argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2015-09-08
Topic: Energy
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I do not agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments. There are some cases where renewables are being sited in areas where there is opposition, but those are a minority. I assure him that if he thinks there is going to be much popular objection to renewables, he should just wait until his constituents and others see the impact of fracking. That is when he is going to see an awful lot more opposition to the energy choices that this Government are making The fact is that the renewable energy industry is a fantastic advantage to our economy. It does some brilliant things, and it does so despite Government policy, not because of it. It is now absolutely at risk of not being able to get away from the subsidies. It does not need subsidies for much longer and has always understood that there will be digression. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) is suggesting that this industry is surviving only because of subsidies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The subsidies are coming down. There is digression, but it has to happen in a planned way. It is not justifiable, or even reasonable, to expect an industry to not know what kind of economic situation it is working in from one year to the next. This Government keep changing the goalposts on an almost monthly basis. The renewable energy industry and the solar industry know that digression will happen and that subsidies will be withdrawn, but it must be to a predetermined timetable. When that timetable keeps changing, it is incredibly difficult for business to adapt Compare that with what is happening to the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry will have subsidies for decades to come. It is already 50 years old, and yet Hinkley Point C could not even begin to be built were it not for the fact that it has massive subsidies, which are hugely bigger than anything that the renewable energy industry could ever dream of. I will not hear suggestions that the renewable energy industry is somehow greedy when it comes to subsidies; absolutely nothing could be further from the truth.
Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2015-09-08
Topic: Energy
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I wish that the hon. Gentleman had done a little bit more homework before making that point, because it is simply not the case. The point about the subsidies to the solar industry is that it has always been deemed that they would come down over time. The objection here is that they are suddenly being forced to reduce overnight at a time when the industry had been told that there was going to be a very different economic situation. Of course the costs of solar are coming down; they have been coming down in a remarkable way, and all credit to the solar industry for achieving that. But they are coming down in spite of the Government—in spite of their chopping and changing, their uncertainty and their lack of vision—and not as a result of something that they have done In conclusion, if the Government go ahead with applying this climate change levy to the renewable energy industry, they will strangle an industry that has so much potential for getting climate emissions down, creating jobs and bringing on a stronger and more resilient economy.
Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2015-09-08
Topic: Energy
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I think I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. He, like me, would like to see affordable energy, but given that nuclear power is one of the most unaffordable energies and that we are going to lock ourselves into extremely high prices for nuclear into times to come, will he be consistent in his position? If he does not want unaffordable energy, will he also oppose nuclear energy fees?
Finance Bill — House of Commons, 2015-09-08
Topic: Energy
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): The Minister has made the case that he wants to be able to reduce householders’ bills, so will he ring-fence the extra revenue generated by applying the climate change levy to renewables and put it into energy efficiency for some of the poorest households in this country?
Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation — House of Commons, 2015-07-08
Topic: Social Welfare
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, because there is a party here that does not agree with the consensus that appears to be building up. Today’s Budget will go down as a pivotal moment in the dismantling of the welfare state, with the Government’s own advisers saying that slashing the benefits cap will throw 40,000 more children into poverty. Can he say whether that is a price worth paying, when even the IMF has told the Government that low borrowing costs make austerity unnecessary, with the costs of paying down the deficit in this way outweighing the benefits?
Climate Change and Flooding — House of Commons, 2015-12-15
Topic: Environment
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): The hon. Lady is making a strong case. As she will have heard from Paris, from civil society and from the countries that are most vulnerable to climate impacts, about 80% of known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground if we are to have a hope of avoiding dangerous climate change. We need a global transition to 100% renewables by 2050. I wonder if she could say whether she agrees with that.
Climate Change and Flooding — House of Commons, 2015-12-15
Topic: Environment
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): The hon. Gentleman will know that emissions from aviation and shipping were left out of the Paris agreement. Does he agree that that is a fatal omission and, similarly, that airport expansion, be it at Heathrow, Gatwick or anywhere else, would fatally undermine the UK’s ability to make a fair contribution to keep global warming well below 2 °C, let alone the 1.5 °C goal that is a matter of survival for many vulnerable countries?
