argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Energy
Questions: Crime involving mopeds and bikes has soared across the country in recent years. Given that yesterday’s unfunded real-terms pay cut to the police will actually cost us more frontline officers, may I suggest to the Prime Minister that the very least she can do is to change the law to protect police officers if they are driving according to their training and experience when pursuing people and responding to blue-light situations, and send a message from this House that no force should be operating a blanket no-pursuit policy? The police protect us every day. Is it not high time that the Prime Minister protected them?; I would like to thank the Prime Minister, because she put me in touch with her powerhouse Minister and we are now looking at getting an enterprise zone in Heysham in my constituency. Ever having a big wishlist, however, may I ask the Prime Minister whether she can help me in any way possible with my ongoing campaign to get the third nuclear power station in Heysham—the tentatively named Heysham 3—built more quickly?; The House and the Prime Minister will remember the case of my constituent, Lola Ilesamni, whose daughter is under threat of female genital mutilation from Lola’s abusive ex-partner. I want to thank “Channel 4 News” and Cathy Newman for breaking the story, and the Prime Minister for intervening and granting an 18-month reprieve. Lola now has a temporary right to work, but no recourse to public funds if she cannot find a job. That wee girl and her family need long-term certainty. Will the Prime Minister look again at that case and allow Lola and her family to stay in Livingston in the long term?; As the Prime Minister was visiting survivors of the Manchester terror attack, families who were heartbroken to have lost their children were also in the vicinity, but the Prime Minister did not visit them. Chloe Rutherford and Liam Curry from South Shields tragically lost their lives, and their parents feel ignored by the Prime Minister. I wrote to her seven weeks ago with their concerns, but she has failed to respond. When will she properly acknowledge their loss?
Ross Thomson (Conservative, Centre-right): Following our successful Offshore Europe exhibition last week in Aberdeen, can the Prime Minister assure me and my constituents that support for the oil and gas industry will be at the heart of the industrial strategy so that we can maximise economic recovery in the North sea? Does she agree that the biggest threat to the industry would be the instability of a second, divisive independence referendum?
Engagements — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Energy
Questions: Crime involving mopeds and bikes has soared across the country in recent years. Given that yesterday’s unfunded real-terms pay cut to the police will actually cost us more frontline officers, may I suggest to the Prime Minister that the very least she can do is to change the law to protect police officers if they are driving according to their training and experience when pursuing people and responding to blue-light situations, and send a message from this House that no force should be operating a blanket no-pursuit policy? The police protect us every day. Is it not high time that the Prime Minister protected them?; I would like to thank the Prime Minister, because she put me in touch with her powerhouse Minister and we are now looking at getting an enterprise zone in Heysham in my constituency. Ever having a big wishlist, however, may I ask the Prime Minister whether she can help me in any way possible with my ongoing campaign to get the third nuclear power station in Heysham—the tentatively named Heysham 3—built more quickly?; The House and the Prime Minister will remember the case of my constituent, Lola Ilesamni, whose daughter is under threat of female genital mutilation from Lola’s abusive ex-partner. I want to thank “Channel 4 News” and Cathy Newman for breaking the story, and the Prime Minister for intervening and granting an 18-month reprieve. Lola now has a temporary right to work, but no recourse to public funds if she cannot find a job. That wee girl and her family need long-term certainty. Will the Prime Minister look again at that case and allow Lola and her family to stay in Livingston in the long term?; As the Prime Minister was visiting survivors of the Manchester terror attack, families who were heartbroken to have lost their children were also in the vicinity, but the Prime Minister did not visit them. Chloe Rutherford and Liam Curry from South Shields tragically lost their lives, and their parents feel ignored by the Prime Minister. I wrote to her seven weeks ago with their concerns, but she has failed to respond. When will she properly acknowledge their loss?
