argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Accident and Emergency Departments — House of Commons, 2015-01-13
Topic: Health
Norman Peter Lamb (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): A range of factors is contributing to increased attendances. The ageing population means that, by the end of this Parliament, there will be nearly 1 million more over-65s than at the start. The urgent and emergency care review cited pressure on GP appointments and availability or awareness of alternatives as factors that might affect A and E attendances.
Accident and Emergency Departments — House of Commons, 2015-01-13
Topic: Health
Norman Peter Lamb (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The Nicholson challenge, which was published in the last year of the Labour Government, recognised that the whole system had to deliver efficiency savings, and I think that everyone understands that. But the answer to all of this is a significant shift of emphasis towards preventing ill health and preventing crises from occurring. Under the better care fund the NHS and the care system are for the first time being properly joined together.
Accident and Emergency Departments — House of Commons, 2015-01-13
Topic: Health
Norman Peter Lamb (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I understand that a meeting will take place very soon, and I certainly encourage my hon. Friend the hospitals Minister to ensure that he listens to the case being put by the hon. Gentleman and his colleagues this afternoon.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2015-01-13
Topic: Health
Questions: The Secretary of State will be aware that the London borough of Havering has the highest proportion of elderly people of all the London boroughs, but he may not know that the average age of an in-patient at Queen’s hospital is 86. Will he agree to look at the balance of future funding between acute care and community health care, so that elderly people can be supported at home and beds freed up for people waiting for acute operations?; The three GP surgeries in Chippenham were turned down by the Prime Minister’s challenge fund, despite developing imaginative plans to bring together all the town’s acute GP care at a new urgent care centre at Chippenham community hospital. They received no feedback, even from NHS England. Will the Secretary of State be more flexible when receiving further proposals from the doctors, who are, after all, very busy looking after their patients?; The Bournbrook Varsity medical centre is about to face a double-whammy financial crisis, as NHS England scraps its minimum practice income guarantee and forces it to switch from a personal medical services contract to a general medical services contract. Why should that excellent practice, which has done all that could be asked of it, and its patients be victimised because a high proportion of the patients are young students? Will the Secretary of State agree to look at this disaster immediately?; The recent extraordinary pressures on A and E in the north midlands underlined for me and my constituents the importance of returning the A and E at Stafford County hospital from 14 to 24-hour opening. Given that consultant-led maternity is due to transfer from Stafford to Stoke this week and the remaining serious emergency surgery next month, will my right hon. Friend set out what steps have been taken to ensure that the safety of my constituents and other users of the services is the top priority, and advise me whether he is confident in them?; Government-inflicted cuts on local government funding and subsequent reductions in adult social care services have increased the pressures of bed-blocking at University hospital Coventry, with a number of patients unable to be discharged as they wait for a nursing home place or a package of care in their own home. Does the Minister agree that this is a problem, and what steps has his Department taken to remedy it? Will he not do the Pontius Pilate act but take responsibility for his actions?
Norman Peter Lamb (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that what happens in social care has an impact on the health service, and the answer has to be to stop seeing them as two separate systems and to look at the whole health and care system. That is why the better care fund is such an incredibly important initiative, pooling a substantial sum of health and care funds, and it must go further so that we end up pooling the entire resource.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2015-01-13
Topic: Health
Questions: The Secretary of State will be aware that the London borough of Havering has the highest proportion of elderly people of all the London boroughs, but he may not know that the average age of an in-patient at Queen’s hospital is 86. Will he agree to look at the balance of future funding between acute care and community health care, so that elderly people can be supported at home and beds freed up for people waiting for acute operations?; The three GP surgeries in Chippenham were turned down by the Prime Minister’s challenge fund, despite developing imaginative plans to bring together all the town’s acute GP care at a new urgent care centre at Chippenham community hospital. They received no feedback, even from NHS England. Will the Secretary of State be more flexible when receiving further proposals from the doctors, who are, after all, very busy looking after their patients?; The Bournbrook Varsity medical centre is about to face a double-whammy financial crisis, as NHS England scraps its minimum practice income guarantee and forces it to switch from a personal medical services contract to a general medical services contract. Why should that excellent practice, which has done all that could be asked of it, and its patients be victimised because a high proportion of the patients are young students? Will the Secretary of State agree to look at this disaster immediately?; The recent extraordinary pressures on A and E in the north midlands underlined for me and my constituents the importance of returning the A and E at Stafford County hospital from 14 to 24-hour opening. Given that consultant-led maternity is due to transfer from Stafford to Stoke this week and the remaining serious emergency surgery next month, will my right hon. Friend set out what steps have been taken to ensure that the safety of my constituents and other users of the services is the top priority, and advise me whether he is confident in them?; Government-inflicted cuts on local government funding and subsequent reductions in adult social care services have increased the pressures of bed-blocking at University hospital Coventry, with a number of patients unable to be discharged as they wait for a nursing home place or a package of care in their own home. Does the Minister agree that this is a problem, and what steps has his Department taken to remedy it? Will he not do the Pontius Pilate act but take responsibility for his actions?; The last Government abolished community health councils, a truly independent health watchdog and voice for patients. Their replacement, the patient advice and liaison service, is not independent. Does the Minister agree that PALS must be made independent?
