argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
GP Provision: Pilsley — House of Commons, 2020-02-10
Topic: Health
Johanna Peta Churchill (Conservative, Centre-right): As the hon. Gentleman knows, we are always prepared to consider anything that will help to sustain the viability of the entire workforce. Offering appropriate career development, for instance, is important to ensuring that we retain doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals. We do not just want to train them; we want to keep them as well. Last year Health Education England recruited the largest ever number of GP trainees—some 3,540—but the system is under significant strain, and more trainees will be required to meet our target of 6,000 general practitioners. The five medical schools that are currently coming onstream will be to central to that objective. However, training new staff is only one piece of the jigsaw. As I have said, retention is just as important. The GP contract recognises that, and sets out an ambitious programme of initiatives which, by 2023-24, will support existing doctors. As well as introducing those workforce measures, we intend over the next 12 months to reduce the unnecessary burden of bureaucracy that often restricts GPs Our review has been agreed as part of this year’s contract, and will begin with a ministerial round table that will seek input from our partners across Government and general practice. Our aim is to free up valuable time for doctors and primary care professionals, while also ensuring that Government agencies, departments and patients have the necessary access to information. By recruiting and retaining more doctors in primary care, covering a wider range of specialisms, we will reduce the burden of bureaucracy placed on them and create additional capacity over the next five years. However, this is also about delivering care in the most appropriate setting as we strengthen general practice, and at the heart of each and every one of those settings is the patient. That can only work if we listen to the concerns and views of all involved in general practice, both staff and patients I commend my hon. Friend’s tenacity. He has lobbied both the Secretary of State and me to ensure that we know about the challenges at the Pilsley surgery, and that we listen and then continue a conversation that involves me but also, most importantly, the Secretary of State when he and my hon. Friend meet Staffa Health shortly. We will act on what we are hearing Question put and agreed to.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Questions:   When the Secretary of State meets the Prime Minister and the Chancellor later to discuss HS2, will he stress that it is of course all about capacity, but also that it is not either/or, because as well as HS2, we need the TransPennine upgrade, Northern Powerhouse Rail, a direct Huddersfield to London service, and an upgrade to the Huddersfield-Penistone-Sheffield line? This would show this Government’s real, true commitment to levelling up our country and our economy.; I would also like to wish the Minister a happy rail nationalisation day. I was rather anticipating a statement on it today, but I thank him for the letter that was sent giving some details. In preparation for the handover in March, will he look at capacity issues? All too often, the line is overcrowded, and trains have only two carriages, particularly on the Durham Coast line through my constituency. When I contact Northern Rail, it says that it simply does not have the carriages. Can we please ensure that we invest in the necessary rolling stock to provide people with the service they need?; A number of my constituents in rural areas of Rushcliffe have difficulty getting buses to towns such as Melton and Loughborough. I am pleased that the Government announced a £20 million fund to trial on-demand bus services in rural areas last year. Can my hon. Friend update me on the timetable for making that funding available and how communities can apply?; The recently leaked Network Rail paper, which showed that the alternative to HS2 was 29 years of weekend closures and interminable delays, should be all that we need to know why we must get on with HS2. Will the Government not only commit to it but get control of the MPs who are constantly undermining this country’s most important infrastructure project?; Many of my constituents have been affected by the redesign of airspace, as many live below the flightpaths in and out of London Luton airport. The Civil Aviation Authority promised a post-implementation review of the changes, and the review of one such route is now overdue by more than two years. What assessment has the Minister made of whether the Civil Aviation Authority is fit for purpose and adequately resourced, and will he meet me and St Albans campaigners to discuss residents’ concerns?; Given that nearly three years have passed since the all-party parliamentary group on taxis laid out the case for reform of legislation governing the taxi and private hire industry, and a year has passed since the Government accepted that case, when can we finally expect them to legislate for the reform we need?
Stephen Crabb (Conservative, Centre-right): Armed forces veterans deserve to be treated equally wherever they are in the UK. Will the Minister promise that when we roll out the veterans rail card later this year in England, it will also apply in Wales, Scotland and elsewhere?
Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Tobias Martin Ellwood (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Some 90% of our trade still goes by ship. However, not all shipping lanes are as free as they should be Talking about global Britain leads to a desire to speak about trade and the economy. That is important, but I am going to focus on security, because, as the first line of the original 2010 strategic defence and security review reminds us, economic security and national security are interdependent of each other. If we do not have national security, we cannot build the economy in order to prosper. If we invest in defence, it is not just for the defence budget—we are also increasing our prosperity, from which all other budgets then benefit from as well There is perhaps some optimism on the Conservative Benches following the general election, and a sense of determination. We have a mandate and we have the energy to, we hope, be in office for a number of years, and to craft where Britain should go over the next decade. However, that decade is going to get more dangerous and more complex than at any time since the cold war. The character of conflict is changing. It is moving from arguments and battles over terrain to the digital domain as we become ever more reliant on the digital economy. We have seen the rise of Russia. We have seen what Iran is up to. Extremism has not disappeared. We pat ourselves on the back that somehow we have got rid of the caliphate in the middle east, but extremism continues. We saw during the interruption in the general election that terrorism remains rife. Those challenges are dispersing and getting more complex, and they are challenges to our economy and our prosperity There are two issues very much at the forefront that we need to focus on, perhaps in the longer term, one of which is climate change and its consequences. One in four of the world’s population will come from Africa. They are not producing the jobs there that they need, and that will lead to huge migrational challenges. Some 80% of the world’s population lives within 50 miles of the coastline. If sea levels rise, where will those people go? How will those economies be affected? How will Bournemouth be affected—my constituency and that of my right hon. Friend the Minister as well?
Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Tobias Martin Ellwood (Conservative, Centre-right): I agree with the hon. Gentleman—who is now my hon. Friend, as we will hopefully work more closely on national defence issues for the United Kingdom. He makes an important point about these being issues that we need to tackle. When it comes to defence, there is an immediate knee-jerk reaction to speak about platforms—have we got enough of them and so forth? That is important, and we do no doubt face some challenges, but it is also about capabilities I go back to the fact that the character of war is changing. We are in constant conflict and competition. Why bother invading or, indeed, attacking a country when it is possible to digitally impose problems for any town, city or community from afar, through a laptop? Elections are being interfered with, and there is not even an international organisation that countries can go to and say, "My election has been interfered with by another state. Please can you take action?" The second issue is to do with the rise of China. It has a President who has got the job for life, and in our lifetime China will become more dominant economically, technologically and militarily than the United States. It is setting its own rules on how it does business, which poses some huge challenges for us. We need to have an adult conversation with China to better understand it and ask, "What are the rules that we should be following?" We talk about the erosion of the rules-based order, but who is willing to step forward and say, "I’m going to challenge that—I’m going to defend the rules-based order or upgrade those rules, because they are out of date"? Let us not forget that many of them were created in the Bretton Woods conversations after the second world war. China was excluded, and it reminds us of that all the time. It needs to be included in a conversation with international organisations, whether it be the UN or the OECD, so that the rules and standards that we follow are observed, because they have not been China is doing its own thing, and we see that in the big debate we have just had over Huawei. Whether it is Huawei, Tencent or China Telecom, all those companies are obliged to provide sensitive information to the state. We do not know the relationship between Huawei and the Chinese army. We have no idea what the intelligence services do with that information. That is why concern has been expressed vividly in this House about the relationship that we have chosen for our 5G roll-out We were not in the room when that decision was made in the National Security Council. Experts are there to give the Prime Minister advice. My message to the Government is: we have taken that decision, but can we put a time limit on our use of Huawei or, indeed, any Chinese companies? Can we develop our own western capability, so that we can wean ourselves off the use of Chinese operations? We cannot predict the security that we will require in the future, or even today.
Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Tobias Martin Ellwood (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is right, and I pay tribute to him for his knowledge, expertise and desire to educate the rest of us on the importance of what China is doing. There is a lot of duality in what China provides. It is providing some of the greenest capabilities in the world, but it is investing more in coal—it is building hundreds more coal-fired power stations at the very time when we need to wean ourselves off coal Militarily, I am also concerned. China’s space budget alone is £7 billion a year. Twenty years ago, its military budget was the same as ours. Today, it is five times that amount. Its navy grows the size of our Navy every single year. Those are my concerns in the longer term, and that is why we need an adult conversation with China, to work out what international rules we should be following Finally, I turn to the review that we will conduct. This is a pivotal moment for the UK to recognise and take stock of the threats that we face. We need a sober assessment of how the world is changing and an honest review of our own capabilities. Our battle tank is 20 years old; it needs an upgrade. Our aircraft carriers are fantastic, but no further investment in the Navy means that the rest of the surface fleet has been depleted. In the Gulf war, we had 36 fast-jet squadrons; today we have six. We need confirmation of our capabilities and our aspirations. What role do we seek to play on the international stage? We then need to commit to what is needed to get there, which will require an increase in our defence budget. We need to upgrade if we want to play that role.
Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Julian Murray Lewis (Conservative, Centre-right): May I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend on succeeding me as Chair of the Defence Committee? I thank him belatedly for the courage he showed when, as a Defence Minister, he argued at the Dispatch Box that we needed to spend more on defence. I urge him, in what I can assure him is an influential new role for him, to make sure that the new combined defence review takes place before, and not after, the comprehensive spending round. Otherwise, the same thing will happen that happened with the national security capability review, and there will be a fight between the intelligence services on the one hand and conventional forces on the other.
Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Tobias Martin Ellwood (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for my right hon. Friend’s kind comments, and I look forward to a smooth handover. I have a lot to learn from him, and he has done a great job as Chair. He makes a valid point: if the review is to be a fair assessment of our capabilities, we must ensure that it is not tied down by the limitations of any Budget I conclude by saying how passionate I am about defence, and I am delighted to take on the role of Chair of the Committee. I want to make it clear: we are managing the threats we face at the moment, but they are getting bigger and more complex, and we need to upgrade our capabilities. I believe we can win the argument for further investment if we take the nation and Parliament with us. Potholes and the NHS get more money because this place makes the noise. I will lead the charge to educate as many people as possible and say, "This is what we should be doing with our armed forces. This is how we can stand up on the international stage. This is what we must do to lead in an uncertain world." That is what Britain should be doing in the future.
Global Britain — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Robert Alexander Stewart (Conservative, Centre-right): On soft influence, when my hon. Friend and I, and other hon. Members, go abroad, perhaps in uniform, we are very well received in large parts of the world. One very important instrument for our soft influence is using our military academies to educate people, particularly from the middle east, but anywhere—for example, Kazakhstan.
War Widows’ Pension Scheme — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
Julian Murray Lewis (Conservative, Centre-right): May I just say that it is typical of my right hon. Friend, a former Secretary of State for Defence, to make sure that she was present today, as she notified me she would be, to make that very point? Indeed, as I would have expected, she goes to the heart of the matter. As we will hear later, what really needs to be done is to stop looking at this award as the award of a pension or a benefit when in reality it is meant to be recognition of and compensation for a sacrifice, which should be untouchable under any circumstances In fact, however, that is not the case because, as Judith Thompson, the commissioner, spelled out at the time: "If your spouse died or left Military or War Service before 31 March 1973 and you also receive the War Pension Scheme Supplementary Pension you keep your War Widow’s Pension for life." So if it is before 1973, they are okay. She went on: "If you were widowed after 5 April 2005 and receive Survivors Guaranteed Income Payment from the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme you keep your War Widow’s Pension for life." In between, however, we have this cohort—now reduced to between 200 and 300—of war widows who lost the pension under a change in the rules and have not had it reinstated. I said in that earlier debate that that basically created a perverse incentive for people who, by definition, have already suffered the greatest trauma and tragedy, to part from the person with whom they have found renewed happiness, and go through a charade of this sort if they wish their pension to be permanently reinstated At that time, the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), who sat on the Defence Committee on behalf of the Democratic Unionist party, pointed out an additional perversity, which was that widows of members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who served and died alongside members of the Ulster Defence Regiment and other regiments, had had the issue resolved locally in Northern Ireland. Because members of the Ulster Defence Regiment were in the Army, which is covered by defence and not a devolved matter, their widows had not had that issue resolved, and were still being denied the reinstatement of their war widow’s pension I then read extracts from five of seven testimonies—that was all I had time for—from war widows who explained what this issue meant to them. I shall now abbreviate those testimonies, but I urge anyone who is interested in reading the full account of what those five widows had to say to look at the speech from, I believe, November 2018, which can easily be found in the appropriate section of my website—[Interruption.]
