Speeches by Ballinger.

“My constituent Yvonne has lived in a house in Halesowen that she has owned for 20 years. She purchased it under a leasehold arrangement that allowed her property management company, Principle Estate Management, to quadruple her service charge from £400 to £1,550 without conducting any maintenance. Clearly, Yvonne feels…”

“My hon. Friend is delivering an excellent speech. Does she recognise the fact that there are also 200 service families among those victims who are seeking answers, and that the Bill will help to address that issue at the same time?”

“I thank the hon. Gentleman for being so sensitive in his speech. He mentions the remedial order that does away with the immunity scheme set up by the last Government; does he accept that that scheme was never actually in place, because it was struck down by the courts in Northern Ireland? The remedial order is really j…”

“It is good to hear about the advantages of moving to an arm’s length body, away from DIO. What other changes, apart from the structural changes and reforms in the Bill, will be necessary to ensure that we have the best standard of housing for our servicepeople moving forward?”

“There is a question about the independence of the new Defence Housing Service. It is good that it is an arm’s length body, but the Secretary of State still controls the budget. What message or reassurance can you give the Committee that, as the housing budget competes against other priorities in the MOD, it will be rin…”

“What difference do you think this strategy, and the £9 billion investment into homes that are being improved, will make to recruitment and retention in the armed forces?”

“I would like to take us on to defence housing. I think there is widespread acceptance that the standard of defence housing under the last Government reached a pretty woeful level. I have family members who were serving until recently, and I have seen the state of some of it. We also had record levels of complaints from…”

“Before I start, I should declare that I am co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on gambling reform. I want to talk about new clauses 8 and 9, which my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) spoke to earlier. They are thoughtful, well-meaning new clauses that address real concerns. I w…”

“Do you think it is unnecessary?”

“Clause 12 is to do with the service policing protocol. The aim is to improve the working relationship between the Secretary of State, the Defence Council, service police and the Defence Serious Crime Unit. In your view, what should be included in the service policing protocol to make it more effective?”

“What is the timescale between you identifying inauthentic behaviour and taking action on it? Does that change in situations of high importance, such as in an election or in crises like the war in Iran?”

“Some of you have covered the actions you take after identifying, but it might be helpful to go through those. What range of enforcement actions can you take, whether that is content removal, account lockdowns, and so on? Do you preserve evidence of those actions for external scrutiny and for law enforcement and the lik…”

“The shadow Secretary of State laments the state of our Royal Navy, but he will remember that it was his party that cut investment in our Royal Navy over 14 years, cut the number of warships we had by 25% and ordered no new destroyers in that period either. Does the Secretary of State agree that while we should be inves…”

“It is a bit less about my particular feed than it is about the systematic issues that we are talking about here.”

“I do when I am following the pages that I follow, but when I automatically get bumped to the other page, I get a lot of far-right American Christian conservative content forwarded to me. I am happy to see a wide variety of views, but I do not get far-left content, for example.”

“I think the balance is the problem, because you are presenting people with views from one particular direction that they do not agree with, but maybe not views from the other direction. Certainly, in all our experiences, and according to the research—I am sure that this is not just a UK problem; it is an international …”

“There is published research on this, Dr Fernández. A study published in Nature in January on the “For You” page said that it pushes political opinion “in a more conservative direction” and that it was influencing more conservative perceptions of the criminal investigations against Trump and more conservative views on t…”

“I have reported a few accounts myself, as an X user. Often, I get a report two or three days later that my community note has been accepted, and of course millions of people may have seen the misinformation in that time. Indeed, it stays up, even with the community note on; the posts do not seem to be taken down. Do yo…”

“I have the same question about reaction time. With the war going on in Iran at the moment, there have been lots of reports about misinformation being shared on X. There is an FT article talking about lots of fake satellite information, AI-generated videos showing attacks that have not happened and the like. What action…”

“Dr Fernández, same question: what actions do you take when you have identified the behaviour? What information do you preserve for law enforcement and others?”