argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: Social Welfare
Questions: I established a universal credit action group in my constituency to track local progress and add performance indicators to see how the roll-out is going in Clackmannanshire. What measures are in place to track local success and progress? Are Ministers willing to meet me to discuss the progress of my action group?; I have the honour of chairing the all-party parliamentary group for terminal illness, and we have been taking evidence over recent months on the challenges that dying people face in accessing social security due to the six-month rule. Incidentally, the Scottish Government are already committed to allowing clinicians to make judgments for PIP, with their limited powers. We will be launching the report on Wednesday at 4 o’clock in the Members’ Dining Room, so will the Minister attend and agree to meet me and Marie Curie to discuss the report’s findings?; Will the Minister provide an update on the Department’s work to help people who are out of employment back into work, particularly in the Black Country and, more specifically, in my constituency of Walsall North?; I want to ask the Secretary of State about my constituent who hanged himself shortly after losing his personal independence payment. I wrote to her asking whether she would establish an inquiry, whether that inquiry would be independent, whether it would be headed by somebody who knows something about this area, whether it would report in three months, and whether the report will be made public.; Earlier this year, I visited the Friendly Autism Moray Experience in Lossiemouth. FAME is paid for by the Lossie Entertainment Academy and works in collaboration with the DWP and Moray’s autism services. Local DWP manager Jane Munro has seen people on the project and believes that their contribution increases both their capabilities and their confidence. Does the Minister agree that we should support this valuable project? Will he also wish everyone involved with FAME all the best for the future?; With £7 billion of unclaimed pension credit since 2017—equivalent to two out of five pensioner households entitled to that credit not getting it—how will Government respond to Independent Age’s “Credit Where It’s Due” campaign to ensure that everyone who is entitled to pension credit gets it?; I spoke to a constituent at the weekend who has a lifetime disability living allowance award, but she is now being told that she has to apply for personal independence payment. She is obviously very worried about the situation, not least because there are so many cases online of people with indefinite awards being turned down for PIP. Why can we not transfer the data over so that somebody who has been assessed as having a lifetime need can automatically qualify for lifetime PIP?
Margaret Ann Throup (Conservative, Centre-right): There has recently been a noticeable increase in the number of my constituents in receipt of personal independence payment who, on reassessment, have had it stopped or reduced. Will my right hon. Friend agree to meet me to discuss this worrying trend and to see what we can do to sort it out?
NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: Education
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): It has been great to hear my right hon. Friend mentioning the new medical schools. The one in Chelmsford is fantastic. It is 12 times oversubscribed for next year—we would love an increase in places. It was lovely to meet three of the medical students last week, when they raced across the high street to have selfies taken with my right hon. Friend’s predecessor We are also doing well on nurse apprenticeships, but there is an issue, especially with mature students coming in to study adult nursing. Will my right hon. Friend look again at how to give them financial assistance?
NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: Government Operations
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): The answer to that question is being worked on as part of the people plan, which Baroness Dido Harding is putting together. We published the interim plan last month. The full people plan will be available after we have settled, in the spending review, the budget of Health Education England. The hon. Gentleman raises an incredibly important point.
NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jeremy John Elton Lefroy (Conservative, Centre-right): I very much welcome the plan, with £33.9 billion being committed by 2022-23. My concern is slightly where the money is going to come from. I wonder whether my right hon. Friend has had assurances from the Treasury that that will indeed be the case. With all the other pressures on spending and revenues in the coming years, that might be a little difficult. We have to find ways to ensure that the revenue is there because this money must be spent.
NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: Social Welfare
Matthew John David Hancock (Conservative, Centre-right): The statement was about the implementation of the NHS long-term plan, to which of course the future of social care is vital, which is one reason why the spending power available within social care has risen by more than 10% over the past three years. We continue to work on the long-term future of social care. We will have to wait for a new Prime Minister before publishing the Green Paper—I think that is fairly obvious—but it would also be good to get a bit of cross-party collaboration. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Ashford (Damian Green) made some proposals that were in line with the cross-party work of two Select Committees of this House, within half an hour the shadow Secretary of State’s friend, the shadow Chancellor, had rubbished the idea—I do not think he took the time even to read it. We could do with a bit of cross-party work on the future of social care in this country.