Norman Peter Lamb (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): PALS was not the direct replacement of community health councils; a different scheme was set up for the patient and public voice independent of hospitals. My hon. Friend raises important concerns about PALS and the Government are intent on looking at the service to ensure that it performs effectively for patients.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Andrew Henry George (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The hon. Gentleman is making a strong case. Has he made any estimate of the savings that might be made if the House were to vote for the motion and the Government decided to follow that as a policy, bearing in mind that the Government might still wish to proceed with submarine capability?
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The decision to procure the existing Trident nuclear system was taken in 1980. My starting point is that the world has changed a very great deal since then. Back then, we were at the height of the cold war. We had a known nuclear adversary that had the capability to strike us and had stated its willingness, if provoked, to do so. We, in turn, felt that it was absolutely essential that we had the ability to respond at a moment’s notice. Thus it was that we concluded that we needed an inter-continental ballistic missile capable of being launched at a moment’s notice, and that because we did not know when our adversary would attack, we would sustain a patrol 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. There was logic in that position But, as I say, the world has changed. The cold war is over. The iron curtain has come down. The Soviet Union, which was our known adversary, no longer exists. In 1994, Britain and Russia de-targeted each other and changed their policy to say that we were not nuclear adversaries of each other. Yet nothing changed: since that time, we have continued with 24/7 patrolling. I join the Secretary of State in saluting those who have been involved in sustaining that for all that time. The Royal Navy and all those at the Faslane base and in the supply and support chains have mounted a gargantuan effort to keep continuous at-sea deterrence going, and they deserve great praise for that. It has been at considerable human cost and very substantial financial cost, but it is very much harder to discern quite what practical utility it is fulfilling in 2015 when we do not have a known nuclear adversary.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): As I have said, it was something that we calibrated to be our need in 1980. If one casts one’s mind back to 1980, one will see that our conventional defences were very much greater than they are today. The scale of the nuclear deterrent that we mounted at that time was a relatively small proportion of a large defence, but what we are considering now, as we look forward to the next 30 or 40 years, is a much greater proportion of a much smaller defence because of the succession of cuts that have been made since then.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I will come on to talk about the implications and the consequences of using nuclear weapons, but—although the hon. Gentleman is right to say that the security situation in and around Ukraine deteriorated rapidly—I do not accept for one moment that anything that has happened there makes the prospect of nuclear conflict between ourselves and Russia any more likely than it was before all that started.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I am making absolutely no attempt to predict the future; I am talking about the threat that I believe we face now at this point in time. For another nation sate to be taken seriously as a nuclear adversary, it needs a combination of capability and intent. Although it is certainly the case that the Russians and many others have the capability to strike us with a nuclear weapon, I do not believe for one moment that they have the intent to do so. If things should deteriorate in the future, that is a different position, but I do not believe that we face such a threat.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I am going to make some progress and I will take another intervention in a little while Our defences have seen round after round of cuts as the financial situation has deteriorated, and later this year we face the gloomy prospect of the whole thing happening all over again. Whatever the outcome of the election, there will be a strategic defence and security review this summer and a comprehensive spending review this autumn. The Secretary of State dismissed the cost figures offered by the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who opened the debate for the SNP, but I readily recognise those figures. It is a fact that if we go ahead and build four submarines, they will cost us between £25 billion and £30 billion. It is a fact that running the nuclear deterrent currently costs us £2.9 billion a year, and if we do that for another 30 or 40 years the cost will multiply. Whatever the outcome, at some point we will have to decommission it all at the end, so I would have thought that £100 billion is the very least it would cost. I would take a private guess that the quantum would in fact be well in excess of that figure, but I certainly recognise it as a starting point.