ensure that everything matches up, because that is right. Scottish Labour will invest in young people—something that the SNP has a woeful record on. That investment includes putting people through the right skilled routes, so that we have the skills that are needed in Scotland. My point is that under the SNP, the Scottish Government have this immigration policy that they have promoted hard, but they have never dealt with its consequences. A new Government—a new broom coming in next May in Scotland—who understand these issues, are able and willing to get their head around how to tackle them, and are willing to work with Government in Whitehall, will deliver for the young people of Scotland and for the Scottish economy.

• 22 Apr 2025 · “For Women Scotland” Supreme Court Ruling · Hansard source

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  I am proud to represent a constituency that shows tolerance to people from all backgrounds, unlike the political hot potato the issue has become in this place and in political dialogue. I have a constituent who transitioned in the 1970s. She has used female toilets for more of her life than any other toilets. Are we saying that her dignity and the respect the Minister talked about will be in any way improved if there is a ban on her using the toilets she has been using for so many years?

• 12 Apr 2025 · Steel Industry (Special Measures) Bill · Hansard source

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  I applaud my right hon. Friend for his decisive action in this matter. I have only had a chance to read the Bill for 10 minutes— [ Interruption. ] That is not a criticism; it is the natural procedure of this House. The Bill could not be laid until First Reading. The Bill talks about compensation. He has made the point that he is not planning to take over and run British Steel, which is not the desirable option, but has he done some sort of impact assessment on the potential range of costs to the taxpayer in these circumstances?

• 8 Apr 2025 · Economic Growth · Hansard source

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  Since the spring statement the world has been rocked by the announcements by President Trump on tariffs last week. It is an event as significant as the financial crisis of 2008, or perhaps as covid, and in those instances the state unleashed everything it could to try to resolve those issues. Is the Chancellor considering changing any of her rules to ensure that everything that the state can throw at this problem is being done?

• 7 Apr 2025 · Housing Supply · Hansard source

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  There is a real housing crisis in Hackney, where we spend £54 million a year on temporary accommodation. I visit families, most of them working families, in tragically overcrowded accommodation. We need this social housing as quickly as possible, and I know my right hon. Friend is putting her shoulder to the wheel. Will she visit Hackney to see the work that the council has been doing to build properly affordable social rented council housing? The council could do so much more with more Government support.

• 3 Apr 2025 · Children in Temporary Accommodation: England · Hansard source

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  I commend my hon. Friend not just on this report, but on her strong leadership of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. In the report, the Committee describe the very real lives of the 3,770 children from my borough who are in temporary accommodation. That is enough to fill eight primary schools. There are other impacts, too. She talked about what the Government are doing, and the report mentions the report that is expected in July. Can she give the House any indication of when that report will come, and what will her Committee do to follow up on it?

