argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Criminal Justice Review: Response to Rape — House of Commons, 2021-05-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Diana Ruth Johnson (Labour, Centre-left): Can the Minister tell the House whether the rape review looks at the shockingly low figures for convictions of men who rape women and girls who have been trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation; and will this be addressed in any action plan, including the need for new legislation to protect women and girls, and to hold men accountable for their actions?
Criminal Justice Review: Response to Rape — House of Commons, 2021-05-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Ruth Lorraine Jones (Labour, Centre-left): Dame Vera Baird, the Victims’ Commissioner, has stated that the Government’s rape review team "took the surprising decision not to seek the views of those who really matter—rape survivors." Will the Minister confirm today that the upcoming end-to-end review did consult survivors of rape and sexual violence? If it did not, how can he assure the House that the review is in fact end-to-end without its speaking to those directly impacted?
Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Clive Stanley Efford (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Minister for that answer, but I have cases of people who worked for the Afghan supreme court, the Afghan Government or the Afghan armed forces. Clearly, they assisted in our operations in Afghanistan. Surely the Minister accepts that these people are at severe risk and should qualify under category 1 of ARAP, yet they have been refused. In the figures he has just cited, how many people who clearly qualify for ARAP have been turned down?
Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Stephen James Morgan (Labour, Centre-left): There is increasing confusion about the Government’s administration of the ARAP scheme. In response to a written question, the Minister said that 1,194 locally employed staff had been relocated by the end of August, yet in a further answer he suggested that only 850 applications had been processed in the same timeframe. This means that at least 344 people are unaccounted for. The Prime Minister says the figure is 311. Will the Minister, therefore, tell the House here and now how many applications were received between April and August, how many were accepted and how many have been left behind?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Energy
Darren Paul Jones (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful to the Secretary of State for an advance copy of his statement. There are, of course, a whole range of important questions to be answered to ensure that we do not face similar energy crises in the future. The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee will be asking Ministers to answer those questions over the coming days and weeks, but may I ask the Secretary of State a specific question today? Can he guarantee that the warm home discount rebate will continue to be paid to consumers who are forced to change energy supplier?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Energy
Stephanie Louise Peacock (Labour, Centre-left): The right hon. Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) referred to our "tiny capacity". The UK cut its strategic gas storage to 1.7% of annual demand, when a former Government adviser suggested that it should be closer to 25%. In the light of that, why did the Government allow the Rough storage facility off the Yorkshire coast to close without taking action?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Environment
Justin Piers Richard Madders (Labour, Centre-left): CF Fertilisers, based in my constituency, is one of the plants that has had to close down in the light of cost pressures. There are obviously many impacts on consumers as a result of this decision, but the employment prospects of my constituents are at the forefront of my mind at the moment. I am pleased to hear that the Secretary of State met the company yesterday. I wrote to the Department over a month ago pointing out the need for urgent action on the cost pressures the company was facing, not just in terms of global gas prices but a number of other factors. I hope that discussions prove fruitful, and not just for my constituents’ jobs. We do not want to get into a situation where we are relying on importing carbon dioxide from other sources, because that will not help us to reach net zero and will put us risk of other fluctuations in world prices.