NHS Long-Term Plan: Implementation — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
John Simon Bercow (Conservative, Centre-right): Order. I will come to points of order in a moment. We now come to—or we will come to, after the points of order, so I should more accurately say that we shall shortly come to—the motion on the estimate for the Department for International Development. The debate will led by Mr Laurence Robertson. I inform the House that I have not selected the amendment in the name of Margaret Beckett. It may also be helpful if I inform the House that I have not selected either of the amendments to the second motion. After the points of order, I will call the Minister to move the motion, but first we will treat of points of order.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the Backbench Business Committee for approving this debate today. I would also like to put on record my thanks to my right hon. Friends the Members for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell) and for Witham (Priti Patel) and the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), for helping me to prepare for this debate; the experience they have and the work they have done is admirable I have long had an interest in international development, and I think probably it comes from the fact that I certainly feel very lucky to have been born in this country. I did nothing to deserve to be born in this country. We have food, we have clean water, we have medical services, and we have education, which very many people across the world do not have; in other words, we have the building blocks to be able to progress in our lives and to normally live beyond childhood, while many in the world do not have that opportunity I would go as far as to say that my interest in international development and in trying to help the world’s poorest people was one of my main motivations for wanting to enter the House of Commons in the first place, and I have had the privilege of being able to witness the effects of the aid that the United Kingdom has provided. I am aware it goes across the world, but my particular interest has been in Africa and I have the honour of being chairman of the all-party group on Ethiopia and Djibouti. I have been to some very rural areas in Ethiopia as well as the cities and have seen the benefits our aid brings to so very many people We should look at the achievements we have made in this country through our official development assistance fund, which is now, I am very proud to say, 0.7% of our gross national income. We have donated more than £77 billion since 2013, when we set that target.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. For a prosperous country—we are supposed to be the fifth largest economy in the world—that is a small amount to be asked to pay, but it has an enormous impact across the world.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman is right to talk about the cross-party support for this issue in the House. The 0.7% target goes back a very long time, and I am pleased that it was a Conservative-led Government who actually reached it, but it would be churlish not to recognise the work that Tony Blair did, for example, in highlighting the issue, and I am pleased to do so. Many other leading politicians have also done work on this. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for making that point, and I will come back to it in just a minute I mentioned the fact that we had given that £77 billion in aid since 2013, but what does that actually mean? It means that we have helped more than 1 billion children across the world to get an education, as well as helping more than 37 million children to be immunised and more than 40 million people to have access to clean water. These are things that we in this country take for granted, but our aid has helped people in those ways across the world and I am very proud of that.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): Absolutely. The hon. Lady makes an extremely good and useful intervention. As many hon. Members have done, I have seen the disabilities that some children have that prevent them from attending school or from doing very much in life, really. For example, we see children who cannot stand up because their limbs are damaged, and children with cataracts who are blind because they cannot get a simple operation. That situation really is unacceptable. So, if our aid can help reduce such incidents, it really is worth doing. We have to increase aid, and we have to improve so much It is a sad fact that we are one of the only eight countries that actually meet the aid target. Other countries do give a lot of money, but few actually meet the target, and we need to work with and encourage others to do so. The situation is a bit like reducing emissions in this country, because we produce only 2% of the world’s emissions, but if other countries are not going to play their part, we are not going to get the progress that we need. The situation is exactly the same with aid.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Stephen Charles Kerr (Conservative, Centre-right): It is appropriate to follow up on the contribution from the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron), because our international aid and development programmes are largely centred in East Kilbride. That is yet more evidence of the strength and vitality of this Union that we enjoy and the blessing that it is across the face of the earth.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): Does my hon. Friend agree that it is also in our national interests to keep up our investment in international aid? By making poorer countries more stable, we improve the world’s stability. By tackling diseases, we stop them spreading to our own country. If we are to fight climate change, we need to fight it globally. Aid is not just the right thing to do morally, but it is in our interests to continue it.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We could take things even further because, in the commercial sense, if countries across the world are richer, that affords us new markets as well, which is in addition to the humanitarian reasons for aid that she rightly outlines DFID’s budget is around the £14 billion mark. While it is certainly a small part of our overall income, as was raised earlier, it is still a considerable amount of money. The aid budget has its critics and criticisms, of course, and I will come on to one or two of them, because some may be valid. Perhaps we can improve matters, and we should certainly never be satisfied with where we are, because we can always do better. We all have constituents who point out that some of our schools and our police are short of money, so if we are going to spend money abroad, helping people who are not from this country, then we must ensure that we spend it wisely and effectively, and this estimates day debate is about addressing the budget in the wider sense It is worth touching on exactly how aid works. This may come as a surprise to some, but DFID itself spends around 75% of the aid budget, with the other 25% being spent by other Departments, such as the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for Health and Social Care and the Home Office, and other outside organisations. Some of the aid that we provide is bilateral and some is multilateral, and I will come on to the difference in a minute The National Audit Office report, which came out just a few days ago, says that most of our aid is going to the right places and having a great effect, but it did point out that there is room for improvement. As I go through one or two areas in which we can improve, the observations that I will make are not in any way a criticism of our approach of our aid policy because, as the House has heard, I am supportive of it.