Theresa Mary May (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have already given significant support to the oil and gas industry. I was pleased, some months ago, to visit Aberdeen and to visit the technology centre for the oil and gas industry. It is doing really interesting work looking not just at existing fields but at decommissioning work and how it can export its knowledge and expertise across the world. He is absolutely right that what people and businesses want is the certainty of knowing that Scotland will remain in the United Kingdom and that there will not be a second independence referendum.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Helen Olivia Bicknell Whately (Conservative, Centre-right): None of us would want anyone to be paid any less, but it has been difficult but necessary, in order to control the overspending by Government and put right the financial mess that the country was left in after the last time the hon. Gentleman’s party was in government.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Maria Colette Caulfield (Conservative, Centre-right): It is generous of the hon. Gentleman to give way. As he says, I support the lifting of the pay cap and I am pleased that the Government are moving on this. My concern about supporting this motion is that Labour do not seem to have learned the lessons from crashing the economy in the first place. Could he outline what level of pay rise the Labour party is proposing for public sector workers—1.5%, 2% or 3%—and how it will be paid for? That is crucial to influencing the voting intentions of Members like me.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Maria Colette Caulfield (Conservative, Centre-right): In this debate, we must be honest with the British public about how we are going pay for the lifting of the pay cap. If Labour wants to lift the pay cap, can the hon. Gentleman explain how the Labour party will pay for it? Will it be through increased taxation or more public borrowing, or will Labour shift spending priorities? We need to know the detail in order to be able to support this policy.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): What the hon. Lady’s constituents care about is that today we announced the lowest unemployment level since 1975, which is a massive benefit to her constituents. She says that we have been repeating our reasons for this terrible financial discipline, which has been so difficult. I am not someone who says that the entire responsibility for the recession in 2010 is the Labour party’s. I recognise that it was a global crash, but what Labour cannot deny is that the recession we faced here was far, far worse than in other countries. Why is that? What did the Governor of the Bank of England say at the time?
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): Hang on. I think it is important to listen to what the Governor of the Bank of England said. Sir Mervyn King said: "we came into this crisis with fiscal policy along a path that was not…sustainable and a correction was needed." What was he talking about in 2010? The Government borrowed £1 in every £4 that they spent. The deficit was 10.2%, the highest since records began. The reason that, say, Germany did not have to go through austerity is not because a German equivalent of the Leader of the Opposition was throwing prudence to the wind but because Germany did not allow its public finances to get recklessly out of control, which is what happened under the Labour Government.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): I am going to make some progress and then I will give way further. I want to talk about the recruitment issues raised by the hon. Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Catherine West) and others, but I wish to conclude on the point about financial discipline, of which Opposition Members are so critical. The consequences for a Government of losing financial discipline are not just pay freezes and 1% caps, but 1 million people unemployed—as a result of that recession post-2008. Every Labour Government in modern times has left office with unemployment higher than when they arrived. That is why this afternoon’s motion is so bogus, because the difference between the Government and the Opposition is not about a desire to invest in public services; it is about the ability to deliver a strong economy so that we can make that investment.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): I will make some progress now, because I know that lots of people want to speak in this debate The other completely bogus claim we have heard this afternoon is that somehow the financial discipline of pay restraint that we have had to have has been deliberately targeted at ordinary people. Again, that is absolute nonsense, as we see when we look at what has happened. Despite the recession and the pressures on public finance, this Government have taken 4 million of the lowest-paid people out of income tax altogether. At the same time, the top 1% are paying more and the top 20% are paying more, and we have gone further, introducing the national living wage, which since its introduction in April has increased the pay of people at that level of pay by £1,400 per annum. The record overall—this is where we see the most obnoxious untruth spread by the story on austerity—shows that over the past seven years we have seen 600,000 fewer people in absolute poverty and 200,000 fewer children in absolute poverty. Income inequality has reduced to its lowest level for 30 years. Why is it that this apparently evil Tory Government have reduced inequality? It is because we have done what Labour never does, which is grow the economy, with 1 million new businesses, 3 million new jobs and unemployment at its lowest since 1975. Today, youth unemployment is below 5% for the first time and there has been a 40% drop since 2010.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): I assure the hon. Lady that we are making reforms because we want to train more nurses and to fund more nurse training places. There has been a dip in the number of people taking up nurse training places this year, as there was when the higher education reforms were introduced in 2012, but it recovered soon after that and we now see in other parts of higher education record numbers of students from poorer backgrounds going to university.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jeremy Richard Streynsham Hunt (Conservative, Centre-right): I am going to conclude my comments by asking three questions. First, who is the real friend of public sector workers—the party that wrecked the economy, leading to massive cuts, or the party that turned the economy around with 3 million new jobs? Who is the real champion of public services—the party that did not only wreck the public finances but wants to do so all over again, or the party that is restoring discipline to the public finances so that we can start to invest more in our public services? Who is the real friend of the NHS—the party that has delivered more doctors, nurses and funding than ever before in its history, or the party that plays politics with the NHS in election after election, despite doing it so much harm?
