Nick Timothy MP: speeches

Speeches

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  Forgive me, Mrs Hobhouse, although the main recipient of the subsidy that we are talking about is Drax itself.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  The Government Whip could stand and refer to the names of the companies in receipt of the subsidies, if she so wishes.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  If the Minister is interested in the security of supply, why will the Government not allow new licences for oil and gas in the North sea?

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  And, as I say, the main recipient of the public subsidy will be Drax. When will we see the NESO modelling justifying the extension of this subsidy scheme? When will the Government publish details of their new sustainability criteria and means of enforcement to ensure that biomass is properly sourced? The Minister should also answer why the Department only sought the advice of the Subsidy Advice Unit on its plans last Friday, knowing that we would be voting on the draft regulations today. The SAU is now running a two-week consultation and will not publish its report until 10 July. There should not be a vote on extending the subsidy until Parliament and the public have been able to examine thoroughly the SAU’s findings. These are big questions that should have been answered before the draft regulations were debated. Beyond those concerns, we must also ask ourselves whether subsidising companies like Drax is good energy policy. The evidence shows that it is clearly not. The company that I have been discussing is an expensive white elephant for which we have been paying ever since the Energy Secretary first held his post back in 2009. Since the ramp-up that he authorised, the company has cut down 300 million trees, six times more than in the entire New Forest. The company has received £6.5 billion of public subsidy. In the nonsensical world of net zero, it has been classed as clean energy, but it is far from being a source of clean energy. It is a plant for burning wood imported from forests across the world. As new forests are planted to offset the emissions from chopping down the trees, turning them into pellets and burning them, we are supposed to believe that it is clean. The truth is that the plant we are discussing produces four times the carbon dioxide emitted from our last coal plant, which itself produced twice as many emissions as gas. The imported wood has come from rare, at-risk and irreplaceable forests and arrives here on diesel-powered ships.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  I certainly will, but we are talking about legislation permitting the subsidy of biomass. It is not cheap to do so; we pay £500 million for the privilege, and the draft regulations will make it even more costly for taxpayers. Every megawatt-hour produced will now cost £160—more than double the cost of gas power—up from £138 before. Burning these trees is raising the cost of wood globally while reducing biodiversity in key areas and eroding natural carbon capture. It gets worse. The sixth carbon budget demands the removal of 23 million tonnes of emissions to avoid even more painful behaviour changes from the general public. This company is being used as an expensive “get out of jail” card, with more public money potentially coming down the line for carbon capture. It was for those reasons that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Surrey (Claire Coutinho) withdrew Government support for schemes such as this last year, which led the chief executive officer of the company that we have been discussing to call her “reckless and irresponsible”. Cutting down and burning trees in the name of saving the planet is not just reckless and irresponsible, but complete madness. If Members here today believe that this is environmentalism and a solution to climate change, I have a bridge to sell them. The Climate Change Act 2008 has created a complex web of targets, quotas and regulations, as well as policies set by a monomaniacal and unaccountable quango tying the hands of elected Governments and twisting policy out of shape. It is producing an energy system that is less secure and more expensive, while doing nothing to prevent rising carbon emissions worldwide. That is why we will vote against the draft regulations. I urge colleagues from all parties to join us and show that they are truly committed to a secure and rational energy system, and not throw more money at the Energy Secretary and his very costly mistakes.