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I thank my right hon. Friend for that—I say “Friend” because the right hon. Gentleman and I served very effectively together in Islington when he was the MP and I was a junior councillor for eight years in his patch, so I know his passion in this area. On run-offs, it is interesting that some councils are still behind on planning issues, so in some areas people are still allowed to pave over their front gardens, and in others they are expected to put in blocks for the tyres of vehicles, with drain-aways or soakaways around them. We need much more of that. I have been involved in that debate for 30 years, and the right hon. Gentleman has been involved for even longer—I bow to his experience—yet we still see challenges in the planning system not allowing for that. We await the full detail of the planning changes, but I really welcome the Government’s move to look at planning differently, ensuring that we are building this sort of resilience into our areas. We have small areas of flood risk in my constituency, around the Lea valley, so we need to ensure, if it is appropriate to build homes there, that we manage that risk through some of these mitigations. That is very important, because what also happens is that rubbish is washed down from the streets to the canal side—we have just talked about the River Lea—and many of my canal dwellers are concerned, as I am sure are the right hon. Gentleman’s, about the rubbish that has to be collected. Research by Thames21 and University College London shows that the amount of faecal E. coli bacteria in the River Lea regularly exceeds international standards. It pains me to have to say this, because I love my constituency and think that part of my job is to big it up and tell everyone the great things about it, but sometimes we just have to call out the problems, unfortunately, and this is a real concern. My constituency is served by Thames Water, of course. Thames Water discharged sewage into the Thames for more than 300,000 hours in 2024, but what is really shocking is that only four years earlier sewage was discharged for just under 19,000 hours—18,443 hours. We thought that was bad and it has exponentially increased, and there is 50% more sewage than in 2023 when sewage was discharged into the Thames for 196,000 hours. London is an international city; it is unbelievable that our river is so dirty and we need to get this resolved. Nationally, none of our rivers is considered to be in good chemical health according to the Rivers Trust. That means every river in England contains chemicals that are known to cause harm, and figures published just yesterday by the Environment Agency revealed that untreated sewage, including human waste, wet wipes and condoms, was released into waterways for more than 3.62 million hours in 2024. In 2016—just eight years before that data—the comparable figure was 100,533 hours. We are seeing a really big deterioration, and that is why we need to act. I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Minister about some of the actions the Government are taking to tackle this. If sewage on its own is not a reason to look at how we tackle water, the problem of security of supply is a very big concern. I had the privilege of chairing the Public Accounts Committee for nine years, having also served on the Committee for longer, and in 2020 we found that there is a serious risk that the country will run out of water in the next 20 years. We were not a Committee that tended to use hyperbole; we were looking at the facts. We would build our reports on work by the National Audit Office, and we would question witnesses about it. The timescale for that risk was 20 years, so we are already five years into that programme. My hon. Friend the Minister and the Government face a great challenge to try and resolve this in such a short time, because 15 years is not as long as it seems when we are dealing with such big issues. Security of supply is threatened by increasing demand and diminishing supply. Relevant factors of course include population growth in parts of the country, and urbanisation and development. The point of how we deal with this in planning has been raised and it is absolutely vital that water supply is built into new developments and the new towns the Government are proposing and all the housing developments that we hope to see. Climate change has obviously been a factor as well, as is unsustainable abstraction when water is removed from the natural environment. I will not try your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker, but the issue of chalk streams in this country is a scandal, and once damaged they are gone forever. We have been raping our environment for water company profit and that has to stop. We have also seen growth in water-intensive industries such as data centres, which are causing issues for electricity but also for water, and we need a proper planning process for that. So a lot of this does come back to the Government’s stance in taking a genuinely proactive approach, making sure that planning is not a blocker but actually helps deliver the solutions we need. In 2022, the Government updated Ofwat’s strategic policy statement to include an objective for the regulator to “increase resilience” in the long term. In 2024, the national infrastructure commission recommended that the Government and Ofwat ensure that water companies’ plans were sufficient to increase water supplies to meet demand for an additional 4,800 megalitres per day by 2050. The numbers are all very well, but we know there is a big challenge now. The Government will be publishing an updated national framework for water in the summer—I do not think my hon. Friend the Minister ever gets a holiday, with the amount of work that she has to do. Basically, we have water, but not in the places that we need it. We have not built a reservoir for decades. As a child of the 1976 drought—unbelievable, but true—I remember the impact that had on behaviour. In my case, we did not have standpipes in the street, but many families in this country had to go with a bottle to a standpipe in the street to get their water. Water is always a precious commodity, but we really learned that then. We were told not to leave the tap running when washing up or cleaning our teeth. I do not want to lecture people, but