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Labor
Oliver Heald (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my hon. Friend agree that with the Labour years having led to far less recruitment and training of nurses and doctors than the country needed, we are now in an international labour market for those important workers? It is therefore important that pay rates are high enough to attract them to this country.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a great honour to have been called in this serious debate. I am pleased by the way in which it has been conducted, as we have heard some very good speeches, in particular the maiden speech by the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan). It was an amusing, entertaining, heartfelt and serious speech, and I have no doubt that the hon. Gentleman will make valuable contributions in this Parliament and in years to come. It was a salutary speech because it gave one faith in the House of Commons Having been a Member for seven years, I have seen many debates—and some yah-boo politics—in which people apportioned blame for the crisis. Labour says that the Tories cut too much and that it was all the bankers’ fault that we had a deficit of £160 billion—the largest peace-time deficit in our history. The right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb), who was a Front-Bench member of the coalition Government for their full five years, will remember clearly the context in which we came up with the difficult policy of the pay cap. It was not a whimsy, and we did not do it for the hell of it to put people under pressure. The pay cap was a serious response to a difficult and chronic problem—the deficit I do not want to apportion blame, and I echo my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State in recognising that the global crash was not entirely Labour’s fault—I am willing to give it that—but the history of the public finances from 2001, eight years before the financial crisis happened, shows that we ran a deficit in every single one of those years. To borrow a phrase—a mantra—from a departed colleague, Labour did not fix the roof while the sun was shining. The Labour party had a record of fiscal incompetence, and it was against that backdrop that public sector pay restraint became an issue. It is important to look at the history to explain why the pay cap was instituted in 2011.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Macroeconomics
Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng (Conservative, Centre-right): That was a fair intervention, but I completely disagree with the hon. Lady’s point. The deficit had nothing to do with the then Secretary of State for Health. It was not the previous Secretary of State for Health who caused the £160 billion deficit the Government inherited in 2010. Naturally, when running a huge deficit—I think it was something like 12% of GDP—one has to find savings in the budget. The question I pose to Labour Members is, how would they find the extra money? There are only two ways to do that: the Government can either raise the money through taxation, or the Chancellor has to borrow the money. It is very unclear to me what the Labour party proposes to do to increase the pay of public sector workers. No doubt it will have a plan to increase it by 5% or 10%—I do not know by exactly how much it wants to put up public sector pay—but it would have to fund that. I looked at the Labour election manifesto and I think it spent the tax on people earning over £80,000 about 10 times over to fund their various projects and policies. We cannot go on kidding ourselves and kidding the British people. I very much like the point made by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk about the fact that we have to be serious about how we are going to fund the NHS and social care provision. He described the current model as—his word—unsustainable. I do not share that view—I think we can fund the NHS adequately for the rest of the Parliament—but his general message was right. It does not make any sense for Labour Members to scream, holler and shout about Tory cuts without having a serious proposal.
NHS Pay — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Government Operations
Kwasi Alfred Addo Kwarteng (Conservative, Centre-right): I am not privy to the conversations the right hon. Gentleman has had with the Prime Minister—that is something he might wish to take up with her—but this is a serious debate. As he said, we cannot be honest with people on this issue if we are simply screaming and shouting across the Dispatch Box Conservative and Opposition Members have made the point that we have extremely impressive professionals across the public services. The level of public service provision here in Britain is right at the top of the global rankings. I have spent time in Europe, Africa and across the middle east. The public services we have in Britain are really world class and we must never lose sight of that in these discussions. The nature of the debate has been very fruitful and we have had a measure of courtesy, but it does not make sense simply to holler "Tory cuts." That is what I have heard in seven years of trying to address what are very serious problems
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Johanna Peta Churchill (Conservative, Centre-right): If we are talking about promises broken, I seem to remember my daughters who are still at university being promised free tuition fees by the Labour party. I then remember the hon. Lady saying on the Marr show that that was nothing more than an ambition, largely because it was going to cost £89 billion.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Anna Mary Soubry (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady will no doubt recall that it was her party that promised not to introduce tuition fees and then, when in government, went on to do that. Does she accept that application rates among disadvantaged English 18-year-olds and black and minority ethnic 18-year-olds are at an all-time record high?
