Author: johnredwood

How to tackle the virus

September 11, 2020 278 Comments

The government waited until the virus had fallen to very low levels. It then began a gradual relaxation of controls, essential to economic recovery and allowing freedoms back.

Its policy to control the virus switched to testing people to seek to ensure that all those with it or in contact with carriers self isolated, so the rest of us could lead a more normal life. It added to the measures by still not allowing some sectors to go back to work, and insisting on varying measures of social distancing for everyone.

With more testing today more cases of the virus are being identified, and the graph is going up again, as it has already done in places like Spain and France. So far it seems to be spreading more amongst the younger and fitter, so there are still not so many severe cases and deaths. Some say this pattern will continue. Others think it is only a matter of time before more vulnerable people get it and the serious cases rises.

The government and Councils turned to local lockdowns as a supplement to testing and isolating more people.In places where there was a surge in cases normal life was further interrupted to seek to control the spread. Now the government is moving back to national restrictions again as the cases still increase.

Yesterday the PM said he now wanted the NHS to develop a much faster test so people could get the result shortly after taking it. He would want to see a massive increase in the number of tests, perhaps a fifty fold increase on current levels. The idea is we could go to an event but be tested on the way in. Meanwhile current levels in excess of 200,000 tests a day are not backed up by sufficient laboratory capacity to give quick results, and some people are being told to wait several days or travel very long distances to get a test.

It leaves people asking some questions. Why can’t the NHS test more people locally? When will the current testing system be fixed? Who is now working on a rapid test and how many would it be possible to make when there is one? How will the public react to a prolonged period of restrictions on freedoms? How much more economic damage will be incurred if the virus does continue to flare up?

The reason for the Single market legislation

September 10, 2020 253 Comments

The government’s Single market Bill is a necessary piece of legislation to ensure the smooth running of the UK’s single market and customs union, and to provide the base for our independent trade policy after leaving the EU single market and trade policy on January 1. At the time of the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration the EU signed up to two important propositions. They agreed that  the core of our new relationship with them would be a free trade agreement with  no tariffs, and they would respect UK sovereignty. If the EU keeps to its promises there will be no need for the arrangements envisaged for the Irish border in  the current legislation. If they do  not pursue these promises then the UK government has the right under Clause 38 of the EU Withdrawal Act to establish control over its borders and trade, notwithstanding  the Withdrawal Agreement. This is expressly recorded in UK law. It was also clear to the EU at the time when we legislated in this way that was the UK’s understanding of the Withdrawal Agreement, as we put it into primary legislation.

Qualifications for the class of 2021

September 10, 2020 110 Comments

Yesterday I raised in the Commons some questions about how exams should be set and marked and how standards of our main educational qualifications should be upheld for the class of 2020.

Ofqual has come up with ways of modifying the exams for next year to take into account the interruption to education experienced by pupils in some schools who did not teach a full timetable from March to September by on line means. It has also changed arrangements for field work and oral exams to respond to CV 19 social distancing rules.

As a result pupils will be offered more choice in content for the exams in History, Geography and Ancient History. In English literature pupils will be able to take three of the four blocs of work for the exam. Fieldwork in Geography and Geology will be dropped and the questions on it in the written papers. Foreign languages and English will no longer have a formal oral or spoken language requirement.

It is important next year that we get back to an exam based system. Ofqual and the Exam Boards are still considering what is best to do on dates of exams. Should they be a bit later to give schools more time to make up for lost teaching time this year? How much later can they go without jeopardising University entrance procedures?

I hope they work out a system which is fair to all students and upholds the standards established in past years. Next year they have to span the range from pupils who got a full education for the full syllabus between March and July to pupils who got very little formal education during lock down.

Non-Covid-19 Related Work in Hospitals

September 9, 2020 4 Comments

I have received the enclosed response to my Parliamentary Question about Non-Related Covid-19 work in hospitals:

The Department of Health and Social Care has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (81472):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress the NHS has made in resuming non-covid-19 related work in hospitals and surgeries in England. (81472)

Tabled on: 28 August 2020

Answer:
Edward Argar:

The National Health Service has continued to progress with resuming non-COVID-19 services. There was an increase of 13% in patients beginning their first cancer treatment within 31 days following a decision to treat in June 2020 compared to May, whilst the number of completed admitted pathways following a consultant-led referral for treatment increased by 73% over the same period.

