argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Official Development Assistance and the British Council — House of Commons, 2021-06-30
Topic: Immigration
Sarah Deborah Champion (Labour, Centre-left): On the right hon. Lady’s point about the migrants in the channel, the director of the World Food Programme said to me, "You are removing money from the areas in Africa where the terrorists are recruiting. Do you not think that they will be using the exact same routes to get into the UK that the migrants looking for work are using?" I agree with him.
Human Rights Act 1998 (Amendment) — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Civil Rights
David Lindon Lammy (Labour, Centre-left): This week, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights said that the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Covert Human Intelligence Sources (Criminal Conduct) Act 2021 and the judicial review Bill will all make human rights violations more likely to occur. The Lord Chancellor will be aware of his special responsibilities to defend human rights both in his Department and across Government. As his two-year anniversary as Lord Chancellor arrives next month—I congratulate him on that—will he consider starting to do that part of his job? How will he respond to the UN special rapporteur’s assessment?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Civil Rights
Peter John Kyle (Labour, Centre-left): It was good to see the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State condemning the harassment of Chris Whitty in recent days. However, the irony seems to be lost that Chris Whitty experienced textbook antisocial behaviour of the kind that happens increasingly up and down our country in every single community. Will the Secretary of State explain why antisocial behaviour has been rising for five years, yet use of antisocial behaviour orders and measures has fallen? When he introduces a victims Bill, will it include measures to give victim status to people who suffer from antisocial behaviour?
Emergency Covid Contracts — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Other
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Order. A serious allegation about somebody lying will have to be withdrawn—as we know, hon. Members would never lie. I am sure we would like to think about the language being used, because I am not convinced about the proof of that. I think we should withdraw the word "lie".
Emergency Covid Contracts — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Other
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Order. [Interruption.] Order. Mr Blackford, please. You cannot criticise another Member such as the Prime Minister without a substantive motion. That is not what has been granted. The language we use is important for me to keep good order, and I am sure you could reflect on the words about another Member, who I presume has also been given notice of any criticism.
Emergency Covid Contracts — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Other
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Order. Can I just say that it is my decision to grant a UQ? You are now questioning my judgment, and I am not going to have my judgment questioned The other thing to say is that I do feel sorry for the Minister being set up. I am sorry that Minister Gove was not here to take some of the questions, because most of them are named for him, but this House will not be taken for granted. When statements continue to be made outside the House, I will continue to grant UQs, so let’s get used to it. If the Government do not want to come here, I will ensure that they are heard here.
Emergency Covid Contracts — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Other
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Gentleman may shake his head or his hands, but he ought to realise that Members have the right to be heard, and not just him for the length of time that he thinks is appropriate; I will make the decision on that.
Emergency Covid Contracts — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Other
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Obviously, I am not aware of what has just been announced. If we are going to criticise, there needs to be a substantive motion, but the right hon. Lady is asking about the internal arrangements. Her point is now on the record; I hope that people have been listening to her request. We will take it from there. I am sure that this will not be the end of the matter being raised. I know that she will use her best endeavours and offices to ensure that the issue continues to be addressed We are going to suspend the House for two minutes so that the necessary arrangements can be made before the next business.
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Mixed Topics
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Order. I wish to make a short statement before we take the next urgent question. Last Thursday evening, the Government announced changes to the countries listed on the green and red travel lists. They also announced that they intended that fully vaccinated UK residents returning from amber list countries would not have to isolate from later in the summer. These are important announcements. They should be made to this House first. The fact that Transport Ministers were answering oral questions in the Chamber that morning only strengthens the case Although I do not have to explain my reasons for allowing the urgent question, in this case I want to say to those on the Government Benches that if Ministers choose to make important announcements outside this Chamber first, they must not be surprised that I will grant urgent questions on those matters. In fact, I will just continue to grant them on the basis that there may be a statement, because it seems that this Chamber is being ridden over roughshod. I will continue to make sure that this House gets an opportunity to scrutinise the Government, but it would be better for all concerned if the Government simply followed their own ministerial code and made important announcements to this House, to which Members are elected to represent their constituents and to ensure that Ministers and Secretaries of State can be scrutinised with questions—not via the media, but via MPs I call Jim McMahon to ask the urgent question.
