argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Covid-19: International Response — House of Lords, 2020-05-18
Topic: International Affairs
Andrew Robathan (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, in my brief two minutes I will look at the situation in some countries abroad and the impact of the lockdown, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie. We have heard about China from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and my noble friend Lord Blencathra. It appears that the virus started in November last year—but, of course, nobody knows at all. Totalitarian regimes such as China, Russia and Iran do not let us know what is actually happening there. There is a lot of fake news and a lack of knowledge. I am afraid that—as the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, pointed out—with deficient medical services we do not know what is happening in Africa either Will the lockdown prove to have been futile? Without a vaccine, will the virus resurge? Nobody knows who has had it. I know so many people who think they have had the virus. We heard an interesting example from the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso. I have another example, among many others. An overweight 60 year-old friend went into hospital for kidney stones. He was tested, as everybody was, and was told he had the virus without any symptoms. The testing is not entirely reliable anyway According to the figures, perhaps 316,000 deaths around the world so far have been linked to CV-19. This is awful—every one is tragic—but it is not callous to point out that some 60 million people will die anyway around the world this year. I suggest that the lockdown, both nationally and internationally, may prove much more damaging in terms of poverty, civil rights—as we have just heard—and death than just taking sensible precautions. We seem to have suspended our critical faculties. We should all remember the consequences of the great depression 90 years ago.
Covid-19: International Response — House of Lords, 2020-05-18
Topic: Environment
Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on introducing this debate. I want to focus on two aspects. First, I co-chair the All-Party Water Group. I was particularly interested in my noble friend’s reference to DfID’s joint funding with Unilever of sanitation, hygiene and water resources. Will she assure us that the UK and other nations will look to work more closely with multinational companies, particularly those such as Nestlé. Along with other colleagues from both Houses, I had the privilege a number of years ago to visit the important work that it is doing in Africa—in South Africa, in particular—through EcoLink. This virus will thrive without proper sanitation. A proper supply of water, particularly hot water, to developing countries is especially important in this regard I urge my noble friend through her international counterparts, in particular at the summit that we will chair on 4 June, to make sure that we understand the origins of this virus so that we do not have a similar virus or the same virus in the future. If it is traced to dubious animal markets in China, will she use her good offices to ensure that those markets are closed down and will not give rise to a future virus?
Covid-19: Housing — House of Lords, 2020-05-18
Topic: Transportation
Stephen Greenhalgh (Conservative, Centre-right): The information that we have in the department is that no Section 114 notices are imminent. We need to recognise that this Government have provided around £20 billion of investment into local services in just two months. That includes two tranches of £1.6 billion to ease demand pressures on local councils and around £5 billion of cash-flow measures, as well as other measures to support wider transport issues, including the recent bailout of Transport for London. I note the noble Baroness’s concerns, but at the moment we have no evidence that councils are about to go to the wall.
Covid-19: Housing — House of Lords, 2020-05-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Stephen Greenhalgh (Conservative, Centre-right): I understand that the proposals do extend to the vulnerable, but it is their decision as to whether they go ahead. However, I will write to the noble Lord and place a copy of my specific answer in the Library.
Lammy Review — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Government Operations
Richard Keen (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, we responded to the Lammy review by publishing in December 2017 our undertakings at implementation. Where a recommendation could not be implemented in full or as set out in the review, alternative approaches have been sought to achieve the same aim. We were clear then as to how we intended to proceed with implementation and we have been consistent and open in reporting against the actions we committed to take in a report in 2018, and more recently in a report of February 2020. We keep under review the report’s aims and make progress on a wide range of areas—indeed, in some areas beyond the Lammy recommendations. But I accept that there is a great deal more to do.
Lammy Review — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Richard Keen (Conservative, Centre-right): Clearly, these issues are under continuous review, but we have a particular concern over knife crime and we are bringing forward legislation on serious violence that will oblige responsible bodies in local areas to create a comprehensive plan tailored to their area. Stop and search is just one approach and we expect plans to be drawn up on a wider crime reduction basis.