As the NHS has continued to restore services, further guidance was issued to local NHS providers and commissioners on 31 July outlining the next phase of the NHS response to COVID-19 and concurrent non-COVID-19 activity. The focus is on accelerating the return of non-COVID-19 health services to near-normal levels, including making full use of available capacity between now and winter, whilst also preparing for winter demand pressures. This will be done alongside continued vigilance in light of any further COVID-19 spikes locally and possibly nationally.

The answer was submitted on 09 Sep 2020 at 10:52.

My contribution to the Debate on the Extradition (Provisional Arrest) Bill (Lords) – Schedule – Power of arrest for extradition purposes, 8 September

September 9, 2020 2 Comments

We had a good debate earlier today, but I hope the Minister will come back to this House erelong on a couple of important issues explored in the earlier debate. The first is the protection of British citizens who are the object of one of these extradition requirements once we have entered into these agreements. My right hon. Friend for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr David Davis) made a powerful speech about how we need to look carefully at the conditions offered to people when they are taken abroad on charges, particularly as they may be innocent and particularly when the most serious offences that most of us had in mind when these extradition regimes were drawn up may not be involved. We all wish to keep our country safe and we all understand that we need reciprocal agreements to do that. We wish such agreements to be used to pursue those who are violent and commit the most serious crimes, but we need to think about how this can be extended and how in certain jurisdictions where we have extradition agreements people may not be accorded the same decent treatment we would want to accord somebody who has been charged with a crime but who may, in the end, prove to be innocent.

We also need to come back to how we are going to handle our extradition arrangements with other European countries. We are still not sure how that might work out, and we fully understand that it is still the subject of various discussions and negotiations. It is entirely prudent to make some provision today. However, some of us think that if there is to be no European arrest warrant when we have completed our so-called “implementation period”, that could be an opportunity for us to have a better and more suitable system, because the European arrest warrant had features that were not to this country’s liking and there was an element of compromise in it, as there has to be. I hope that we will therefore have some greater guidance on what might materialise.

As two other speakers in this Third Reading debate have referred to a topical issue that goes a bit wider than this Bill, perhaps I may also be permitted briefly to do that.

I have not heard or seen anything that implies that this Government wish to break the law or the international treaty. I have seen everything to say that this Government take very seriously section 38 of the European (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020, which was the assertion of sovereignty, and it was a fundamental proposition of the political agreement and the withdrawal agreement, which the EU willingly entered into, that British sovereignty was going to be assured and central, just as it was central to that agreement that there would be a free trade agreement. If there can be a free trade agreement, the other legal issues fall away.

One did need to correct that wider point, but, in conclusion, this Bill is a necessary one. There are issues arising from it that could warrant further thought and treatment. I hope this Government will take the advantage of that thought which our leaving the EU can provide to look again at how in the longer term we have a good judicial relationship—a co-operative relationship—with the EU that is fair to both sides and to any innocent people in Britain who may have to stand trial abroad.

My contribution to the Debate on the Extradition (Provisional Arrest) Bill (Lords) – Clause 1, Power of Arrest for Extradition Purposes, 8 September

September 9, 2020 1 Comment

Sir John Redwood MP (Wokingham) (Con): Two very important principles should be in all our thoughts when framing extradition legislation. First, there is the imperative to make sure that where someone has committed a serious and violent crime, such as a terrorist offence or murder or some other such crime, in the United Kingdom and has escaped abroad, we have arrangements so that we can pursue justice against them through co-operation with countries around the world. We should also have very much in our mind the issues that my right hon. Friend for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr David Davis) drew to the attention of the House. We should be very concerned about innocent people in our country who may be the object of extradition requests or demands from countries abroad to take them into justice systems that are not up to the standards of our own, or not the kind of thing we would want an innocent person, particularly, to have to approach, only to see justice not done in those countries if we have undertaken such extradition matters. I echo my right hon. Friend’s request that we need to look again at how the US relationship is working. This was sold to the House some years ago on the basis that it would be targeted on those criminals we could all agree about—the terrorists, rapists and murderers who were committing violent crime—and it is of concern for us to discover that that has not been its main use at all.