• 2 Jun 2025 · Draft Contracts for Difference (Miscellaneous Amendments) (No. 2) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Hobhouse, and pleased to respond on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition. Today we consider the Government’s plan to go on subsidising Drax. Drax is of course not mentioned in the draft regulations, and Ministers had hoped to sneak through this contract for difference without much scrutiny, but we have a responsibility to examine what is actually a very significant change to our country’s energy system. The draft regulations will push ahead with the Government’s four-year extension of the subsidy scheme for Drax, from 2027 to 2031. Such a major move is being made without proper debate or awareness of all the facts. Ministers and Drax itself have kept vital information hidden from scrutiny, covering up the true costs and business practices of the company. Concern has been expressed about Drax in both Houses of Parliament in recent months. The Public Accounts Committee says that Ofgem allows Drax to “mark its own homework” when it comes to subsidy claims. The House of Lords Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has criticised the Government for not sharing key documents about the true nature and cost of their dealings with Drax. Just a couple of months ago, the company was taken to court by a whistleblower who claimed that Drax had made attempts to “deliberately conceal” the unsustainable sources of its wood and “had likely broken its legal obligations owed to its government funders”. Thanks to the investigations by BBC “Panorama” and others, we know Drax’s behaviour has not been honest. Drax executives have been caught misleading the media, covering up reports and manipulating evidence. Ofgem fined Drax £25 million for inaccurately reporting data about its sources of wood. We have seen evidence that Drax sourced wood from primary forests in British Columbia and elsewhere. There is more than enough cause for many to doubt the ethical integrity of Drax and whether it should receive more public money. Before presenting the draft regulations to the House, Ministers should have done their due diligence and published this evidence, so I ask the Minister these questions. When will we see the legal documents associated with the recent court case? When will we see the 2022 KPMG report on Drax’s accounts, which the Prime Minister said on the Floor of the House he would look at? When will we see the Ofgem audit? When will we see the NESO modelling justifying the extension of the subsidy scheme?

• 22 May 2025 · Remote Betting and Gaming Duty: Horseracing · Hansard source

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  1. If she will produce an impact assessment for the proposed remote betting and gaming duty on the British horseracing industry.

• 22 May 2025 · Remote Betting and Gaming Duty: Horseracing · Hansard source

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  The racing industry is getting a bit tired of the warm words and lack of action. At the last oral questions, the Secretary of State said that “we need to treat different forms of gambling differently”, —[ Official Report , 3 April 2025; Vol. 765, c. 412.] but the Government have since proposed a flat tax on all online gambling, which fails to distinguish between betting on sports like horseracing, which is limited by the number of races and requires knowledge and thought, and online casinos and gaming. However, problem rates for bets on racing are about the same as for lottery scratchcards. Will the Minister commit here and now to making sure that betting on sports like racing is not treated the same as betting on online casinos and gaming?

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member for Burnley (Oliver Ryan) has just said, from a sedentary position, that my right hon. Friend was “race-baiting”. My right hon. Friend was simply reading out official statistics in contributing to an important debate about the future of our country. Does my right hon. Friend think that the hon. Gentleman should stand up and put his views on the record, and tell his constituents what he thinks about their legitimate concerns?

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  Indeed. I remember when Dominic Raab was the Housing Minister and he made that point. The response from the Labour party was one of sheer hysteria, with accusations of bigotry. My hon. Friend is completely right. Mass immigration has also killed labour market pressures for employers to invest in skills and training, labour-saving technology and the pay and conditions of their workers. Then there is the capital stock of the country. When our population increases at the kind of speed we have experienced, what do we expect to happen? There are fewer hospitals and surgeries, less space on trains and the road, and fewer flats and houses and police officers and prison spaces per person than before. Let us dwell for a moment on the social problems that we have created for ourselves. According to the census, there were six London boroughs where a majority of people were born abroad. In towns and cities across the country, the census shows that we can draw a line where on one side the white British population lives and on the other lives an Asian Muslim population. The reasons that should alarm us ought not to need spelling out. We are importing many of the world’s hatreds. Just look at the Saturday marches against Israel and the intimidation of Jewish communities, or the riots we saw in Leicester three years ago. When the Prime Minister referred to an island of strangers, he was not wrong, even if the Immigration Minister did not back him up in using that language in her speech. The pity is that the policy response is risible. From Tony Blair to Boris Johnson, we have seen successive Governments talk things up, only to deliver ultra-liberal immigration policies. [ Interruption. ] Yes, this is the point, and Labour still will not learn. This Government are pursuing the same cynical path. Their policies are pathetic. They cannot even tell us if indefinite leave to remain changes will apply to immigrants already in the country. We know that Labour lacks what it takes to drastically cut the number of people coming into the country or to remove all the people who are here who break the law, claim benefits or take out more than they put in. I hope, and I believe that my party has rediscovered the necessary steel. The future of our country will depend on it.

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Member give way?

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  I will in a moment. That fallacy is now enshrined in Whitehall policy through the Office for Budget Responsibility, which insists that immigration creates fiscal headroom without calculating, as the Danish Ministry of Finance does, the true long-term fiscal cost of immigration by national background of migrants. I will now give way, unlike the Immigration Minister when she was going on.