Lammy Review — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Richard Keen (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I do not accept that the MoJ has been dilatory in this respect. As the noble Lord’s question implicitly acknowledges, the Lammy review was necessary. We are still taking forward the recommendation on prisons and prisoners, in particular the position of BAME prisoners. Indeed, that is also reflected in the steps we have taken in recruitment.
Lammy Review — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Law and Crime
Richard Keen (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, the CPS in particular is fully committed to ensuring that its decisions are free from racial bias. In that context, it is currently investigating a limited number of offences where review showed evidence of disproportionality in charging. It continues with such quality assurance decisions to check for racial bias. However, there are considerable practical difficulties in pursuing this and the CPS has to act on material passed to it by the police. This has to be undertaken across the entire criminal justice system.
Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Transportation
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): The Government are to be congratulated on these regulations. As the Minister said, they open the possibility of people creating comprehensive apps to enable bus travel to become as plannable and easy as train travel is currently. This will be a considerable advance as we look towards a multimodal, well-integrated, low-carbon transport future I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister could enlarge a bit on how these regulations will apply to demand-led bus systems—those designed to meet patchy demand, going to places only when they are required to, having variable routes to meet demand—as are being developed by TfL in some places on the outskirts of London, and contemplated in other places. For locations such as Eastbourne, where I live, where there are diffuse, tortuous estates of nice houses with lots of gardens around them, full of old people, it is really difficult to maintain an economical bus system on the standard model of a timetable and fixed stops. Something much more flexible is needed, and I very much hope that these regulations will not impede that I hope that the regulations will also not impede the use of frequency-based services, where you have services based on timetables, to which the operators tend to be held and penalised if they do not keep to them. But if you want to encourage multimodal transport, and therefore to be able to drop a bicycle or a mobility scooter on to the back of a bus when needed, you need something where the operator is held to frequency and not to timetable, and I hope that that will fit within these regulations I also very much hope that my noble friend will allow me to quote her when I write to Nick Gibb, saying that if the Government are heading in this direction it is high time that we look at schools admissions information and enable open data for that in the way that we have done here.
Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Transportation
Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on introducing these regulations, which I warmly welcome in principle. My questions concern how they will work in practice—in particular, in rural areas. My information is that 51% of all bus journeys take place in London, where, as my noble friend said, you might have to wait between two and 20 minutes for a bus. In rural areas, you might have to wait two hours, which is unacceptable. Is one reason for the need for the regulations that currently fewer than 50% of the 87 local authorities in England provide real-time information for the bus system and there is no national database for fares information Will the Minister also respond to my concern that most passengers who use rural buses are on concessionary fares? Concessionary fares are most welcome but, when they were rolled out from a local/regional system to a national system, this left many local authorities, including North Yorkshire and others, cash-strapped as they had more people willing to use the service from outside than were contributing to it in the area The Transport Secretary is custodian of this digital service. Can the Minister explain the implications of that and where this service will be publicly available? Does one have to use the app? I agree with the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, that Movia, in Copenhagen, works very well indeed and provides information on not just buses but train connections. If, for example, you are connecting through York to the outlying villages, it is extremely important to know if your train is delayed as that might impact on the time the bus leaves Although I welcome the emphasis on buses, I think it realistic to say that the Government’s announcement on e-scooters will not bring any benefits to North Yorkshire. What are the cost implications for bus operators? Will there be any implications for local authorities, which are extremely cash-strapped, with very few staffing or financial reserves at the moment? Can the Minister put my mind at rest that these regulations will work as well in rural areas, where buses are few and far between, as they are currently deemed to do in urban areas such as London?
Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Transportation
David John Maclean (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I join my noble friend Lord Holmes in paying tribute to those unsung heroes: the bus drivers, taxi drivers, lorry drivers and shelf-fillers who have kept the country going during Covid-19 I totally support these regulations—they seem like a jolly good idea, creating a sort of Trainline.com for buses. My interest today is in what the Government will do with the information they collect. It seems that they will put all the information on a website, but will they develop any apps for users? According to my understanding of the regulations, anyone else can take that information and invent an app, so long as they credit the Government as the source of the data. Is that correct? Are there any circumstances in which the department might wish to develop its own app, albeit that that seems a risky policy these days? When does my noble friend the Minister expect the Government’s website service to start? Will the Government wait until they have every bit of information from every operator, or will they kick off when they have, say, 50% One can buy train tickets from the train company or from Trainline. Would there be any bar to an app provider selling bus tickets? With regard to the Secretary of State’s liability, I know that the app developer has to state that he accepts that the Secretary of State cannot guarantee the integrity and quality of the information, but will that hold up in court? We know that lawyers are now piling in by their thousands to sue over Covid-19, and to sue for any excuse. Could an app developer sue by alleging that the department was, say, too slow in putting timetable changes on to the website? Suppose an app provider breaches some of the conditions in Clause 16: what can the department do to stop him or strike down his app? I cannot see any provisions for that The review period is every five years. I suggest that the first review should be after two years, with subsequent reviews at five-yearly intervals Finally, I have a couple of asides, prompted by what the Minister has said. She said that missing a bus may result in a delay of 20 minutes, or two hours in Yorkshire. Up here in Cumbria, if you miss the bus you wait another seven days until the next one comes along. I am not surprised that 51% of UK buses are in London. Every day when I was in London, I would see hundreds of empty, diesel-polluting buses clogging the streets. The boast that there is a London bus every 12 minutes reminds us just how mollycoddled Londoners are and how much the rest of the country needs to be levelled up. That said, from what I saw of the carnage in Paris the last time I was there, I suppose that diesel buses will kill fewer people than the e-scooters when they start this weekend.
Public Service Vehicles (Open Data) (England) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Transportation
Charlotte Vere (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in today’s short debate for their generally warm welcome for these regulations, and for the bus open data service as a whole. I will respond to as many points as I possibly can in the allotted time, but I will of course write on the points which—[Connection lost.]
Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Energy
Michael Morris (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I welcome this SI and say well done to the Government for anticipating this need. If they had not done that, there could have been problems with the continuity and reliability of supply, and it is absolutely crucial at this difficult time that we do not go through any of the old problems we had in the past. As an aside, I recently had no telephone, no wi-fi and indeed no water supply, but thankfully they are all back on again now I have a few questions. First, what consultation was there with the key renewable companies over this arrangement and were any problems raised by them? Secondly, following the speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, does Ofgem fit into this anywhere? She is right in the sense that we know that, domestically, demand has gone up because everyone has been locked down and stuck at home, and we have all been using our computers far more than we would normally do. Thirdly, some might say that this action is undermining efficiency and making it a little too easy for companies that ought to be able to handle the toing and froing of challenges. However, maybe looking at the detail of the SI, the Minister will tell me that paragraph 7.5 of the Explanatory Memorandum answers that question What exactly is the estimated cost to the Government through this transitional loan? Presumably it is a cost of lost interest, and is that somehow rolled up at the end of the process? Finally, as someone who was a very junior Minister in Northern Ireland, I am not sure why Northern Ireland is not involved. Is it because Stormont was not sitting and this came under Stormont, or is the infrastructure in Northern Ireland different from the rest of the United Kingdom?
Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Energy
Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend the Minister on bringing forward these regulations for our consideration this afternoon. My first question is not dissimilar to that asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, and I am grateful to her for the research she has clearly put into that. Paragraph 7.1 of the Explanatory Memorandum states this fairly complicated payments procedure and says at the end: "We expect that suppliers pass on the costs of these payments to their customers." As we know, while retail shops and business customers generally closed down, as they were told to do because of the Covid-19 virus—and it was absolutely right that they did so—that meant that everybody was working from home and the consumption of electricity and water went up incrementally. I am therefore concerned that this will be passed on to the domestic customer in what is a very grey area as regards transparency of payments Successive Governments have introduced renewable energy, and we as domestic customers pay handsomely for the privilege. However, the transparency of how we pay is indeed very opaque. Can my noble friend put my mind at rest as to how this increase will appear, and what role Ofcom will have in agreeing to this? Presumably Ofcom was consulted, and as the regulator it will have a view when it comes to sorting this out at the end of the next quarter or at the end of the financial year Finally, I do not quite understand the thinking behind why the agreement that the Government have entered into—between BEIS and the LCCC—is not part of our proceedings this afternoon. That would have been very helpful. I hope that my noble friend will agree to publish all the responses on the website, in the normal way.
Contracts for Difference (Electricity Supplier Obligations) (Amendment) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Energy
Timothy Kirkhope (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, the title of this statutory instrument is long and complex, but the issues are, I think, relatively simple. In order to encourage alternative or green suppliers of electricity, the levy on energy suppliers provides resources to support Contracts for Difference—or CfD—generators. So far so good. However, a combination of seasonal or weather-related issues plus Covid-19 issues has resulted in overall demand for electricity dipping substantially, creating a serious financial position for suppliers. Effectively, therefore, what is proposed is a loan of up to £100 million for the Low Carbon Contracts Company—the LCCC—so that the CfD generators can continue to receive the sums due under their respective contracts I therefore have several questions for my noble friend. First, I understand these government moneys are just loans that will be clawed back within a year. How are these loans to be secured and enforced, especially if the suppliers continue to have financial pressures? Secondly, to what extent should general energy prices have any effect in the next year? Are the contracts from the so-called difference auctions flexible in this regard? Does my noble friend understand that low energy prices give rise to the concern that the prices paid for the alternative suppliers are fixed at a much higher rate, especially if these low prices in the market continue, with a depressed economy, the Covid aftermath and resultant low demand Thirdly, the reference to "similar exceptional circumstances", allowing these measures to continue without any further parliamentary scrutiny by even secondary legislation, concerns me. Definitions such as this are imprecise; we need to be sure that they are not used in respect of only slight changes in energy prices, usage or climate variations. Can my noble friend describe what "exceptional circumstances" means? As this measure postpones the levy payments only for a year, and as the costs are ultimately borne by the consumer, can he advise us of the likelihood of a fresh price cap following a new Ofgem determination As noble Lords know, as the dispenser of the levy, the LCCC is established as an independent body. I hope, therefore, that this intervention by the Treasury with these loan moneys—for no doubt very merit-worthy reasons—will not affect that longer-term independence which I believe is so vital in these overall energy relationships.
Electricity Capacity (Amendment etc.) (Coronavirus) Regulations 2020 — House of Lords, 2020-07-02
Topic: Foreign Trade
Anne McIntosh (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these regulations and entirely endorse the reasons for them. He very kindly gave us the detailed background, particularly about the judgment by the European Court of Justice and the decision of the European Commission. I spent six very happy months as a stagiaire in DG4, which is now called DG Competition, becoming familiar with the anti-trust rules and regulations of European law, although I am less familiar with state aid, so I will put a question of principle to my noble friend. It is not dissimilar to that of the noble Lord, Lord Purvis. As we are leaving the European Union and will exit at the end of the transition phase on 31 December this year, that begs the question, what will be the future arrangements for such support being meted out under the regulations before us this afternoon? Which body will replace the European Commission as the regulator of these subsidies—as we are apparently going to call them in future—or state aid, going forward? Can he give the House an assurance this afternoon that his department and others will indeed be subject to overview and scrutiny in all these decisions? Can he confirm that it will be the Competition and Markets Authority I have a separate question that relates entirely to the regulations before us this afternoon. Can the Minister confirm that long-term STOR contract holders will be able to compete in the capacity market as a result of these regulations? Is he convinced that it is absolutely a good idea that they be included?