Speeches by Moore.

“I appreciate that the Minister is short for time. Will he write to me in response to my question about the loophole associated with domestic abuse claims?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) on securing this timely debate. We are here to talk about improving the UK visa system. That has to start with addressing one of the most cynical flaws in our system, which is t…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“I am aware of that, as it resonates with some of the casework I get in my constituency in Keighley. I am also aware of people being encouraged to fabricate false allegations by so-called online legal advisers. The scale of the problem has been amplified through a freedom of information request from the BBC. It found th…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. It is perhaps not surprising that we are here talking about yet another piece of legislation that will impose further harm and unnecessary burdens on our farmers. We have already had the family farm tax, which has now regrettably come into force, the added…”

“If the Minister were speaking to a farmer, would she say that this is dancing on the head of a pin? We are talking about reducing an annual delinked payment to a farming business from a potential £30,000 to about £600. Given all the additional overheads placed on farming businesses that produce food, the Opposition bel…”

“I personally do not think that is good enough. You are saying “if you are judicially reviewed”. Why is it not a good case to show some real leadership and independence with this inquiry?”

“I am struggling to understand. The only reason you are looking at Oldham, as far as I understand it, is because the previous Home Secretary announced over 18 months ago, in January ’25, that Oldham would have a local inquiry.”

“It just happens to be the week before we all go off on recess.”

“Is there a risk that that could be used against any of the outcomes of the inquiry in three years’ time? Is there any perception of political association that others may wish to use as a narrative further down the line?”

“Have you calculated how many local areas you will be looking at?”

“So will we be looking at new areas being explored?”

“You may have done. But you have to do that because the Home Secretary instructed the inquiry to do that. We are now 18 months after the original announcement was made on local inquiries. Why are you not able to right now, on day one, announce that the Bradford district will be included and looked at? I ask because the …”

“The reason I ask is that some concern has been expressed about the fact that you were sitting in the House of Lords as a Labour peer. Therefore, I ask how we as a Committee, and others, can seek reassurance that the appointment is completely independent, not aligned with political appointments, or anything like that, s…”

“Thank you all for your time this afternoon. Baroness Longfield, I want to pick up on the appointment process, as a supplementary. You said at the start that you are on a leave of absence from the House of Lords. Is your intention to go back in as a Labour peer after this inquiry?”

“I want to stay on the theme of local inquiries, if that’s okay. Zoë, you mentioned and you repeated this point that you have all the information available and you are going back into areas to be able to ascertain those key themes. “Themes” has come up quite a few times, but what worries me—my saying this will not surpr…”

“Let me just finish my point. Would it not show some leadership to single out an area that has been referenced by many a person, not just politicians, where there needs to be a spotlight shown, to reinstall that trust quite quickly, that this is a truly independent inquiry? I suppose the question that I want to ask is w…”

“To really push you on “We believe it is possible” with an envelope of £65 million: the inquiry, as I understand it, has not even announced which local areas it is going to be focusing on, or what the criteria are for which local areas there will be. Surely, therefore, the funding allocation is not known, when we do not…”

“Coming back to my question, how can we be confident about the funding? As a follow up, I hope the funding envelope would not restrict how many local areas can be explored, and which ones are explored. I want to push on the £65 million.”

“Having sat in the House of Lords, I am sure you will know that. The point is that we also need to scrutinise the process. Would it not be a good thing to have announced that? If the local authority today turned around and said, as I have been asking Bradford to do for a long time, “We now demand that we have that inqui…”