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Mixed Topics
James McMahon (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Mr Speaker, for granting this urgent question. As you pointed out, it was unacceptable that the Government were not willing to come to the House to make the announcement when the traffic light system was reviewed last week. Thank you so much for your robust defence of Parliament on this matter Passengers and the industry want to see a clear plan of action, supported by transparent data and with measured interventions to balance the urgent need to keep our borders safe with the desire to support aviation and tourism First, on data and country-by-country assessment, I urge the Secretary of State to publish not only the decision-making criteria for the traffic light system but, importantly, the analysis that underpins it We have been pushing for the Government to show international leadership, but so far they have failed to step up. Why will they not bring forward concrete plans for an international vaccine passport that will be accepted by key destination countries? International co-operation is key to getting travel back up and running again, yet the Prime Minister missed a golden opportunity at the G7, including with the US. What progress has been made on reaching an agreement to see the safe return of transatlantic travel As much as we want to see more countries added to the green list, we also want to see a robust red list. Given that the easing of restrictions has been delayed throughout the country, will the Secretary of State now commit to reviewing the decision not to place India on the red list, so that lessons can be learned Labour’s position is clear: we have set out a sectoral deal and a simplified red and green list, supported by clear country-by-country assessment that shows the clear direction of travel. The Government also promised a sectoral deal, so when can the industry expect to see that promised sectoral deal? In the early days of this pandemic the public were willing to support the Government as they learnt on the job but, frankly, patience has run out. It is important that action is taken, and taken now.
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Immigration
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): What I picked up on a recent visit to Heathrow with the Home Affairs Committee was that the Government always seem to be behind the curve. They always seems to be having to deal with the current crisis and not thinking ahead to what the next crisis will be in travel, particularly at the borders. We have heard lots of reasons today why it is all very difficult for the Secretary of State to come with a plan, but can he give a firm date for when he will have a clear plan, which is what the public are really calling for, along with the travel industry?
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Domestic Commerce
Matthew Toby Perkins (Labour, Centre-left): The threat to the travel and tourism industry is very real. Just this week, I met constituents who normally work on aircraft but now have either been furloughed or in some cases made redundant several months ago and they are extremely concerned about the ongoing future of the industry. So it is regrettable that the Transport Secretary should seek to misrepresent the position of my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) in terms of recognising an increase in the number of nations on the green list, seeking clarification of the system and calling for international co-operation on vaccine passports, which can give real certainty to the industry and confidence to holidaymakers, so that we can try to save some of these crucial jobs in our industry.
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Immigration
Benjamin Peter James Bradshaw (Labour, Centre-left): From the Secretary of State’s response, it is clear he was not listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon), who said that Labour supports an expansion of the green list and that we want the rapid introduction of covid passports. The Secretary of State claims that it is complicated, but other Europeans and Americans are already free to travel with a vaccine passport, a negative test or proof of infection in the last six months. Why are we less free than they are and less free than we were last summer, when we did not have the vaccines?
EU Settlement Scheme — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Immigration
Paul Christopher Blomfield (Labour, Centre-left): The Prime Minister promised EU citizens "absolute certainty" of their rights to live and remain in the UK, but the day before applications to the EU settlement scheme close, serious questions remain unanswered, so may I press the Minister on some of them? Reports suggest that the Government have estimated that up to 130,000 of those eligible for benefits have not applied for settled status. What assessment has the Home Office made of the total number of eligible EU citizens still to apply, and how has it reached out actively to those people? What support has been given to older and more vulnerable people who have yet to make applications, particularly those in social care? There is concern that some parents have thought it unnecessary to apply on behalf of their children. How is the Home Office identifying those children and enabling their applications Government figures show that applications have been made for only one in three children in care, so what has been done for the others? The Home Office has said that late applications on reasonable grounds will be considered, so will the Minister confirm what status those applicants will have while the reasonableness of their case is determined Victims of domestic abuse whose traumatic circumstances have prevented an application will lose rights to support and a place in a refuge. What has been done to protect them? One in three landlords are not aware of the settlement scheme. Business groups think employers do not know enough about it. What has been done to ensure that nobody is wrongly excluded from housing or work Almost half—around 2 million—of those who have applied for settled status have not received it. Instead, they have pre-settled status with no long-term rights. What are the Government doing to ensure that they can overcome the barriers to full status There is a real risk of a new Windrush-type tragedy in the future if we do not get this right now. The pandemic has affected Government capacity and communication, so will the Minister reconsider his previous statement, follow the lead of countries such as France and the Netherlands in relation to UK citizens and extend the deadline for applications?