Climate Change and Flooding — House of Commons, 2015-12-15
Topic: Environment
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): The right hon. Gentleman is making a very strong case, which I appreciate. Surely the difference that 1.5° makes means that we need to think again about aviation expansion. In yesterday’s aviation statement, which came right after the climate statement, nobody even mentioned climate, and yet aviation is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
Sixth-form Education: International Comparisons — House of Commons, 2017-01-09
Topic: Education
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): The hon. Gentleman is making an incredibly powerful case. On the issue of underfunding, does he agree that sixth-form colleges are uniquely cruelly treated, because unlike schools and academies they cannot cross-subsidise from the more generous funding available for younger students in schools and they do not receive a VAT reimbursement? So not only are they the most efficient, with the best track record on delivery, but they are the most underfunded section of the higher education area.
Sixth-form Education: International Comparisons — House of Commons, 2017-01-09
Topic: Education
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I genuinely very much welcome the Minister’s support for the sixth-form sector and sixth-form colleges, but he has been speaking for nearly 10 minutes and has said nothing about the arbitrary funding that has been the focus of so much of the concern expressed on both sides of the House. Will he commit to look at this funding issue? Will the Government look at how much funding is required for the rounded curriculum that sixth-form colleges want to deliver? Colleges in my constituency, such as Varndean College and Brighton, Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College, are desperate to deliver it but are being undermined by the lack of funding, which the Minister still has not really addressed.
Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (Statutory Requirement) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-01-20
Topic: Law and Crime
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): There is absolutely no way I am giving way to Government Members, who have spent so many hours filibustering a perfectly serious Bill. [Interruption.] There is no way I am going to give way To expand on the last example, I should say that the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners tells us that statutory status is needed because police and crime commissioners across the country—[Interruption.]
Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (Statutory Requirement) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-01-20
Topic: Education
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): Hon. Members will recall the freedom of information requests to the police made by the hon. Member for Manchester Central (Lucy Powell) last year. They showed a 1,200% increase in sexting among under-16s—sharing explicit images or texts—and an increasing number using the dating app Tinder. It is clear that children are being pushed into adult territory well before they are ready Some of the most powerful calls for action come from the young people themselves. A Terrence Higgins Trust report, which involved a survey of 900 young people aged 16 to 24, found that SRE is inadequate or absent from many schools. Some 99% of the young people surveyed thought that SRE should be mandatory in all schools and more than 60% received SRE just once a year or less. Three quarters were not taught about consent and half the young people surveyed rated the SRE that they received in school as either poor or terrible However, we should take heart from young campaigners for statutory PSHE because they are doing excellent work. As well as having tremendous support from groups such as Girlguiding, this year I have also had the privilege of forming links with an exciting group in my Brighton, Pavilion constituency called PSHE Matters. It is made up of students from the Dorothy Stringer School in Brighton who have got together under their own steam to campaign actively for PSHE to be mandatory. They recognise the value of the proactive PSHE provision at their school, and they want to ensure that all students across the country have access to similar high-quality teaching. Their work on PSHE is a testament to the success of the subject The students’ call to action comes in a context where one third of young people aged between 11 and 14 have watched online porn on a tablet or mobile phone, and half of 11 to 14-year-olds who had viewed pornography said it had affected their relationships. SRE is desperately needed to offset these messages with age-appropriate information about consent and healthy relationships Members will be well aware—
New Partnership with the EU — House of Commons, 2017-01-17
Topic: Environment
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): May I suggest to the Secretary of State that his Government’s threat to turn Britain into a corporate tax haven floating off the edge of Europe is not what people voted for on 23 June, and that people also did not vote to wreck our environmental protections? Will the Government therefore introduce a new environmental protection Bill, as advocated by the Environmental Audit Committee, so that vital safeguards for nature are neither quietly dropped through secondary legislation, nor bargained away in the rush to conclude new trade deals, for example with the US?
