Owen Paterson: It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cardiff North (Anna McMorrin). I endorse much of what she said about the horror that plastic presents to the world and the nonsense of exporting it. She might be interested to know that one of my sad failures as Secretary of State was failing to persuade our coalition partners to introduce a price incentive for a genuinely biodegradable...
Owen Paterson: I thank my right hon. Friend very much for his statement. I congratulate him on his new post and on the measured manner in which he has made public statements, and thank his colleagues for triggering the Bellwin scheme. Would he agree with—and hopefully take the advice of—my constituent, Mr Bryan Edwards, who has been chairman of the Melverley drainage board, on the confluence of the...
Owen Paterson: I heartily congratulate my right hon. Friend on bringing forward this policy, which she and I first discussed when I visited fruit farmers in her constituency when she was a thrusting young Back Bencher. Will she confirm that the great advantage of her scheme is that it gives flexibility and that we can now adapt our needs to supply and demand and the development of new labour-saving technologies?
Owen Paterson: I congratulate my hon. Friend on landing this timely debate. I apologise to her—and to you, Sir George—that I cannot stay for the whole debate; unfortunately, I have a clash, which I discovered only this morning. My hon. Friend touches on all the problems with how to fish in a mixed fishery. Does she agree that one of the real horrors of the CFP is the extraordinary level of discards? The...
Owen Paterson: One of the ways of consolidating the benefits of leaving the EU would be to make Northern Ireland the most attractive part of the UK to trade. When I was Secretary of State, we had an all-party campaign that had the support of all the business community. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of my successor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers), the Executive now...
Owen Paterson: Will the Minister give way?
Owen Paterson: I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman’s arguments. The Americans use peroxyacetic acid, not chlorine. Will he comment on the fact that Americans eat about twice the volume of chicken as Europeans but have significantly fewer cases of campylobacter and salmonella? He makes the correct case that they have different animal husbandry standards from ours, but what metric would he use?...
Owen Paterson: I find this absolutely extraordinary. Sir Richard Dearlove, formerly of MI6, has said that there is such a risk, and we know that there is a risk of losing key intelligence from our closest allies. What is the overwhelming advantage of the equipment that makes us consider taking the risk?
Owen Paterson: I congratulate my hon. Friend on landing the debate and on the powerful case that he is making. As he said, we have all been working very closely on the matter for some time. I think he would agree that the situation is going to get worse. Currently, 23% of Shropshire’s population are aged over 65. That will increase by 50%, to 33% of the population, by 2036, compared with the projection...
Owen Paterson: I heartily congratulate my right hon. Friend on his tenacity and skill in getting us to this point, and getting the institutions up and running. He touched on the issue of health. Sadly, health outcomes in Northern Ireland are now shockingly bad. In December 2018, all five trusts in Northern Ireland failed to meet their targets and recently we have been getting reports that people in real...
Owen Paterson: Will my hon. Friend give way?
Owen Paterson: I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing this very, very difficult subject forward. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for South West Surrey (Jeremy Hunt) for launching the Ockenden review. It is very easy to talk about numbers, but every one of these cases is unutterably terrible and ghastly for the family concerned, and obviously a total tragedy. We all know dreadful stories...
Owen Paterson: I heartily congratulate you on your re-election, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I wish you and the new team the very best of luck in your endeavours as you work with the new House. I congratulate the hon. Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) on her speech. She made her points very well, but she will not be surprised that I disagree with virtually every single word. Above all, I disagree with...
Owen Paterson: With great prescience, my hon. Friend makes exactly the point I was about to make. Here we are, 15 years later, and, moved by the Government, the “notwithstanding” clause is going into law, subject to the other place being sensible. I pay tribute to him. He has been mocked, traduced and insulted, but he has stood for the simple democratic principle that members of the public, every few...
Owen Paterson: I am sure the hon. Gentleman will not mention that 56% of the votes in the recent general election were for parties that wanted to keep Scotland inside the United Kingdom. I have made this point many times, so I will be very brief. How many more times do the people have to be listened to? We had the Cameron referendum promise, which granted a very clear in/out referendum. We had the...
Owen Paterson: No. I’m not giving way. We know where the Scottish nationalists are coming from, because they make the same point every time. Just to keep them happy, though, I will give them a little anecdote. In the town where I was born, Whitchurch, we have six polling stations in one building, the civic centre. On referendum day, people came up to me off a building site, covered in dust, and said,...
Owen Paterson: My right hon. Friend is quite right. The opening line of my paper said: “The Common Fisheries Policy is a biological, environmental, economic and social disaster; it is beyond reform.” Today we are giving ourselves the power to reform it and take back this power. I would like those on the Front Bench to remember that this is a crucial, totemic issue. We have to take back full power and...
Owen Paterson: My hon. Friend, who speaks with great knowledge of this subject and represents his constituents so well, has just spoken with total wisdom. It is fundamental that we do not make the mistake of the 1970s, and allow the allocation of fish resources to be a trading card in these negotiations. We have said that we will take back control, and I am looking at the Secretary of State. We will take...
Owen Paterson: My hon. right Friend is absolutely right.
Owen Paterson: I want to move on, because others wish to speak. I really hope that Ministers take this on board. It is fundamental that we take back full control, and, however much pressure we are under from our current European partners, regain our status as an independent nation, partly because of the environmental harm—the shocking shame of throwing back a million tonnes of fish. There is one other...