EU Settlement Scheme — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Immigration
Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds (Labour, Centre-left): I welcome the Minister back to the Dispatch Box I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing this urgent question. There could not be a more powerful warning to the Government of what happens when innocent people are deprived of their right to be here than the Windrush scandal. Twenty-eight-day warnings advising people to apply for settled status have been issued, despite an estimated 400,000 applications still awaiting processing. As my hon. Friend said, leaked documents suggest that 130,000 people in receipt of benefits have yet to sign up, and that support could be taken away. The Children’s Society has estimated that applications have not been made for more than 2,000 children in care or care leavers. That is why the Opposition have called for an extension of the European Union settlement scheme to the end of September. The Government must then do everything possible to sign up eligible people, with a strategy focusing on the vulnerable, children in care and care leavers Will the Minister confirm what is being done to support those who are unable to use or access the internet? More widely, how many eligible individuals does the Home Office believe have yet to sign up, and precisely how many applications are still being processed? Put simply, the Government have not done enough to prevent people from falling through the cracks. To avoid the risk of terrible injustice, surely the Government must extend the deadline to the end of September and use the additional time to ensure that all who are eligible are signed up.
EU Settlement Scheme — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Immigration
Catherine Elizabeth West (Labour, Centre-left): Many in Hornsey and Wood Green have called the UK their home for decades, but they have yet to hear back from the Home Office. A 62-year-old man is waiting anxious and fearful of being separated from his family. Will the Minister today fix the Home Office telephones, get through the backlog and calm the nerves of constituents who fear a Windrush-style scandal of falling through the cracks and being excluded from vital support?
EU Settlement Scheme — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Immigration
Chinyelu Susan Onwurah (Labour, Centre-left): "Data not dates" is the Government’s mantra for lockdown easing, so should it not be the same for settled status? The data clearly shows that tens of thousands of EU citizens, to whom the Government promised the right to stay, will become undocumented overnight, criminalised for working, renting accommodation or opening a bank account. They may be young or elderly, have insufficient language or digital skills, or have been unable to return to the UK because of the pandemic. In Newcastle, we value our European residents, so will the Minister not extend the deadline? Or does he want another Windrush?
Building Safety — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Mixed Topics
Rosalie Winterton (Labour, Centre-left): Before I call Clive Betts, the Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, to open the debate, let me inform the House that, as there are clearly a lot of Members who want to speak, there will be a five-minute time limit on speeches, which will be on the screens.
Building Safety — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Housing
Stephen Creswell Timms (Labour, Centre-left): We learned this month of the anger in Chesham and Amersham over Government housing policy. My constituents who face massive bills for waking watch and to repair defects in their leasehold homes are angry as well. Their anger is well expressed by Liam Halligan in the current issue of The Spectator, which was once edited by the Prime Minister. Liam Halligan’s article explains how the big house builders—Barratt, Taylor Wimpey and Persimmon —have used their excessive profits from the broken housing market to buy off the Tory party with donations in order to successfully maintain the current rigged system. Those firms have built tens of thousands of shoddy, dangerous homes and are now passing the cost of fixing the problem to leaseholders, and the Government are refusing to stop them. And then there is Help to Buy, which The Spectator says is "a government subsidy focused on new builds which has overwhelmingly gone to the big operators, juicing up both house prices and profits further, while making new homes even less affordable for the majority who are unable to access the scheme." All this has been compounded by Tory failure on regulation. In January 2012, David Cameron made it his new year’s resolution—with a frankly chilling phrase, in hindsight—to "kill off the health and safety culture for good." Tory Housing Ministers, seeing growing evidence of the need to tighten fire safety regulation, steadfastly refused to do so; it would have upset the house builders. The upshot was Grenfell Tower. NHBC, the privatised building control provider favoured by house builders because it is easier to satisfy than local authorities, signed off shoddy, defective buildings with minimal inspection, if any. It has been utterly discredited. Far from killing off the health and safety culture, Ministers have had to hand the Health and Safety Executive—the embodiment of that culture, which the Tories fortunately did not manage to "kill off"—the crucial new building safety regulator role The Spectator article finishes by pointing out: "Powerful vested interests benefit mightily from this high-price, low-build-quality gridlock" and calls for "a full Competition and Markets Authority inquiry into UK housebuilders" Unlike other Members in this debate, I do not want to thank those house builders. Competition is absent from this market. The Government must now finally side with leaseholders and would-be homeowners, and take on not the building products industry, but the house builders.