US Immigration Policy — House of Commons, 2017-01-30
Topic: International Affairs
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): It seems that fake news has come to the House of Commons with a vengeance, because the Foreign Secretary has just said that our Prime Minister was one of the first out of the blocks to condemn the words of President Trump. She certainly was not; we have heard that it took 38 hours. Her failure shames this whole country. I am proud that more people in my constituency of Brighton, Pavilion, have signed the petition to stop the state visit than in any other. They recognise that our Prime Minister has been not involved in diplomacy, but complicit with tyranny. What does the Secretary of State say?
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-01-31
Topic: Environment
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I do not see any contradiction between what I wrote back then and the position I am taking now. I have always been critical of certain actions of the ECB and I will continue to be so. That does not mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Only someone who was enormously reckless would think that was a sensible way forward What is reckless is a Bill that is going to throw us off a cliff edge, entirely unnecessarily, because it fails to include any mention, let alone give any details, of any transitional arrangements. That means that once the clock starts ticking—once article 50 has been triggered—if negotiations take longer than those two years, we will suddenly be thrown into a world of WTO-only tariffs, and I can assure the hon. Gentleman that his constituents will not thank him for that. I do not believe that democracy is well served by such recklessness In the last few moments available to me, I want to say a few words about the environment, an issue that has been conspicuous by its absence during most of the debate over the past few days. I am especially concerned about the need for guarantees—real guarantees—to maintain environmental regulation that is at least as strong as current EU regulation. An environmental protection Act—crucially, with its own court of arbitration —might be one way of delivering that, but we also need to ensure that there are clear ways of retaining our relationships with important European agreements such as REACH, on the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals, and with the European Chemicals Agency We need UK environmental regulators and enforcement agencies, ready to step into the shoes of the EU institutions that currently perform such roles. Those institutions must be properly funded when the EU is no longer funding them. We need to ensure that the principles that underpin our environmental regulations, such as the precautionary principle, are not lost. At present we have no guarantees, and we deserve to have guarantees before article 50 is triggered. About this, as about so much else, there is no information Leaders of the leave campaign famously talk about taking back control. If that means anything, it surely means that control must be not just about our departure, but about our destination. Democracy requires that Parliament has ample opportunity to scrutinise the terms of the Brexit deal that will emerge from negotiations, but it also requires the country to have the right to continue to be given a say in the form of a referendum on the proposed deal. I cannot vote for a Bill that fails to provide those safeguards.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-01-31
Topic: International Affairs
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I do wish that Government Members who say that we have to go for an extreme Brexit would stop rewriting history. At the time of the referendum, plenty of people, including Dan Hannan, were saying things like, "Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening to leave the single market."
Article 50 — House of Commons, 2017-01-24
Topic: International Affairs
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): The final vote offered by the Government on the negotiated package will not be meaningful unless they also guarantee that, if there is a vote against the withdrawal treaty, we will have an option to continue talks with the EU for a better deal, rather than simply falling out with no deal at all. Can the Secretary of State guarantee that we will have that vote in time for such further discussion to happen?
Sex and Relationship Education — House of Commons, 2017-01-23
Topic: Education
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I congratulate the right hon. Lady on securing this debate and the excellent work that her Committee has done in this area. Does she agree that it is significant that there is now such strong cross-party support for moving in this direction? Five Select Committee Chairs have now said that this is an important issue. Does she also agree that the statutory nature of her proposals is essential, because that will mean that children will get good sex and relationship education and personal, social and health education? We need the teacher training to be done well so that we can get good teaching.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-03-13
Topic: International Affairs
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): We live in very strange times. The campaign to leave the EU was based to a very great extent on the idea of restoring parliamentary sovereignty. Indeed, the Government’s White Paper asserts: "The sovereignty of Parliament is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution." Yet Ministers seem set on opposing any attempt to guarantee a meaningful role for Parliament in the process of withdrawing from the EU. Instead we are being asked to write a blank cheque to give Ministers power to withdraw the country from the EU on whatever terms they like—or worse, on no terms at all. Ministers seem to regard their colleagues as little better than lemmings. Faced with the prospect of falling off the cliff edge, we are apparently meant to suspend all judgment and blindly follow wherever they lead. But to allow Ministers to proceed in this way would be an extraordinary and unforgivable abdication of parliamentary responsibility. The manner and terms on which we withdraw from the EU will have implications for the rights and interests of every citizen and business for many years to come, and Parliament must take responsibility for these decisions. The final deal on trade with the EU will almost certainly need to be ratified at both national and federal level of each EU member state. Lords amendment 2 simply gives the UK Parliament the same power. Do Ministers really want this Parliament to be the single most underpowered of all European Parliaments during that process I appeal to colleagues to defy the whipped-up anger of the anti-European press, and to stand up to the ridiculous notion that any and every attempt to give Parliament a role in the Brexit process is somehow a betrayal of the will of the people. It is no such thing—it is simply the exercise of the judgment that we were elected to bring to this House. We were not elected to be lemmings.