I hope the Minister will share with the House his thoughts on what arrangements we will move towards with the other European countries now we have left the European Union. There may be a move to put all European Union, or European economic area, countries under these provisions, but we should definitely look at the different standards of justice system in those countries. While many of our European friends have excellent justice systems that we would be very happy with, there are very variable standards throughout the European continent. Given that we are rethinking our foreign policy and our position in the world generally, this is a good opportunity to look at them one by one and to ask whether some of them are below the standards we would expect and whether they have not made good use in the past of the very widespread powers granted to them under the European arrest warrant.

When I was preparing for this debate, one set of figures I saw in a commentary was for the period from 2010 to 2018. It said that over that period, continental countries had used the European arrest warrant eight times as often as we had used it for criminals, or alleged criminals, that we needed to undertake it for in our courts, so it has been asymmetric. In part, that is because there are many more people on the continent than there are in the United Kingdom, but it also tells us something about the seriousness of the offences that they are interested in for extradition.

I am pleased to see that there is some recognition in the legislation that extradition should be reserved for more serious offences. One does not want a complex and expensive system such as this to be used for a lot of minor offences. The Government have chosen to define it as something that is an offence in the United Kingdom and which would command a prison sentence of three years or more in the event of somebody being found guilty. I think that is a good start, because one of the features of the European arrest warrant that many people did not like was that somebody could be extradited under it from the United Kingdom for something that was not actually an offence in the United Kingdom. That did not seem a very fair system or proposal.

I hope the Minister will share with us some of his thoughts on what would be an appropriate list of European countries and whether they should just slot into the proposals that we are debating today. I think I am happy with the list of countries that we are being asked to endorse, with the caveat that we need to look at the American relationship in the way that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden suggested. I fully understand that now is not the afternoon to try to make dramatic changes to that and why he has tabled only a probing amendment. We are asking the Government about that, but there are big issues here that we would like them to review.

Junction Safety and Capacity

September 9, 2020 0 Comments

I recently received this answer to my Parliamentary Question on junction safety and capacity:

The Department for Transport has provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (81475):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what funding is available for local authorities to improve junction safety and capacity and to remove bottlenecks to make it easier for people to get into town centres by car and van. (81475)

Tabled on: 28 August 2020

Answer:
Rachel Maclean:

Local highway authorities, such as Wokingham Borough Council, have a duty under Section 41 of the Highways Act 1980 to maintain the highways network in their area.

The responsibility for improving junction safety and capacity is also a matter for the relevant local highway authority. The Department for Transport is allocating over £1.7 billion for local highways maintenance and improvements in 2020/21 through the Transport Infrastructure Investment Fund to local highways authorities in England, outside London. Of this Wokingham Borough Council will receive over £5.1 million. It is entirely for each authority to determine how their share of this funding is utilised to meet local needs.

A new commuting model?

September 9, 2020 218 Comments

Many companies are saying they are looking at more staff working some days at home and some in an office in the centre of a city. One of the issues that arises is how will people travel to and from the office, and what will that cost? Will the nationalised railways respond with attractive new tickets and offers which allows people flexible choices of when to travel, with a suitable discount for being regular users?

I started researching this article by going onto one of the big well known rail ticket sites. They ask the right questions there, and offer a cost comparison for people wanting to commute for fewer than 5 days a week. They of course can only compare costs against the background of the present ticketing offers. They show that the railway has not yet bothered to think through what a part week commuter might like.

The worked example I was offered showed this for the daily costs of travel:

3 day commuting Anytime day return £48.90

Weekly season £39.53

Annual season £33.83

Traditional 5 day commuting

Anytime Day return £48.90

Weekly season £23.70

Annual season £20.24

As these figures reveal, there is a substantial discount offered on high ticket prices for daily commuting 5 days a week. If someone now wants to commute three days a week they still have to buy the full 5 day a week season ticket, but get a much smaller effective discount on the daily fare. I guess these figures do not allow for holidays which means the actual daily cost on the season ticket is higher.

The railway needs to do better than this. People may now be flexible not only about which days they go into the office, but also which times. There may be a willingness by employers, particularly all the time social distancing applies, to allow or support staggered hours. The railway has always claimed commuter fares even on season tickets have to be so high because it is all peak travel. This imposes high peak costs on the railway which needs high capacity for just a few hours a day. This new pattern of reduced days and a wider range of times allows the railway to flatten the peak, which should lead to economies to pass on to users.