War Widows’ Pension Scheme — House of Commons, 2020-01-30
Topic: Defense
John Luther Mercer (Conservative, Centre-right): Let me be clear with the House, the War Widows’ Association and my right hon. Friend. No one, least of all me, underestimates the sacrifice of these individuals who have lost their spouses on operations. I am determined to continue these conversations so that we can fulfil the part of the armed forces covenant that talks about the special recognition we give to the bereaved. I am happy to continue meeting my right hon. Friend to find a way forward Question put and agreed to.
Iran — House of Commons, 2020-01-13
Topic: Defense
Robert Butler (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my right hon. Friend agree that an extremely serious issue we now face is the safety of our armed forces, who have been described quite disgracefully by a senior commander in the Quds force as potentially "collateral damage" in attacks on the US military?
Britain in the World — House of Commons, 2020-01-13
Topic: Defense
James Whiteside Gray (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my right hon. Friend not agree with me that there have been many security and defence reviews over the years and they have all been hampered by one thing in particular, which is that they happened at precisely the same moment as a comprehensive spending review? I very much welcome his announcement of this very extensive review—it is the right time to do it—but does he not agree that it must be done independently of the Treasury? We must decide what Britain is for and what assets we need to achieve that, and then only subsequently—a year later—should the Treasury become involved.
Britain in the World — House of Commons, 2020-01-13
Topic: Defense
Julian Murray Lewis (Conservative, Centre-right): In support of what my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) has said, may I remind the Foreign Secretary that, in 2017-18, we had a national security capability review that sought to look at both security and defence together, but it was so limited by having to be financially or fiscally neutral that it meant that extra resources for, for example, cyber-warfare would be granted only at the cost of making cuts in, for example, the Royal Marines? That is no way to conduct a review—to play off one necessary part, say security, against another necessary part, such as defence.
Britain in the World — House of Commons, 2020-01-13
Topic: Defense
Dominic Rennie Raab (Conservative, Centre-right): I think my right hon. Friend makes an important point, although at the same time we need to be mindful of the overarching financial parameters that any Government—any responsible Government—are going to be within if we are to make credible investment decisions. Certainly, on the issue of cyber and its being somehow nudged out of focus or set up as a zero-sum game with troops, I can assure him that that will not be the case. Cyber increasingly plays an important role not just in our security, but in our ability to project our foreign policy.
Britain in the World — House of Commons, 2020-01-13
Topic: Defense
Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative, Centre-right): This is on the same theme. It is my right hon. Friend’s Department that has suffered the worst cuts over the last period because it has been an unprotected Department. What we must do if we are to direct defence, development and the intelligent services in the right direction is to have the capacity within his Department to do that. Will he ensure that he fights very hard for the necessary resources to be able to recreate the capacity of a Rolls-Royce Department of State?
Britain in the World — House of Commons, 2020-01-13
Topic: Defense
Julian Murray Lewis (Conservative, Centre-right): It was genuinely a pleasure to hear the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith) express himself in such fluent and consensual terms. The fact that he says his party is willing to agree with Government Members does not come as a surprise to me, because I know from my experience on the last two iterations of the Defence Committee, where I had the pleasure of serving alongside two Members of the SNP, that that is exactly true. That is how it was that, on a cross-party basis, all three parties represented on the Committee were able to agree at quite an early stage that defence expenditure is too low, and that something in the order of 3% of GDP is a more realistic target if Britain is to hold her head up in the world with safety Before I develop that theme, however, I want to pick up one point from the excellent speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), and that is his reference to the BBC, in which he concentrated on the World Service. In about 2011, when the then Sir Ming Campbell and I were both members of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I remember that we learned with alarm of the coalition Government’s plan to stop the ring-fenced funding not only of the BBC World Service but of the vital BBC Monitoring Service based at Caversham Park. We expressed the view at the time that the result of putting that funding on the shoulders of the BBC in return for allowing the BBC to have its usual requested rise in the licence fee would come back to bite us—and so it did, because both those budgets were badly squeezed, and I think I am right in saying that in the end the Government felt it necessary to restore separate funding for the BBC World Service, but sadly not for the BBC Monitoring Service.