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Conor Burns (Conservative, Centre-right): The £9,000 limit was introduced more than five years ago, but given inflation over that period, in real terms it is £8,500 today, and by 2020 it will be £8,000. Is it not the case that the direct consequence of the perfectly honourable position that the hon. Lady advocates is that less money will go into higher education?
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Justine Greening (Conservative, Centre-right): Today’s debate is about student finance—an issue on which, as we have just seen, the Opposition put rhetoric ahead of results, spin ahead of substance, and self-interest ahead of students. As we have just heard reconfirmed, Labour’s policy is to have no tuition fees, but no fees means fewer students at worse universities. Labour’s policy is an anti-social mobility policy writ large. It is a disgrace Let me talk about how far we have come in recent years. We have made extraordinary strides in higher education since the Government took office. More people are at university than ever before, including record numbers of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. That is not a hypothesis but a simple fact. In 2016, disadvantaged 18-year-olds were 43% more likely to go to university than in 2009.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Justine Greening (Conservative, Centre-right): I am happy to take an intervention from anyone on the Opposition Benches who thinks that is a bad thing and wants to justify not continuing with a policy that has led to more disadvantaged young people going to university.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Justine Greening (Conservative, Centre-right): First of all, there has never been more funding available to enable students to go to university. Secondly, the facts simply do not bear out the hon. Gentleman’s point. If what he says is correct, we would see fewer and fewer students going to university, but the exact opposite has happened. [Interruption.] We can hear Labour Members’ faux anger about how much debt students have, but the bottom line is that they do not want to even engage with the fact that there have never been more young people getting the opportunity to go to university. I was the first person in my family to get the chance to go to university. If Labour ever has the chance to bring in its policy there will be fewer people from backgrounds like mine who will have the chance to go to university. That is a statistical fact.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Justine Greening (Conservative, Centre-right): Let me just make some progress and I will give way to my right hon. Friend in a second. What would a policy of no fees mean? It would mean an emergency cap on student numbers, going back to the days when we had to limit the number of young people who went to university. That is because if we are not willing to fund the system, there can be fewer people in it. It has to be paid for.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Desmond Angus Swayne (Conservative, Centre-right): I recently returned to my alma mater in Scotland, some 30 years after leaving. I was surprised to discover that Scottish students were capped at 20% of the student body. It is a disadvantage for all students if there are no fees, because universities cannot afford to educate them.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Justine Greening (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. There are two groups of people who miss out in Scotland. We know what no fees would mean; we only have to look north of the border. In the interests of evidence-based policy, I encourage Labour Members and the Labour party to actually look at the impact of what they are proposing. Go to Scotland. See whether disadvantaged young people from the poorest families have more or less chance to go university in a country where there are no fees. They have less chance. In fact, young people overall have less chance of going to university in Scotland. I am not putting some kind of hypothesis before the House; this is a simple fact. It is a consequence of the Labour party policy of no fees.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
Justine Greening (Conservative, Centre-right): I am pleased the hon. Lady accepts that there are more young people going to university. A number of different factors are involved when it comes to mature students. We will be providing more support for mature students, but part of the decline is due to the fact that more young people are going to university in the first place, so there is simply a smaller cohort of mature students.
Higher Education (England) Regulations — House of Commons, 2017-09-13
Topic: Education
John Charles Baron (Conservative, Centre-right): Will my right hon. Friend please never cease to remind people, as there is sometimes a risk that we are losing the PR war on this, that we are doing more for disadvantaged students, courtesy of the tuition fees—in particularly with the element of support above £6,000—than many previous Governments? That is why south of the border participation rates by poorer students, relative to students as a whole, are so much higher than they are in the north. We need to keep drilling that message home, because it is one of the best aspects of tuition fees.