Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, as you slide gracefully into the Chair. I am pleased to see you there too. Before you disappear, Mr Speaker, I thank you for everything you have done. You have been a tremendous Speaker during my time here and, like many others, I am very grateful to you. I hope we see each other again before too long.

Madam Deputy Speaker, it is an enormous pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I know that I cannot now say Madam Chairman, as I know you would have liked me to yesterday, but we like to do things properly in this House. If I say “you”, I will be referring to you, and not anybody else.

I would like to thank my South Norfolk constituents for sending me here at six successive general elections. I want to thank my private secretary and office manager Tracy Reeve for 27 years of outstanding service, both to me and my South Norfolk constituents for all of my 23 years as an MP and for some four years before that as private secretary to my predecessor John MacGregor, now Lord MacGregor of Pulham Market. You know him well, Madam Deputy Speaker, as you served as his special adviser many years ago, before either of us was in this House. You know Tracy Reeve, my private secretary for many years after Lord MacGregor left the Commons, and you know my Constituency of South Norfolk very well too, so it is a great pleasure to finish this debate with you in the Chair. Nothing I have done in the last 23 years for my South Norfolk constituents would have been possible without Tracy Reeve, and I am enormously grateful for her service.

This morning I was lying in bed with my wife Catherine and my dog Beaufort, who had made himself comfortable using the well-known “commando crawl through a non-existent space” technique for which spaniels are famous—by the way, my wife will get very cross if I do not mention her dog Calouste. As I was lying there patting his head and thinking of what I wanted to say, I was reminded about a story I heard from a colleague in the Tea Room the other day. As a Conservative Member of Parliament, she had attended the Conservative candidates’ weekend selection process, and she said that she had heard one of the would-be candidates opine that there was no point in becoming an MP unless one became a Minister. One hopes that he will learn quite a lot before he ever gets anywhere near this place—if he does at all—because, plainly, that is completely incorrect.

My colleague’s story reminded me of another one, particularly in this week when we have finally righted the long-standing injustices of the infected blood scandal—I remember Alistair Burt standing around here talking about it at the end of the 2017 Parliament, and that was very recently in relation to the length of that scandal—and the Post Office Horizon scandal. I remember that, as I left the Public Accounts Committee in 2017, after some 16 years, Tony Collins, the renowned computer journalist, telephoned me about it. Luckily, because I was then involved in other matters to do with housing, James Arbuthnot, and many others in this place, took it up very seriously.

As we finally correct those wrongs this week, and are reminded of other huge wrongs over many decades, such as the one corrected by the work of those including Andy Burnham—the Hillsborough scandal—and of other great work by many other great colleagues, I was reminded of another story. Consider the following:

“Investigations into the allegations have revealed them to be a mixture of unsubstantiated rumour, incorrect information or repetition of earlier allegations which have been fully investigated and found to be unsupported by the facts.

A question: was that official statement aimed at refuting public disquiet about (1) the efficacy of measures taken against Foot and Mouth, (2) the reliability of the army’s S80 rifle and radio sets in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, (3) a government order that police should keep protesters out of sight during the state visit of the President of China, (4) the possibility that BSE can cross the species barrier to humans, (5) the loss of an RAF Chinook helicopter and twenty-five security personnel on the Mull of Kintyre, (6) the existence of illnesses collectively known as Gulf War Syndrome, (7) the export to Iraq of machine tools capable of arms manufacture, (8) the circumstances surrounding the torpedoing of the Belgrano, (9) the radiation sickness claimed by some participants in the British atomic tests of the 1950s”— which my hon. Friend Mr Baron has so assiduously campaigned on, having even joined by telephone a surgery that I had with my constituents because I knew that he knew more about that matter than anyone else—

“(10) experiments carried out at Porton Down during the same period (11) the denial of full pensions to thousands of disabled ex-servicemen (and their widows) for over fifty years, or (12) …the loss of the carrier HMS Glorious and her two escorts in 1940?

The answer is that the statement was made by the Ministry of Defence in December 1994 to refute a body of opinion that there might, indeed, be a condition…referred to as Gulf War Syndrome. But it could just as well have been…those others”.

