Speeches by George.

“Contrary to what the media are saying, today’s decision is not about bringing this Bill into law; it is about allowing it to go to the next stage. People may have misgivings, but the hon. Gentleman is making the assumption that the Bill cannot be corrected or amended in order to make it palatable to people who have dou…”

“I should have intervened earlier. The Minister is making a strong point. On the back of that, all we have to do is talk to the pollack fisherman in Cornwall to find out how they feel about what has happened in the last year.”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn), who gave what I suppose is best described as a commercial break in our proceedings, as she did a fantastic job of marketing the health and other benefits of cons…”

“My right hon. Friend is making an excellent case. On his point about multi-annual quotas, does he not agree that ICES very carefully presents its advice in a manner that actually provides for Governments, Ministers and indeed the European Commission to adopt a policy of multi-annual quotas for stock recovery? It does n…”

“The hon. Gentleman seems to be implying that the fishing industry is resistant to any conservation measures and would resist the proposed management measures that inevitably have to be brought into the industry. From my experience, the industry itself often proposes changes in order to protect its stock for the future.…”

“I will come to that in a second. The nature of what happens off the Cornish coast, and certainly in the south-west and other areas, is that pollack is caught in a multispecies environment. It is impossible not to catch pollack even when targeting other species—the hon. Member helps me to make the point—so my constituen…”

“Well, he died a fish, and we are very saddened by his demise. I should reflect, as we certainly did in those days, on the risk that people take to put fish on our table, of which my right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) rightly reminded us. I remember that in 1997, we lost seven men in th…”

“My hon. Friend is making an excellent case. Certainly in my own constituency, further west than his own, in west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, there have been 18 discharges around the coast just in the past 10 days. On the proposed changes in the Government consultation, as attractive as the concept of bringing wat…”

“My hon. Friend is making an excellent case. Along with the point I made in my previous intervention about the opportunity for abuse under the rates relief system, particularly by holiday homes, does she accept that the methodology used by the current rating system for parking spaces in out-of-town retail outlets such a…”

“Does the Minister agree that the cold-blooded slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza cannot be justified as self-defence? Does he also agree that—contrary to the Trumpian line adopted by those on the Conservative Benches—just because a country is a democracy, that does not provide it with blanket imm…”

“If the Minister is looking for other methods by which public finances could be effectively deployed, will he look carefully at the last decade, during which small business rate relief has been used by second home owners to flip their properties to business rating and pay nothing at all? In Cornwall alone, that has resu…”

“A lot of people are focusing on delayed discharge. There is a rather two-dimensional view about delayed discharge, that it is the inadequacy or lack of resource in social care that is causing that resistance. However, in Cornwall I have been asking similar questions and they have come up with datasets that indicate tha…”

“Is it those kind of proportions?”

“As someone who was a member of the Health Committee during the 2012 reforms and who sat on the Government Benches and opposed those reforms all the way through, you have picked at the scabs of my war wounds. Moving on to this excellent report, I wanted to cover a couple of themes about primary care and acute care, and …”

“My last question is on emergency care. In response to your report, I notice that Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, has said that there is a ward of patients waiting to be admitted in every tertiary centre. The pushback against the shift of resource from hospital to community has…”

“Exactly: I could not find it in the report. In terms of geographic variation, you highlight the distinction between Devon and north-west London, where there is a very significant difference in terms of caseload for GPs. Would you agree that there are demographic variations? Just walking around London, you get knocked o…”

“In Cornwall, only 25% of delayed discharges from hospital are because of lack of social care packages, with the remainder involving the significant degree of support needed from primary and community NHS services. The Royal College of Nursing has pointed out that there has been a 45% reduction in district nurses in the…”

“I welcome the Secretary of State’s statement, and particularly the sentiment about putting passengers first and getting a grip. Those who are served by Great Western, which runs to south Wales as well as down the main line to Penzance in my constituency—Great Western has already been heavily criticised this afternoon—w…”

“I do, although that is rather rich of the right hon. Gentleman when he knows that he and his party left the country in this state. Another issue is the housing emergency, which we have not debated much today. I welcome the additional £500 million that the Government announced, which will supplement the affordable homes…”

“I will, although the right hon. Gentleman has only just walked into the Chamber, so I think it is rather cheeky of him.”