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Energy
Stephen Nathan Kinnock (Labour, Centre-left): This crisis is causing steelmakers across the country to suspend their operations during periods of the day when the costs of power are peaking at thousands of pounds per megawatt-hour. Can the Secretary of State assure the House that he is engaging with the steel industry to ensure that this crisis does not end up crippling our steel industry, which of course underpins our entire manufacturing sector?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Energy
Alexander Cunningham (Labour, Centre-left): I, too, am grateful to the Secretary of State for his statement, and specifically for meeting representatives of CF Fertilisers, which has stopped production in my constituency, with a knock-on effect on industries needing the carbon dioxide that it generates as a by-product. He will remember my many meetings, letters, parliamentary questions and points made in the House about the perfect storm brewing for firms such as CF Fertilisers—rising fuel prices, a bizarre funding mechanism from Ofgem for gas transportation costs, and the lack of appropriate support for energy-intensive industries to mitigate high carbon emission prices. He says that talks are ongoing, but can he say a little more about what he is doing to get CF Fertilisers producing as soon as possible, and when we can expect policies to make our energy and related costs competitive against Europe?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Energy
Zarah Sultana (Labour, Centre-left): The decision to raise the energy price cap to its highest-ever level will push half a million people into fuel poverty next month. At the same time, an additional 800,000 people will be pushed into poverty by the £20 a week cut to universal credit. On top of that, the national insurance hike will hit low-paid workers the hardest. These are political choices, so rather than relentlessly attacking the working class, will the Minister avert a worsening winter poverty crisis by cancelling the cut to universal credit, raising taxes on the richest and bringing energy companies into public ownership and running them for the public good, not private profit, to slash bills and cut carbon?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Environment
Clive Stanley Efford (Labour, Centre-left): The Secretary of State said we have to wait for his plan to find out what he will do to retrofit buildings and reduce dependence on carbon fuels, but local authorities across the country are way ahead of the Government. My local authority in Greenwich is experimenting with air-source and ground-source heat pumps. When he produces his report, does he think local authorities will be front and centre in creating local plans so that we can drill down into local communities to bring about the change we need to achieve zero carbon?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Agriculture
Stephen James McCabe (Labour, Centre-left): The Secretary of State says he is working on contingencies, but the meat industry says its CO2 supplies will be depleted within a fortnight. Is he sure that pork and poultry will not be the next items to disappear from our supermarket shelves?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Rachael Helen Maskell (Labour, Centre-left): The question my constituents will have today is what the cost will be to them. As we know that serious costs are coming on to some of the poorest people in our constituencies, will the Secretary of State commit to speaking to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions about cancelling the cut to universal credit and will he speak to the Chancellor about putting additional measures in place to avert fuel and food poverty?
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Government Operations
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): Can I just say that the ministerial code says that Ministers are answerable to this Chamber, not to anybody outside? It is about being here. I do not think this is acceptable. It is continual. I thought we had got the message through to the Prime Minister when I had a meeting with him, but it is obviously not reaching Secretaries of State and Ministers If you want to make some statement afterwards, Secretary of State, I hope you have it covered by somebody making a statement at the same time. This House deserves its respect. People here, on all sides, are elected to hear from you and to be told here first, not to be told second hand by the media and that somebody might come to the House tomorrow if they feel like it. What would have happened if it had been Thursday? It is not right, it is not acceptable and we are going to have to get this right. I am telling you now: I will begin to change the course of what you think the direction is.
UK Gas Market — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Government Operations
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): I go out of my way to ensure that this House hears, but I cannot work on my own; it works two ways. I am saying to you that this House needs to hear. Ofgem is very important, but it is not elected. The people here are elected to serve constituents. The ministerial code needs to be sent to every Minister and every Secretary of State, with the point about where responsibility lies underlined.
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Government Operations
Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (Labour, Centre-left): I have to say that I enjoy Mondays, but this has been a bad one. I do not like being tested Before I call the Transport Secretary to make a statement, I want to put on record my disappointment and frustration that, despite repeatedly making it clear that Ministers should make important statements to this House first, the media apparently knew the contents of the Transport Secretary’s policy announcement at the end of last week, before Members of this House. The Government’s own ministerial code says that that must not happen. It is not acceptable for statements to be made to the media before being made to elected Members of this House. It defies belief that the Government only decided the policy on Thursday night after the rise of the House. In other words, this statement should have been made last week before the media were told I have raised this before with the Government and with the Transport Secretary. I sincerely hope that I will not have to do so again. In any event, there should be no doubt that, if the media continue to hear about important policy announcements before this House, I will ensure that hon. and right hon. Members will have every opportunity to hold Ministers to account I do not want to have to do this, but if we have to grant an urgent question on the areas of those Departments that continue to make statements outside this House, I will have to come to a view that something must be coming before we are told. That is a silly position in which to get ourselves. The Government need to get their business through, but the Government also have to respect the Members who are elected here. This is the second time. It is not personal against the Transport Secretary. We need to get our act together. We need to show the due respect that Members deserve. They matter to me. They matter to the constituents. They should hear it first, not the media, and it should not be trailed elsewhere. In the end, constituents knock on the doors of Members, not the Secretary of State’s.