We all know this. It is a phenomenon that Tim Slessor, in his book, “Ministries of Deception”—which I am quoting from here—refers to as “the Whitehall Loop”.

“At its simplest, this is the closed circuit procedure where, in reply to questions asked of a government department or minister, the answers are put together by the very same civil servants whose earlier judgement is both the subject and the cause of the inquiry in the first place.”

I remember bumping into Simon Burns, who was, at the time, the Health Minister responsible for the National programme for IT in the health service—the NPfIT, as it was called. There were at least eight other Ministers during that period; I tracked it closely from 2002 to 2011. I would not recommend that anyone read it unless they have a particularly masochistic disposition, but in the book that I wrote about Government, I devoted an entire chapter to the NPfIT, where I lovingly detailed the many ways in which what was then called “Connecting for Health” managed to conceal information about how badly things were going. One day, Simon Burns came up to me in the Tea Room and said, “Richard, I am sick and tired of being told things by you, and then finding out six months later that they are true.”

The truth is that, whether it is on the Child Support Agency, the Criminal Records Bureau, the tax credit scandal, the Rural Payments Agency scandal—which has led some farmers, sadly, to commit suicide—the Student Loans Company, or the recruitment of junior doctors, or many, many other things, it is our constituents who, through us as their Members of Parliament, keep Government honest. They so often know far more about how Government is actually working than the Government themselves do. That is why we need Members of Parliament who see their chief job as representing and protecting their constituents, and as requiring the Government of the day, of whichever political complexion, to justify themselves and to keep explaining their actions.

I am delighted to see my friend Dame Margaret Hodge back in her place. Of the various things I have done in the 23 years I have been here, I have not found any more consequential—or more fun—than the work we did together when I was her deputy Chairman on the Public Accounts Committee, between 2010 and 2015. She performed an extraordinary service and, by the way, wrote a great book about it, “Called to Account”, which hon. Members may wish to read.

It says next in my notes, “Dame Eleanor said,” but that is because when I wrote them you were not in your seat, Madam Deputy Speaker. As you yourself said yesterday, MPs of all parties are the people who do not just shout at the television but

“get up and do something about it.”—[Official Report, 23 May 2024;
Vol. 750, c. 1104.]

It is an honourable estate; it is an honourable calling. It is one of the most important things we can do. It is worth devoting oneself to, to the point of exhaustion, in order to keep our people free and to keep our Governments honest.

It says here “self-commissioned housing”, so I suppose I had better say a word about that before I conclude. It is well known that for the past 10 years or so, since I steered through the Self-build and Custom Housebuilding Act 2015, I have worked very hard to try to implement that. I see the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend Mrs May, nodding. I remember bouncing up to her in the Lobby many years ago, when she was Prime Minister, and saying, “Is it true that self-build housing was discussed at Cabinet this morning?” She said, “Yes.”

I am sorry to report that there is still more to do. I see Lucy Powell in her place. I nearly succeeded in coaxing her into giving evidence for the report I did in 2021 for the then Prime Minister—it was several Prime Ministers ago; we have had quite a few. There are some excellent recommendations in there, some of which have even been implemented. I wrote to the current Housing Secretary on 11 March with some detailed suggestions about how the recommendations might be implemented.

I will sit down in one or two minutes, but I must place on the record my huge gratitude to the Culture Secretary, my right hon. and learned Friend Lucy Frazer, who, when she was Housing Minister, allowed me to introduce her to one of the nation’s leading planning silks. Silk to silk, they talked through the issues and the things I was proposing. My right hon. and learned Friend said to her officials, “What’s wrong with this?” and they could not provide her with an answer, so that now sits on the statute book as section 123 of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. I hope that a future Government will do their best to implement it, and I shall certainly be encouraging them to do so.

In conclusion, I will just say this. It has always been an article of faith to me that there is no “they”, just “us”. If there are things we want to fix and change, it is we who have to do it. As Karl Popper put it—I am not jealous of many things, but I am jealous of the right hon. Member for Barking because she was at the London School of Economics when he was still teaching there:

“Progress depends on us, on our watchfulness and our efforts, on the clarity of our conception of our aims and on the reasonableness of their choice. Instead of posing as prophets, we must be the makers of our fate.”