we should all keep to those habits. I learned those habits about water preservation at the age of seven—I will admit it—and they have never left me. That was a serious crisis in 1976, but here we are in 2025, facing many of the same challenges. I do not envy my hon. Friend the Minister for the challenges she is seeking to address. The Government are acting. The Water (Special Measures) Act has been introduced and includes, quite properly, criminal liability for water executives. They cannot hide behind the corporate body and say it was someone else’s fault; we have to have people stepping up. In over a decade on the Public Accounts Committee, I learned that failure is always an orphan. We used to call it “public accounts tennis”. We would say, “Who was in charge? Who was responsible?” and people would all look at each other, waiting to see who would jump forward. Introducing criminal liability sounds draconian, and it is, but it is vital that those who are heading up operations of this importance, and being paid the pay that they are to deliver them, take real responsibility and ensure they have systems in place in their organisations. If the buck stops with them, they will take it very seriously. The criminal liability includes imprisonment for water executives when companies fail to co-operate or obstruct investigations. The Act also introduces a bonus ban for chief executives and senior leaders unless high standards are met on protecting the environment, consumers and financial resilience. We can talk more about Thames Water in relation to that in a moment. It also introduces automatic penalties for environmental pollution. It ensures that pollution is being measured in real time, because during the last Parliament it was discovered that, for all the talk about measuring sewage, it was not being measured in real time. A lot of the indicators were not there, so it was easy to dodge the real numbers that we are now seeing with the exponential increase in sewage discharge. The Act introduces an independent water commission as a regulator, which I welcome. The commission was launched in October last year and is chaired by the former deputy governor of the Bank of England, Sir Jon Cunliffe. It is intended to deliver a reset to the sector and is expected to be the biggest review of the water industry since privatisation. I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich South, who introduced the Bill today, that the commission will be the platform for discussions about the future. Tempting as it may be for him to want to get his Bill passed today, it would not deliver in the timeframe that he would want it to, as that would take a while. Let us take a measured stand and look closely at the independent commission—as I have warned my hon. Friend the Minister, I will be watching it very closely and asking questions about it—because we need to see that overview from every angle. Sir Jon Cunliffe is an independent individual who will be very tough with the Government on this issue.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I urge the hon. Lady to listen to what I say. I did not say that I had people saying overwhelmingly that they wanted public ownership—certainly not. They are saying that there is a problem, and saying, “You lot are in government. You need to sort it out.” Over the last 20 years that I have been in this place, and particularly in the last Parliament, there has been endless discussion about how to resolve this situation, and stasis in the Government. We now have a Government who have acted to begin to tackle some of these huge challenges. I give real credit to the Minister, who has engaged massively with Members across the House on this. She is absolutely aware of the issues, partly because many of us across the House have lobbied her, because our constituents have lobbied us. I do not think there is doubt about the problem; the issue is about the solution. We should absolutely have a big public consultation, but that is to inform the work of the citizens’ assembly. Clause 4(3) states that the citizens’ assembly must “be composed of a randomly selected representative sample of users of water and sewerage services in England and Wales, and…consider any matters which the Commission refers to it in relation to water ownership.” I want to be clear that that will be a randomly selected representative sample of users, and the Bill is silent on the model. I appreciate what the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Ellie Chowns) highlighted—that there is a science to doing this—but the Bill is silent on how it would be done.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I will be careful not to try your patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. We could have an endless debate about the difference between selecting people through the sortition process—I am well aware of how that works—and how our electoral system works, but, in the end, we face our electorate, and they can reject us. Many colleagues have been sacked on television at 4 o’clock in the morning because the electorate rejected them or their party. There is no same power over a citizen’s assembly. Let us be clear. Perhaps I should talk in a bit more detail about clause 4 of the Bill as proposed. Subsection (1) says: “Within four months of being established under subsection (3), the Commission on Water must establish a Citizens’ Assembly on Water Ownership…to…consider different models of water ownership, and…make recommendations for reforms to water ownership and governance.”

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  I will give way one final time.

• 28 Mar 2025 · Water Bill · Hansard source

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  Absolutely. I think we would all agree that we talk all the time to constituents, whether on doorsteps or at public meetings and other forums, because that is our job. I say to constituents every week when I am on their doorsteps, “I am here because I need your expertise. I can’t do my job without you.” But it is a cumbersome task to be on a citizens’ assembly as it requires people to devote a great deal of time, and only a certain subset of society has the time to do that. Many of my constituents are working three or four jobs and struggling to survive. They do not have the time to do that, but their voices need to be heard, too.