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Lady give way?

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  Nobody ever voted for mass immigration. The country has repeatedly said that it wants border security, very little immigration and deportations for those who break the law, yet successive Governments have imposed mass immigration on our country. Human rights laws that render border security and immigration control almost impossible are treated like untouchable and unchangeable holy scripture. The justifications for mass immigration have changed over the years. First, people were told that the numbers were small and that nothing much would change. Next, people were told that immigrants would integrate and that there was nothing for them to worry about. People were then told that multiculturalism was a gift and that things such as foreign foods made it all worthwhile. More recently, as the numbers became unimaginable and communal intimidation, violence and sectarian politics, and even terrorism, became, in the words of Labour’s London Mayor, “part and parcel of living in a big city”, people have been told to keep their views to themselves and parrot the official line instead. However, diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge that we have to manage, thanks to policies imposed on the public by politicians who chose—arrogantly and callously—to ignore what the people of their country wanted. [ Interruption. ] If the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) wants to intervene, he can do so. Britain’s true strengths are our long stability, our legal inheritance, our institutions, our language, our shared identity forged through the triumphs and tragedies of history, the places we have in common, our literature, our culture and even our food. [ Interruption. ] The hon. Gentleman is entitled to intervene, but he has continued to abuse from a sedentary position—as, indeed, have various Members on the Government Benches. This is supposed to be a debate.

• 21 May 2025 · Immigration · Hansard source

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  When I worked in the Home Office, for the first couple of years net migration fell—after that, it rose. The Conservatives, like the Labour party, have failed the public on immigration. I am happy to accept that, but Members on the Government Benches show no sign of any contrition or of learning anything from experience. While politicians have talked vague nonsense for years about British values, sometimes values that could equally be said to be French or Dutch or whatever, and sometimes values not even shared by many British people, the constituent pieces that add up to our shared identity and culture are precious. Without our shared identity, there is less social trust, little solidarity and less willingness to compromise and make sacrifices for one another. It is undeniable that mass immigration and the radical diversity it has brought have undermined that shared national identity. What of the justifications for this massive social change? We have been told for years that it is vital for our economy, but mass immigration has displaced British workers from their jobs and undercut wages. The zealots who still support mass immigration will no doubt scoff that I am guilty of the lump of labour fallacy. If I am, so is the Migration Advisory Committee and various immigration experts. The only fallacy is believing that importing millions of fiscally negative immigrants will make us richer.

• 20 May 2025 · Draft Pollution Prevention and Control (Fees) (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2025 · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon, Dr Murrison. I am pleased to respond to the draft regulations on behalf of His Majesty’s Opposition. This legislation, as we have just heard, will increase the hourly rate of fees charged under environmental regulations related to the offshore oil and gas industry. There may not be an impact assessment for this specific change, but it is part of a broader shift in energy policy that is increasing costs and threatening the viability of our offshore industries. It is, I am afraid, economic madness to refuse to issue new licences in the North sea and to tax the oil and gas sector out of existence. Doing so only makes us more dependent on dirtier foreign imports—imported liquefied natural gas produces four times the emissions of North sea oil and gas. It also puts around 120,000 jobs at risk and will lead to less revenue for the Exchequer in the long run, at a time when the public finances are under strain. I invite the Minister to see the madness of that approach. We are refusing to drill for our own natural resources while importing Norwegian oil and gas drilled from the very same seabed, impoverishing ourselves and enriching the Norwegians. The company profits, the jobs, the prosperity and security, the tax revenues—it all goes to Norway when it could be ours. It is surely no coincidence that we now have the highest industrial energy prices in Europe, while data published yesterday shows that the output of our energy-intensive industries has fallen to a 35-year low. Removing oil and gas from the equation is an ideological and destructive move. It does not serve our national interest or help our struggling industries. The Government should be much more hard-headed about their approach to energy. Lower prices, more jobs, higher growth and stronger revenue, not ideology, should be the objectives. Instead, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero is driving us towards economic and national decline.

