Speeches by Onwurah.

“You can see that there might be a challenge for small businesses. Alex Hall-Chen, are any of your members currently using digital forms of right-to-work checks? If so, are they increasing efficiency, and what are the costs involved?”

“Does that business need to have digital infrastructure? Do they need to have secure web providers or something like that?”

“So if I am a small business and I want to use a digital verification provider, it could cost me between £1 and £6 per check?”

“Thank you very much for enabling me to guest on this inquiry. I am very interested in the costs and implications of the transition to mandatory digital right-to-work checks. I will start with you, David Crack. I understand that only 23% of employer right-to-work checks use your members. Can you tell us about the costs …”

“Just to clarify, how many eVisas are there?”

“That is a really moving story. Part of the challenge here is that for those non-British and Irish citizens who do not have a stable right to work, a stable proof of ID is something very important that they look for, but many British citizens who automatically have a right to work object to that exact same feature—it is…”

“What is our entire working-age population?”

“That is a digital ID, and the Government are not making digital ID mandatory. Maybe this is a technical question, but can you have stable tokens without having a stable digital ID?”

“But your right to work is not necessarily stable if you are on a visa; it can change.”

“But you said that they have tried to clean up the data that underpins it. What can Committees such as mine look for or ask for to have confidence that lessons have been learned, and the data has been cleaned?”

“The proposal now is for mandatory right-to-work checks, but without a mandatory digital ID, so there would not necessarily be one identifier. The issues that you are talking about would carry on, because there would not necessarily be one identifier for a right-to-work check.”

“So an order of magnitude higher in terms of numbers.”

“I am just trying to get an idea of where we are going from: from 10 million eVisas, and if a digital ID is for the entire—”

“T2. The three-year local government funding settlement is a welcome return to long-term planning. Newcastle city council faces a 34% rise in adult social care costs, compared with only a 15% rise in core spending power. That is taking more and more money away from the many services that my constituents depend upon. Wil…”

“I congratulate my hon. Friend on freeing so many of my constituents from the historical and, indeed, feudal injustice of the leasehold system. I urge him to ignore the clarion complaints of those freeholders who predicated their business model on the continued exploitation of working people through extortionate ground …”

“I see that Tory MPs are too scared to turn up to hear how we are cleaning up their mess. As a Newcastle MP, as an engineer and as a cold water swimmer—the North sea is very cold—I welcome the Government’s new vision for water, which will deliver the water my constituents deserve at a price they can afford. I am, quite …”

“I welcome the consultation. We know that technology has changed childhood, we believe that it has changed child socialisation and we think that it may have changed brain development, perhaps even motor neurone skills, but there is little concrete evidence beyond the individual terrible stories and, of course, the profi…”

“The brutal regime in Iran has destroyed so many lives, and as a woman and a feminist I want to pay particular tribute to the brave women of Iran fighting for their freedom against such odds. They were promised support by President Trump. Can the Minister say what form that support may take, and what involvement the UK …”

“Knocking on doors in Denton, Westerhope, Arthur’s Hill and Wingrove, I found that, for the first time in my 15 years as an MP, the No. 1 issue was global insecurity. President Trump has succeeded in uniting the British people against his unwarranted attack on a close ally. My right hon. Friend is right to be calm and d…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for the passionate points that he is making. I want to support him by pointing out that the answer to a parliamentary question of mine in October stated that the Minister for Science, Lord Vallance, was following up “with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to explore a coordinated approa…”