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Foreign Trade
Mohammed Afzal Khan (Labour, Centre-left): It took half a dozen letters, two ministerial meetings, bilateral talks and endless questions, but as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Britain-Pakistan trade and tourism, I am pleased that the Government finally listened to calls to remove Pakistan from the red list Last year, Virgin Atlantic began running direct flights from Manchester airport to Islamabad, much to the delight of my constituents. However, this route has now been suspended for months. Given that Ministers in this Government are always so keen to highlight their pursuit of levelling up, what support is being given to regional airports such as Manchester to reopen important routes for the benefit of local people?
International Travel — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: International Affairs
Imran Hussain (Labour, Centre-left): Many people continue to feel that the decision to keep Pakistan and Bangladesh on the red list for longer was based on politics not science. If the Secretary of State denies that, let him bring forward the evidence The Secretary of State referred to quarantine hotels. Many of my constituents, including one with kidney failure, another who had suffered a heart attack and another who was at risk of miscarrying, along with others suffering from serious health issues, were denied exemptions against the medical evidence and professional opinion of their doctors. Will the Secretary of State therefore launch an urgent inquiry as to why those appalling decisions, which put many of my constituents lives at risk, were allowed to happen?
Points of Order — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Government Operations
Gillian Furniss (Labour, Centre-left): On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I ask your advice regarding the Elections Bill, which, as you know, is probably one of the most important Bills to come through Parliament in the past 50 years or more. I act as the Opposition Whip on the Bill, and it has been very difficult to sort things out with it, particularly now. The Bill Committee has already had four evidence sessions and we are due to start line-by-line scrutiny on Wednesday. We learned over the weekend not only that the Minister and the Government Whip have been moved to a different Department, but that the Cabinet Office will no longer have responsibility for the Bill. I ask what advice you can give me to ensure that we have the appropriate pieces of the jigsaw in place for the Bill Committee to sit on Wednesday and begin going through the Bill.
Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Mathew Richard Allen Rodda (Labour, Centre-left): I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, as I understood that the Government had frozen the housing allowance. I look forward to discussing that further in this debate The Government have left it late to do the right thing and end the cut, but it is not too late. There is clearly a strength of feeling on both sides of the House on the universal credit cut and the state pension uplift. I think we agree that trust is important and is the basis of good government. The Government will be letting down pensioners and the country if they plough on with these unfair changes without any explanation or reassurance about the future and without any assessment of the impact on many pensioners. We have now seen three successive breaches of trust in just a few weeks, and the last two were only days apart. Trust in this Government has fallen dramatically, and it will fall even further if they fail to listen We are making a very important decision today, but the Government can still correct some of their mistakes if they listen to their own Back Benchers as well as to the advice of the Opposition.
Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Stephen Creswell Timms (Labour, Centre-left): The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important point that I agree with. It is a vital fact, often not understood, that universal credit is an in-work benefit as well as an out-of-work benefit. I think that 40% of universal credit claimants are in work. We have taken evidence in the Select Committee from working parents receiving universal credit who are having quite a hard time at the moment and are going to have a very hard time indeed if they lose the £86 a month that they will if the uplift is removed The cost of keeping the uplift, the figure that we are given, is £6 billion a year, but—the hon. Member for Amber Valley drew attention to this in the Select Committee last week—that figure was calculated when lockdown was still in place and job vacancies were much lower, so presumably the cost would be less if the uplift was kept The Bill misses the chance—the Liberal Democrats’ reasoned amendment gives us the opportunity to reflect on this—to address this very serious flaw in the Government’s current intentions. We are heading into an extremely difficult period for both working families and unemployed families who depend on universal credit, because of price rises across the board.
Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Michael Whitley (Labour, Centre-left): I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. Across the country, the British people are waking up to the fact that a Tory promise is an empty promise. From tax hikes on the lowest earners to drastic reductions in our food and environmental standards, and now the triple lock on pensions, this Government have made it absolutely clear that their manifesto commitments just are not worth the paper they are written on This latest U-turn could hardly have come at a worse time. Having endured immense suffering during the pandemic, retired people are now being forced to grapple with the fallout of the Government’s incompetence, from rising inflation to food shortages, and now we have soaring energy prices just as we enter the coldest months of the year. Pensioners are being told they must survive on the lowest state pensions in all of Europe The last Labour Government proudly set themselves the goal of ending pensioner poverty in our country, and when they left office, the number of retired people in poverty was at a historic low. After more than a decade of Conservative Governments, nearly a fifth of pensioners are languishing in poverty, with women and black and minority ethnic pensioners disproportionately affected. As the nights draw in and temperatures begin to fall, many older people in my constituency of Birkenhead will be forced to choose between putting a hot meal on the table and heating their homes. As they do, they will undoubtedly be asking themselves how they can ever trust this Government again The Secretary of State has justified this measure as a temporary response to the extraordinary conditions created by the pandemic and said that it is impossible to accurately estimate underlying earnings growth. She must now commit to publishing the advice she has been given on this issue Millions of people across our country are filled with a sense of dread at the prospect of the coming winter, from overworked and underpaid healthcare workers to families struggling to get by on universal credit. Pensioners are not being and will not be spared from a cost of living crisis that is engulfing our poorest and most vulnerable communities, but that will be nothing compared with the suffering that will be inflicted on retired people in winters to come if the triple lock is not reinstated again in 2023 As Age UK has warned, we have simply no hope of tackling pensioner poverty without an absolute commitment to the triple lock. As many of my retired constituents look fearfully to the future, I call on the Secretary of State to reaffirm her commitment to the triple lock and to guarantee to the House that this Bill will not be the first step in doing away with this vital safeguard altogether.
Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jonathan Neil Reynolds (Labour, Centre-left): Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me to close the Bill’s Second Reading for the Opposition. We have heard many good speeches, but, before I turn to them, I want first to deal with the central case that the Government have made for the legislation As my hon. Friend the Member for Reading East (Matt Rodda) set out in opening for Labour, Opposition Members accept that there has been an anomaly in the earnings data due to the pandemic, and we recognise that a solution is required. I have listened carefully to passionate speeches from colleagues across the House, but I simply do not believe that anyone in the UK believes that wages are rising at 8.3% in real terms across the board. If I were to put that case to my constituents, I think they would very much question my judgment. However, as we said since the announcement was made, the duty is on the Government to explain why their preferred solution—a move to uprating by inflation or 2.5%—is the right one. That duty is particularly important because the triple lock was a Conservative manifesto commitment and, as many hon. Members pointed out, the announcement to break it has come after a series of decisions to break other Conservative manifesto commitments. It is therefore reasonable that the burden of proof lies on the Government and that the threshold for support should be high We have had some valuable contributions. The hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) was right to highlight the trust in the Government stemming from the decisions of the last few months. He was also right to point out figures that show that the number of pensioners living in poverty taken by the measurement that he indicated—those living with an income below 60% of the median after their housing costs—is rising. Given that we know overall spending on pensions is going up every year by quite considerable numbers, why are we also seeing that rise in poverty? That is a question for us all and one on which we may need more time in future The hon. Member favours auto-enrolment, and I very much agree. The question is about how to do that in a post-pandemic environment. He will understand, however, that I cannot agree when he posits that Scottish independence might be the solution to some of those problems, because an independent Scotland would clearly face some difficult economic decisions in its own right. I do not think it is necessarily helpful to put that across.
Social Security (Up-rating of Benefits) Bill — House of Commons, 2021-09-20
Topic: Social Welfare
Stephen Creswell Timms (Labour, Centre-left): I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way, and I am delighted he is still in his post. He talked about pensioner poverty, but rather idiosyncratically, he is using the absolute measure. The much more widely used measure is the relative measure of poverty, on which the analysis of Independent Age is based, and on that much more widely used measure, pensioner poverty is of course going up.