Building Safety — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Housing
Florence Eshalomi (Labour, Centre-left): I would like to thank my fellow Select Committee member, my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), for opening the debate and for leading the Committee in its efforts to hold the Government to account on the national cladding scandal. There are many issues in the building safety crisis that the Government have failed on, and that failure is turning the lives of leaseholders in my constituency into a living nightmare, but today I want to focus my comments on one of the root causes of the problem: the requirement for an external wall survey, or EWS1. Buildings are deemed to be unsafe only when a leaseholder tries to sell their flat and they are asked by their mortgage lender to provide an EWS1 form to show that the building has passed its fire safety assessment. This assessment is not overseen by the Government; nor is it a legal requirement for building owners. This means that most unsafe blocks are discovered only by chance. Four years on from the Grenfell tragedy, the Government still do not know exactly how many unsafe buildings there are in this country The first step in solving any problem is to correctly diagnose it, but this Government have outsourced that task to individual leaseholders. As a consequence, the Government have consistently underestimated both the scale of the problem and the personal and financial cost to individual leaseholders. Costs are spiralling because the people who are deciding that the works are needed are not the ones paying for them. Private fire assessors have no interest in keeping costs down and managing agents have no incentive to complete the works quickly so long as they are still liable for any cost. Without anyone with professional experience taking charge, leaseholders are left to navigate the system alone Labour is calling on the Government to establish a building safety works agency: a team of Government-appointed engineers with an expert in direct charge of resolving the crisis, going block by block, assessing the problems, commissioning remediation works, paying for them and signing buildings off as safe and sellable so that homeowners can get on with their lives Without effective Government action to address this, I fear that an ever-growing number of leaseholders will have their lives plagued in crisis for years to come. That is why the Government must act now to end the cladding scandal.
Building Safety — House of Commons, 2021-06-29
Topic: Housing
Clive James Charles Betts (Labour, Centre-left): Perhaps we could hope for the same result for the Select Committee vis-à-vis the Government when we come to their response to the building safety Bill We have had a wide-ranging debate, and this is clearly a very important issue. We should also think back to Dame Judith Hackitt’s report, in which she identified a legacy of building regulatory failures in this country, but also identified a fundamental problem of culture in the construction industry. That culture is about cutting costs, a race to the bottom and conflicts of interests, and that is fundamentally at the heart of many of these problems, which eventually will probably take longer to address When we debated the Fire Safety Bill, the Government said that it was the wrong Bill to be used for amendments to bring building safety matters to a conclusion. They said that the right Bill was the building safety Bill. I am pleased that the Minister has now said that the Bill is imminent. I hope that means it will be before the recess and is quicker than "soon" or "shortly", which Ministers often say The first duty of a Government is to keep their citizens safe. The only way to keep people safe in their homes is to remove all safety defects, and I say to the Government that the only way to remove all safety defects is to adopt the comprehensive building safety fund, as recommended by the Select Committee Question deferred until tomorrow at Seven o’clock (Standing Order No. 54).
Levelling Up Agenda — House of Commons, 2021-07-08
Topic: Mixed Topics
Catherine Jane Smith (Labour, Centre-left): Labour believes that it should be an explicit priority of this Government that when it comes to public procurement we should be buying more from British companies. In the Government’s document, "National Infrastructure and Construction Procurement Pipeline 2020/21", the procurement contracts in the pipeline are worth £37 billion. Can the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster tell the House how much of this was awarded to British companies? If not, what does that say about the Government’s priorities for British business?
Public Bodies: Transparency in Service Delivery — House of Commons, 2021-07-08
Topic: Civil Rights
Fleur Anderson (Labour, Centre-left): I think that made my point for me, thank you Last month, an Information Tribunal said that there is "a profound lack of transparency about the operation" of the freedom of information clearing house. Can the Minister confirm categorically that every single freedom of information request received has been treated in exactly the same way, with no different approach for certain journalists or campaigners?