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady raises a good point. I think it was Tony Blair who set up the separate Department, which provided it with focus. Thinking back before that, however, most right hon. and hon. Members would acknowledge the excellent work carried out by Baroness Chalker, even though the Department was then within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office I suppose there are two ways of looking at it. When I travel and meet DFID officials abroad, I often meet officials from the FCO, and maybe also from other Departments linked to it. Overall, I agree with the hon. Lady that this is such an important subject, and it obviously should have close ties to the Foreign Office, and probably to other Departments, too. As I say, 25% of the overseas aid budget is spent by other Departments, so there has to be a close link. I am probably persuaded that that should be the case. I will talk to the successful leadership candidate, whoever they are, about this issue in due course I mentioned that other Departments spend about 25% of the aid budget, and that proportion has increased significantly—it was 11.4% in 2013. That spending can be a good thing, because it draws on the expertise of those other Departments. In certain cases, money is provided that might not have been so quickly forthcoming if those Departments had to queue outside the Treasury for it However, the spending raises the question of whether these other Departments quite have DFID’s experience and expertise in delivering aid. The Department of Health and Social Care, for example, might be expert in handling health-related issues—I am sure it is—but DFID has that experience of delivering projects abroad. There is a question mark over whether we have got to the right level. Hopefully the Minister will give us some guidance.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman makes a good point, and I look forward to hearing whether the Minister thinks that 25% of the budget being spent by other Departments is about right, too high or too low. I have not necessarily come with answers. I am asking as many questions as I am giving answers, but that is the nature of this debate This spending also raises the question of transparency, because the other Departments do not have the same legislative requirements. For example, the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act 2006 requires DFID to report to Parliament on where the money is spent, but other Departments are not covered by the Act The targeting of aid is something else that concerns some people. In 2017, the last year for which figures are available, DFID spent 66% of its bilateral aid budget on the world’s poorest countries, but the other Departments spent only 25% of their bilateral budgets on the least developed countries. There are always explanations and more details behind these figures but, on the face of it, we need to look at it and ask questions Through bilateral aid, we have complete control of the projects we fund; and through multilateral aid, we work with other agencies and do not have the same control, and the priorities of those other agencies might be slightly different from ours. There are different nuances within each of those headings, too. This is never a simple subject.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman raises a good point. I have not had those discussions with the Treasury, but they are certainly discussions we will need to have. I raise this with the Minister to find out her view, because this is increasing quite a lot—it has more than doubled in the past few years, so the hon. Gentleman is right to raise the point. This is why I make the point about spending in the countries that most need it and targeting it at the poorest people in the world. That is what most people would want us to do. There can be knock-on effects that come to this country, but the primary concern must be about helping the world’s poorest people.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Andrew John Bower Mitchell (Conservative, Centre-right): On the comment just made by the former International Development Minister from the Opposition, surely the issue is not just the 0.7% but the rules. Any expenditure undertaken by other Departments must of course be within the rules; otherwise, the Treasury would have a fit, as it would have to find the additional money if spending were undertaken outside those rules. The important thing is that this expenditure should be well spent—a point I hope to make if I catch your eye, Madam Deputy Speaker. It does not matter which Department is spending any expenditure that falls within the rules that Britain has accepted so long as it is spent well.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: Government Operations
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for that intervention. He has expert knowledge of this issue. We had a meeting before this debate and it could have gone on a lot longer because we discussed so very many things. Where this spending goes does matter, and it does matter that there is accountability and transparency. That is the important point.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Victoria Mary Boswell Prentis (Conservative, Centre-right): What concerns me is the issue of which partners we use to deliver our aid. DFID has great relationships with large trusted partners, but I am always concerned that smaller, more effective organisations operating in the most dangerous places, such as the Hands Up Foundation, do not get the funding and support from DFID that they need. Does my hon. Friend agree on that?
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend raises a good point. It is very important to consider the partners we use. Accusations are made that some of the partners—the intermediaries—might take too big a chunk of the money before that money gets to ground level, and there are concerns about that. With multilateral aid, who we deal with is certainly one of the issues. Sometimes these bodies do not have the same priorities as we have.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will deal with this immediately. The bilateral aid of DFID was 62.6%, as against multilateral aid of 37.4%, and this has remained steady over the past few years. However, that is still a lot of money going on aid that we do not fully control. There are some good projects out there. The World Food Programme is an excellent example of multilateral aid that saves lives. The hon. Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) mentioned the money going to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and today we had the announcement of this being £467 million a year. As I understand it, that is multilateral aid, so there are some excellent projects we are involved in, but there are delays in reporting by the multilateral agencies, which impedes our ability to analyse the work they do.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Laurence Anthony Robertson (Conservative, Centre-right): I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, to whom I pay tribute for all his work in that respect. I shall come back to that issue in a moment Let me turn to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which was set up by my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield. It has identified some spending by, for example—this is only an example, and it is not the only one—the Newton Fund, which the commission said "is not promoting the best use of ODA and some projects appear not to be within the ODA definition." That is of some concern. The commission lists some of the projects about which it is concerned. Sometimes when one looks into the projects and gets into the details, one finds they actually do help people who need help, but the headlines that they receive do not necessarily suggest that. Nevertheless, we have to be careful, because we all have constituents who want to see that their hard-earned money they pay in taxes goes to the right target.
Department for International Development — House of Commons, 2019-07-01
Topic: International Affairs
Alec Shelbrooke (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend has just made an important point. It is absolutely right that we fund multilateral projects, and some of the organisations involved, such as the UN, are huge. In respect of the big multilateral projects it is easy to pick on the tiniest point about where some aid might go and blow that up into a huge headline, and that is what our constituents hear. We are not going to change that in the press—the newspapers will not print a headline that says, "All the planes took off on time yesterday"—but it is the House’s responsibility to emphasise exactly what my hon. Friend is talking about.