Speeches by Carling.

“T9. Young people in North West Cambridgeshire and across the country are struggling to access mortgages and get on to the housing ladder due to thin credit files. Will the Minister explore requiring lettings agents and large landlords, with the consent of tenants, to report rental payment data to credit reference agenc…”

“To move back to public bodies reform more broadly, the public bodies reform programme that your Government led would have required sustained engagement and buy-in from across Government for a long time. How did you create that sustained engagement and buy-in, and how was that structured and resourced at the centre of G…”

“That was going to be my question: where do you think that best fits and how can that be ensured?”

“To follow up on that, before I ask about a different subject. You are talking about how a Prime Minister can make sure that the people they are appointing as junior Ministers have the right skill set. Obviously, Prime Ministers are very busy people and do not necessarily have the time to conduct really thorough assessm…”

“They have now.”

“I have long been arguing that we need an overhaul of charity regulation to tackle rogue operators who are exploiting charity status to peddle extremism and hate, so I am thrilled that the Government have listened and are starting that today with new powers for the Charity Commission—I look forward to seeing the detail.…”

“That is where the problem is.”

“From my constituency experience, there seem to be system data-sharing problems as well, which we have not discussed so much today. I have a constituent who left the civil service in December due to ill health. They have been in touch with Capita several times and have told me that they have got different information an…”

“Over this Labour Government’s term in office so far, we have spent a lot of time discussing and highlighting the evils of child abuse and the exploitation of women and girls, and there has been a lot of progress. The audit from Baroness Casey on grooming gangs made several recommendations that we have already put into …”

“I agree completely with my hon. Friend. In the debate in the House of Lords earlier today, Baroness Grey-Thompson gave a good example from when she was a younger athlete of sports coaches’ behaviour that she had observed. She believes that if there had been a duty relating to reasonable suspicion, it could have helped …”

“I am very grateful to the hon. Lady, who I know has done a lot of work on this matter, in particular on making sure that the seal of confession is not exempted from mandatory reporting. I very much appreciate her work on that, which is really important. She says—I am sure that she has the correct figure—that it takes o…”

“I am really grateful for that contribution from my hon. Friend, and I absolutely agree with her. It is really important that we listen to IICSA, which spent many years on this, and deliver what it recommended. When it comes to religious organisations in which there is a strong culture of distrusting secular authorities…”

“I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for raising that point. It sounds like really helpful evidence and a really good example, and I will certainly go away and have a look at it. I will not rehash the arguments I made in June, but I will say that IICSA was clear, having examined the issue in huge depth over many ye…”

“No, that is very helpful. Off the back of that and some of the earlier comments that you made, does there need to be some more co-ordination in standards and reporting regimes across Parliament, Government and other areas of public life? I am particularly thinking about the interaction between the ministerial code and …”

“Daniel, you touched on this topic just now, but I will ask the question anyway. We have a set-up now where the EIC has been set up and has had its scope and terms of reference set by Government, but it has a remit to cover standards all across public life, including in Parliament. Is it appropriate for a Government-spo…”

“Before the 2024 election, the Standards Committee described the parliamentary standards landscape in a report as being complicated but having “a logic behind the complexity”. Daniel, could you give us a sense of whether the system is well enough understood first by people within Parliament and by the general public mor…”

“Just to go back to a couple of the questions that we were asking around the role of the EIC, I wondered, John, if you could give some thoughts on whether the fact that the EIC will be taking on quite a cross-cutting strategic role across standards could create duplication with the Electoral Commission on those issues a…”

“You mentioned there the statistics on how well run elections are and how people feel about that, which is really important, but there is also, as you say, how people feel about the democratic system, trust in politics, and the process more generally, where there is a lot more concern. When measuring your success, which…”

“Thank you; that is really helpful. Just to move on to a slightly different area, in your written evidence, you have talked quite a bit about how the Electoral Commission works to ensure public confidence in the democratic system as a whole. Can you give us more of a sense of how you do that and how you are measuring yo…”

“Just to go back to a couple of the questions that we were asking around the role of the EIC, I wondered, John, if you could give some thoughts on whether the fact that the EIC will be taking on quite a cross-cutting strategic role across standards could create duplication with the Electoral Commission on those issues a…”