Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what progress his Department has made on meeting its commitment to deliver £11.6 billion in climate finance to vulnerable countries by 2026.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to minimise the disruption of import checks on food products arriving from the EU.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to improve its communications with food importers in the (a) UK and (b) EU on upcoming import checks on food products arriving from the EU.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to improve (a) awareness of and (b) compliance with upcoming import checks on food products arriving from the EU to Great Britain among food importers in the (i) UK and (ii) EU.
Richard Thomson: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing the debate, and I welcome everyone with an interest in kinship care who has made the journey to Westminster to hear it. Anybody who has done so or who is watching cannot fail to be moved by the powerful speeches that have been made by all the Members who have...
Richard Thomson: As if the future stoking of inflation through extra Brexit red tape was not bad enough, businesses are already having to cope with uncertainty, the lack of a level playing field and the threat to our own food safety and security through the failure to introduce checks of our own. Given that Ministers were saying as recently as April that those checks will begin on 31 March, can the Minister...
Richard Thomson: The Government could stop making existing global problems even worse when they apply to the UK—I was following up on the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) about the cost of checks on imported food—but the only thing worse than bad border checks is no border checks at all. We are no longer imposing SPS checks on food coming in from the EU. Is the...
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the availability of fresh food will not be affected by the implementation of import checks on food products arriving from the EU.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the implementation of import checks on food products arriving from the European Union to Great Britain causes minimal loss of perishable products.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that (a) border inspection teams and (b) port authorities are fully-staffed ahead of the implementation of import checks on food products arriving from the EU.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the impact of import checks on food products arriving from the EU on Christmas supply chains.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of import checks on food products arriving from the EU on (a) independent and (b) small and medium-sized (i) sandwich shops, (ii) delicatessens and (iii) grocery wholesale businesses.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether she has had recent discussions with industry in the (a) UK and (b) EU on the potential impact of import checks on food products arriving from the EU.
Richard Thomson: To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment her Department has made of the potential impact of import checks on products arriving from the EU on (a) food prices and (b) consumers.
Richard Thomson: It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I take this opportunity to sincerely congratulate the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) not only on securing the debate, but on his persistence on this issue. The first time that he and I spoke at the same time on this issue was in a debate on 10 December 2020. I think he only had three minutes on that...
Richard Thomson: I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement. My party hopes Khalife will soon return to custody. Leaving aside the extraordinary manner of the details of the escape, some more immediate questions arise. Mr Khalife may have been believed to pose a low risk to members of the public, but he was clearly thought to present a considerable risk to his service colleagues and to...
Richard Thomson: I am well aware that time is limited; you will be pleased to hear, Mr Speaker, that so too is my capacity for repeating arguments that I have made many times previously. My party believes that this Bill is wrong in principle and that in practice it will not achieve the aims that the Secretary of State believes, no doubt with great sincerity, that it will. We will therefore be joining the...
Richard Thomson: The cost of living crisis is clearly continuing to bite hard in Northern Ireland, with footfall at stores across Northern Ireland falling by 5% throughout August. What steps is the Department taking to enable people to take full advantage of the highly privileged economic status and market access that Northern Ireland now has, which this Government have deprived to the rest of the UK?
Richard Thomson: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of trends in the number of debt collections undertaken on behalf of Government Departments since 2018.
Richard Thomson: It has been revealed that Integrated Debt Services, a company set up by the UK Government to recover personal debt, saw its profits increase by a staggering 132% last year. Do Ministers think it is right that this company should be able to profit to that extent out of the misery of the cost of living crisis?