• 20 May 2025 · UK-India Free Trade Agreement · Hansard source

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  6. What assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of the double contributions convention in the UK-India free trade agreement on levels of tax revenue.

• 20 May 2025 · UK-India Free Trade Agreement · Hansard source

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  I note that the Chancellor did not actually address the point of the cost to the Exchequer of the double contributions convention, which the Government has agreed with India. Indian workers sent here by their employers on intra-company transfers cost more in taxes than British workers, but that flips under this deal: Indian workers will be taxed less and cost less to employ than British rivals for doing the same jobs. That will not only cost the Treasury lost revenue, which the Chancellor did not admit, but displace British workers, suppress wages and increase immigration. Will the Chancellor commit now to monitoring the effects of the agreement and, if the data shows any of that happening, promise to scrap this charter for immigration with India?

• 12 May 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill · Hansard source

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  Does the hon. Lady accept that, despite what she has just said, under the last term of the Conservative Government, record numbers of people came here through resettlement schemes, which are safe and legal routes?

• 12 May 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill · Hansard source

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  Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

• 12 May 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill · Hansard source

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  And Afghans.

• 12 May 2025 · Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill · Hansard source

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  I want to go through the differences between what the Government told the newspapers, and the reality of this Bill and the amendments that have been tabled. Ministers said that they would change indefinite leave to remain, but the White Paper proposal today is weak, and the Home Secretary admitted that it may not apply to immigrants who are already here. It is therefore no wonder that the Government refuse to support new clause 11, which would do the job for them. The visa crackdown on the nationalities blamed for asylum costs—Pakistanis, Nigerians and Sri Lankans, we were told—and the promise to kick out all foreign criminals were both headlines, but no credible policy on those issues was presented to us today. The Government promised action against the tens of thousands of people, or maybe more, who are working illegally for delivery companies as a result of abusing substitution clauses. It is welcome that substitution clauses are being added to sections 15 to 24 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, but what will be the operational reality? There are perhaps 1 million illegal immigrants in Britain, but only 366 fines were imposed for illegal working in the last quarter of last year. At least 100,000 people are trading identities online to work as substitutes. Before the local elections, the headlines said, “Foreign sex offenders will be banned from claiming asylum in the UK”. I suppose that is what Government new clause 8 does, but what use is that new clause if Ministers do not give themselves legal powers to deport foreign sex offenders? The Government are whipping their MPs to vote against new clause 14, which disapplies the Human Rights Act and interim measures issued by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. I am afraid that today is just another stage in the cycle of political deceit. I should say that in the past, my party has been as culpable as the Labour party—we must be honest about that. Immigration policy must be about not just who comes here, but who we decide must leave. People who are here on time-limited visas must be told to go; people who refuse to accept our culture and way of life must leave; and people who have broken the law, and those who take out more than they put in must be thrown out. We will need to ensure vast numbers of removals and deportations in the years ahead, and we need to remove the legal impediments in domestic law, and in international conventions drafted in another age, that stop us securing the border and saving our country. We must also be tough about who we allow to come here. We cannot afford to import more of the world’s hatreds, nor to allow foreign conflicts to be fought out on our streets. We must accept that not every migrant is the same, and not every culture is equal; one in 50 Albanians in Britain is in jail, one in three Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage adults is economically inactive, and 72% of Somalis live in social housing. We are a million miles away from doing what is necessary, and despite the rhetoric, this Bill takes us even further backwards. Look past the words, and this country will see what this Government are doing.

• 12 May 2025 · Immigration System · Hansard source

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  In answer to the hon. Member for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green (Florence Eshalomi), the Home Secretary refused to say whether her proposals to reform indefinite leave to remain, briefed to the media as a tough new crackdown, will apply to immigrants who are already here. If it does not apply to people already here, it makes a mockery of the very idea of reform, so will the Home Secretary answer very clearly: will the new rules apply to existing immigrants or just those coming in in future?

• 8 May 2025 · Flooding: Protecting Vulnerable Communities · Hansard source

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  Next month, a planning application for a biodigester near Haverhill and Withersfield in West Suffolk will be decided. It is the wrong location for many reasons, not least the risk of flooding as the proposed site is on flood risk zone 3 land. What are the Government doing to prevent development on land susceptible to flooding?