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I was taking the lifetime of the submarines as being more like 25 to 30 years. If we operate them for 25 years at almost £3 billion, that would take us into the realms of £75 billion plus the building and decommissioning costs, which would certainly take us over £100 billion very quickly indeed. I would have thought that, in reality, it will cost a great deal more than that We know that the national deficit remains a serious problem and we do not hear from any of the political parties—mine or anybody else’s—that defence will be insulated or protected from a tough comprehensive spending review later this year. If defence were to face another cut comparable to that which it took in 2010, which seems entirely possible, the proportion of our gross domestic product that we spend on defence, which is already destined to go below 2% next year, will make rapid headway down towards 1.5% We know, however, that on the table for discussion in this summer’s SDSR is a whole series of big procurement projects. The two new aircraft carriers are due to have joint strike fighter craft flying off them—we do not know how much their unit cost will be or how many of them we will be able to afford. The Type 26 frigate is due to be built in the next few years, but it is very difficult to know how much that will cost. We need more helicopters and more intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance assets. We need another generation of remotely piloted aircraft. The existing amphibious shipping is due to become redundant in the latter part of this decade and will need replacing if we are going to sustain that capability. The Army’s vehicle crisis remains unresolved after the collapse of most of the future rapid effect system programme All those things will be on the table and wrestled over in agony this summer. In addition, paper exercises are already being done looking at what an Army of just 60,000 would look like, because of the financial crunch that the Department will face. Yet, for some reason, keeping a nuclear deterrent going at the level we thought necessary at the height of the cold war in 1980 gets an automatic bye and is assumed to be beyond debate. Nobody even wants to put it on the table and debate it alongside those other things that are there to mitigate the dangers that our own security assessment said in 2010 are first-league threats that we face here and now.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): The 2010 national security strategy identified the primary threats faced by the United Kingdom. Personally, I think it was correct in identifying the threat from international terrorism, cyber-attack, international crime, the security consequences of the sudden mass migrations of peoples, and pandemics as a result of climate change. All those are very real threats that we face, and they are probably greater than the threat we face from direct state-on-state warfare. We see every day that our armed forces—through, for example, the work they perform off the African coast countering piracy and in the Caribbean countering narcotics—are very flexible and capable of dealing with this wide and diverse range of threats. It is actually maintaining a broad spectrum of capabilities to deal with such diverse situations and the willingness to use them that secures us our place at the United Nations Security Council, not the fact that we happen to be a nuclear state. In any case, we can change the composition of the United Nations Security Council only by unanimity, and there is no reason why the UK should agree to give up its seat.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): It is certainly true that very few NATO states possess nuclear weapons, although a few have them on their soil. Other Members have spoken about the nuclear umbrella, but none of us knows how real it is, and let us hope that it is never pushed to the test We are asked to focus our minds on whether we should proceed with a replacement programme in 2016. It is not of course the Trident missile that needs replacing, but, as other hon. Members have said, the submarines. I believe that we should be willing to build some more submarines at this time, but I shall add some riders in a moment.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): If the hon. Gentleman bears with me, I shall do my best to explain my position and where I am coming from I profoundly agree that we should not allow the Barrow submarine-building capability to fall apart—if we do not place such orders at that shipyard in the next few years, it will be necessary to give it other contracts—but I do not support the construction of submarines whose sole purpose and capability is to carry a nuclear weapon, thus committing us to a £30 billion investment programme with but one purpose and forcing us to be a nuclear power for the next 30 and 40 years unless we are prepared to write off a capital investment of that scale The United States has used some of its Ohio class submarines for quite different purposes. The US has developed a means of firing conventional weapons through their missile tubes, and it has used those submarines in a tactical role and in support of special forces operations. To my mind, it is certainly the case that if we are to build new submarines—I think we should, for the reasons I have given—we must ensure that they are capable of performing other functions, as the United States has done with its large submarines.