Speeches by Smith.

“T5. On Friday, I met a constituent who has been told that she is losing all her child maintenance payments because her ex-husband simply told the Child Maintenance Service that he had moved abroad, which my constituent knows is entirely false. What steps will the Government take to verify claims from people trying to g…”

“Thames Valley is already a large police force, where our superb police officers and staff struggle to balance resources effectively, even with local command units now across rural areas like my own and the bigger cities, such as Oxford and Milton Keynes. Given that it is such a large force—and that right now it finds i…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) on securing this important debate. It is not the first time that I have heard her make the case for Aldridge station, which she does with considerable force. She has been …”

“This morning I met Roly May, the landlord of the Russell Arms pub in Butlers Cross. Government Members might recognise it: it is the closest pub to Chequers, where they can drown their sorrows after an audience with the Prime Minister. The pub has seen as £17,500 business rate increase. I have heard similar horror stor…”

“Does the Secretary of State accept that cancelling an £18-million, purpose-built, 152-place SEND school in Buckinghamshire, due to open in 2028, and replacing it with just £8 million over three years will inevitably increase reliance on high-cost independent placements, worsen outcomes for children with the most acute …”

“The Minister has been consistent this morning both in his defence of the indefensible and in avoiding putting a price on this scheme. He did not answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson), who asked whether the Government dispute the £1.8 billion figure from the OBR. If h…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. Too often when we talk about rural activities, too many dismiss them as relics of a bygone age. Those of us who represent rural constituencies know that nothing could be further from the truth. Horse riding remains a vital living part of rural life, deeply emb…”

“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. She is absolutely right and I wish her a speedy recovery from her own horse-related incident. What might seem a minor lapse in judgment from behind the wheel has serious and sometimes devastating consequences for riders and horses, given that the rider has limited…”

“The Minister said in her statement that she did not want to look the other way, but in reality this Government are looking the other way when it comes to rural communities. I listened carefully to the answers she gave to my hon. Friend the Member for North Dorset (Simon Hoare), but the fact is that, with the exception …”

“If the Minister is serious about, in his words, “doubling down” on brownfield first, will he look again at the Campaign to Protect Rural England report, which was put together with academic rigour, which identified enough land in England alone for 1.4 million homes on brownfield sites? If he looks again at that serious…”

“T5. Given that Germany has lifted its partial arms embargo on Israel, why do the UK Government persist with restrictions on defence export licences to our ally?”

“I am grateful to the Secretary of State for that answer, but it is curious to see what is and is not in the Red Book from the Budget we just had. Page 88 shows in intricate detail just how big the welfare budget will get as a result of the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap, but there is no such analysis anywhere i…”

“2. What discussions he has had with the Chancellor of Exchequer on meeting the NATO target of 5% of GDP on defence expenditure.”

“As ever, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (John Lamont) for securing this debate on an issue that matters greatly: ensuring that transport, in this case on the railways, effectively serves rural communities. It is part…”

“Chiltern Railways serves my constituency and Buckinghamshire more widely, on both the Chiltern main line and the Aylesbury branch. The Aylesbury branch in particular is a very rural service; it stops at a number of very small stations, often village stations, between Aylesbury and Marylebone. For a very long time, it w…”

“I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, but the trains will continue to run 24/7, whereas we are talking about a system in which if renewable sources drop and the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine, the electricity is not there. I am not sure that his analogy is necessarily a helpful one, but I h…”

“As ever, Mr Vickers, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. The Opposition have a deep and growing concern about the direction in which Ministers of this Government are taking our energy system. It is a direction that depends increasingly on the weather, and I do not believe that anyone in this House should…”

“We have a Government who could not even keep their own Budget under wraps. What hope do they have with our personal data?”

“It is always a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. As an island nation, Britain has always been reliant on our sailors, as other Members have said. For centuries, we have depended on them to protect our nation, to transport goods around the world and to deliver the products of our national endea…”

“The point of my comments on the actions of the previous Government is not to say that they were wholly conclusive and the end of the matter. But I believe the steps that were taken by the previous Government did demonstrate a step forward, as I think the right hon. Gentleman acknowledged in the debate—perhaps not the e…”