Education: Public Funding — House of Commons, 2017-07-04
Topic: Education
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): Could the Minister stop playing games? What schools care about is the total amount of money they have to invest in their pupils, so will he just level with the public and admit that he has not protected per pupil funding? It is insulting to constituents to pretend otherwise. What will he say to children in my constituency who are facing a 10% cut in their funding by 2021?
Chris Gibb Report: Improvements to Southern Railway — House of Commons, 2017-07-04
Topic: Labor
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): Will the Minister acknowledge that page 93 of the Gibb report shows a graph that demonstrates that Southern was the worst-performing company a very long time before there was any trade union industrial action? Will he also explain why he has not got round the table with the unions and GTR? This is an absolute nightmare for our constituents, but the Government cannot pretend that it has nothing to do with them, given that Gibb also says that the Secretary of State is "already determining the strategic direction of this dispute" That is what Gibb says.
Chris Gibb Report: Improvements to Southern Railway — House of Commons, 2017-07-04
Topic: Transportation
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): May I, Madam Deputy Speaker, add my congratulations to you following others that have been expressed? It is a pleasure to see you in your place I welcome this debate, as the Secretary of State has some major information gaps to fill and some serious questions to answer. It is a shame that he left the Chamber almost as soon as he could, because on top of the six-month delay between the Government receiving the report and its publication, we have had no serious formal Government response. The Minister’s 500-word statement barely stretches to a side of A4. That is indicative of the whole attitude that we are seeing from the Government—all hands-off and no leadership. After two years of the Brighton main line rail nightmare, my constituents expect more and deserve better. They have regularly been in tears of anger and frustration. We have heard the stories of jobs lost, relationships broken up, and businesses taking a very serious hit in Brighton and Hove. All the while, passengers continue to pay through the nose for Britain’s worst-performing rail service I have listened to the Secretary of State today. May I point out to him that it will not help passengers to heap all the blame for our long-running rail nightmare on to the unions? The people who work on our railways every day—people who are trained to a safety-critical standard and work on the frontline—are raising specific concerns about access and safety that have yet to be answered. Moreover, the Secretary of State simply cannot keep up the pretence that this two-year-long fiasco is nothing to do with him and the Government. The buck stops with him, whether he likes it or not, and chronic problems long predate the industrial action. That action started a little over a year ago, at the end of last April, whereas we have had enduring problems for well over two years. A glance at the graph on page 93 of the Gibb report makes that very clear. Southern was the worst-performing company a very long time before any industrial action took place As the Secretary of State well knows, Chris Gibb says that "all the elements of the system have been under strain" He says that Southern rail was attempting to run too many trains on poor and unreliable infrastructure. He makes a lot of technical suggestions on issues such as signalling, timetabling and service patterns. He says, critically, that strategic leadership is missing. That is not news for long-suffering passengers. With regard to this dispute, the bottom line is that there has been a chronic lack of leadership from this Government and from Ministers. It is plain that we are not going to get anywhere unless we get people talking together.
European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-02-06
Topic: International Affairs
Caroline Lucas (Green Party, Left): I do wish that the hon. Gentleman would not rewrite history. I have some lovely quotes here. The present Foreign Secretary said: "I’d vote to stay in the single market. I’m in favour of the single market." The right hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr Paterson) said: "Only a madman would actually leave the market" That one speaks for itself. Arron Banks stated: "Increasingly the Norway option looks the best for the UK." What the hon. Gentleman is saying is simply not the case.