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): No, because that would imply that we were in favour of a full-scale, like-for-like replacement of the Trident programme. [Interruption.] If one is going to be pedantic, the motion refers to a missile system that is not due for replacement for some years. In fact, what needs to be decided in the next year or so is whether we shall build new submarines. I think we should, but if we make such an investment, it is essential that the submarines are capable of performing other functions. I do not believe that it makes any sense whatever for us to sail the high seas 24/7, waving weapons of mass destruction at the rest of the world, because we thought it was necessary in 1980 or because we would be left looking embarrassed if we did not make that £30 billion investment The Defence Secretary seemed to suggest that to adopt any deployment posture other than continuous at-sea deterrence was somehow risible and laughable, but many sensible studies by serious people have looked at a ladder of different postures for the UK to take. My belief is that we should for the time being retain the components of a nuclear deterrent—the warhead, and the ability to look after it; the missile, and the arrangement with the Americans; and the submarines capable of firing a nuclear weapon—and maintain a highly skilled work force who are regularly exercised in how to put back together the deterrent’s components. NATO air-based nuclear systems in eastern Europe operate on the same basis of a well-exercised drill to put the pieces of the deterrent together if it is thought necessary.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I will give way to the hon. Gentleman in a moment, as I said I would In this day and age, it does not make sense for us to go out to sea armed with nuclear weapons and on patrol when we do not believe, on our own assessment, that we face a primary threat. I do not believe that we have a nuclear adversary at this time, but in future we might reach a different conclusion and believe that the international security situation had so deteriorated that we faced a nuclear adversary. For that purpose, it seems to me to make sense to keep the component parts of the nuclear deterrent and the ability to put them together again should we ever need it I do not at all accept that that would be a part-time deterrent. I do not believe that the Royal Air Force—or the Army or the Navy for that matter—represents a deterrent to a potential enemy only when on patrol. The fact that it is known to have the capabilities it has is in itself a deterrent. If one wanted to be pedantic and to cling to the belief that it has a deterrent effect only when on patrol, let me make it perfectly clear that I am proposing patrols not for part of the time but for none of the time. I propose that we simply retain nuclear capability as a contingency against a future situation where we made an assessment that we needed to operate a patrol.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I do not think that I have made my point quite clear to the hon. Gentleman. I do not believe that we have a nuclear adversary, but I am saying that we should keep the component parts of the deterrent for the time being so that if in future we concluded that we did have such an adversary, we could resume patrols. I am absolutely with him in saying that for something to have a deterrent effect, it needs to be mobilised and deployed in a timely matter, but I simply do not accept his proposition that—out of the blue, out of nowhere—an adversary will pop up who wishes to do us irreparable harm and to take the global consequences of doing so.
Trident Renewal — House of Commons, 2015-01-20
Topic: Defense
Nicholas Barton Harvey (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): I remind the hon. Lady that the national security strategy identified such a nuclear attack as a second level threat. I believe that we have potential nuclear adversaries, but I do not believe that we have actual nuclear adversaries at the moment. To be an actual adversary requires a combination of capability and intent. I can see plenty of countries with the capability but none with the intent, and countries that may have an intent to launch a nuclear weapon at us in future are still a considerable way away from having such a capability. If any of that should change, and if any future Government should arrive at a different calculation and believe there was an enemy with both capability and intent, they would need to revisit our posture Trident should be retained on a flexible basis that can be ramped up or down according to our reading of the security situation, which is exactly how we approach all our other military capability. The rest of our military capability is not kept on constant patrol on the basis that that is the only point at which it has any deterrent effect; it is kept at different levels of readiness, according to our assessment of the particular threat that it is designed to mitigate.