If the railway wants it business back it needs to do better by commuters. One of the main reasons people do not want to return to five days a week in the office is the high cost rail service which often let them down.

UK sovereignty

September 8, 2020 280 Comments

There seem to be some misunderstandings about what government and Parliament did sign up to as we set out the Withdrawal Agreement and Political Declaration.

As far as I am concerned I strongly supported Clause 1 of the EU Withdrawal Agreement Act 2018 which simply repealed the European Communities Act 1972, the source of all EU power in the UK. The Act then went on to recreate EU powers for a transitional period which I was less happy with.

The EU Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020 contained the all important Clause 38 to reassure people like me that the UK is going to be an independent sovereign state from the date of exit. That Clause as enacted says

“It is recognised that the Parliament of the UK is sovereign. In particular its sovereignty exists notwithstanding…” the provisions of the 2018 Withdrawal Act that had reimported EU powers. “Accordingly nothing in this Act derogates from the sovereignty of the UK”

This was a crucial reassurance, reflected in the Political declaration which committed both parties to negotiating a future relationship that reflected this UK sovereignty. No-one reading either document could be in any doubt that the UK was not signing up then or now to anything which meant the European Court of Justice would decide our fate, nor to anything that meant we had to follow EU laws. The UK did not offer up its fish as some further concession.

The Political Declaration said “It must also ensure the sovereignty of the UK and the protection of its internal market, whilst respecting the result of the 2016 referendum including with regard to the development of its independent trade policy and the ending of free movement of people between the Union and UK”. It went on to explain a Free Trade Agreement with no tariffs would be at the heart of the new relationship.

I find it very odd that some are now making silly allegations about the UK and international Treaties when the UK placed this central point at the heart of all our dealings with the EU over Withdrawal Agreement 2019/20. Either the EU assists in good faith to secure this with a deal, or it will have to accept that the UK can confirm all of this again in primary legislation by way of amendment to the detail of the Withdrawal Act . We can stress again we end Transition EU powers at the end of the so called Implementation period. So far it is the EU that has resiled from the Withdrawal Agreement by not accepting UK sovereignty and not offering the tariff free Free Trade Agreement they signed up to in the Declaration. .

No deal is better than a bad deal

September 7, 2020 360 Comments

Mrs May had the right approach and the right slogan when she first embarked on negotiations over the UK’s exit from the EU. “No deal is better than a bad deal.” If she had stuck to that we would now either be completely out with no deal, or more likely out with a Free Trade Deal to protect EU tariff free entry to the UK market and vice versa.

Once she dropped this important statement and revealed a continuous wish to give in to most demands the EU made she left the UK unable to get any kind of decent deal. The EU perceived the UK as weak and willing to recreate many features of its membership without the votes or voice. This was all much chronicled here as elsewhere, as delay followed concession and concession followed delay.

UK voters showed their massive disapproval in the European elections which should not have been needed had we simply left as planned, and went on to confirm their clear wish to leave the EU with or without a Free Trade deal in the General election of 2019.

The new government has rightly insisted on three things . They do not wish to stay in the single market and customs union which we are still in during transition. They are not trying to recreate something like membership of the EU through a comprehensive partnership or Association Agreement. They will leave without an agreement if the EU does not want a Free Trade Agreement. As they say in vivid language, they do not want the UK to become a vassal state. The UK is not seeking any special privileges from the EU and and is only suggesting similar trade arrangements to other independent countries like Canada and Japan.

It is crucial to success that the government adheres to this sensible position. It was rightly reminding the EU of it in statements by both the Prime Minister and the Chief UK negotiator this week-end. Brexit means taking back control of our laws, our borders, our fish and our money. The UK is offering a Free Trade Agreement which is of more benefit to the EU than to us, though both would benefit from it. Instead of continued posturing and refusal to discuss this issue the EU should take advantage whilst the offer is still there. The UK government this time does have to get on with No deal if the EU does not want to talk about proposals that are mutually beneficial.

I am glad to see the government has drafted unilateral U.K. legislation to amend the Withdrawal Agreement. We need to remove bad features of that if they do not agree to by negotiation. The EU has not negotiated in good faith so we must get on and establish full U.K. self government as we wish.