Transatlantic trade agreement is a threat to health and sovereignty of UK citizens, says Roger

Roger is concerned that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which is currently being negotiated between the European Union and the United States, poses a severe threat to the UK’s public services and its regulatory standards in a number of areas including safety, food hygiene, workers’ rights and environmental protection.
The idea behind TTIP is to level the differences between European and American regulations and so promote trade. In practice, however, trade barriers between the EU and the USA are already extremely low, and the effect of TTIP would be to drag regulations down to the lowest existing standard in each area, removing protections for people both as consumers and as citizens.


The Conservatives’ constant mantra is that red tape must be cut, but some rules--such as those on workers’ rights, food safety or the use of toxic chemicals--were put in place for very good reasons. For example, in the European Union it is illegal to sell beef which has been produced using growth hormones which have been linked to cancer in humans, or to sell poultry which has been washed with chlorine. These laws do not apply in the US, and TTIP would remove the legal barriers which prevent companies from selling meat produced in these ways in the EU or in the UK. In the EU almost no GM food is sold due to widespread consumer opposition, but in the US almost 70% of processed foods contain genetically modified organisms. TTIP would remove the legal barriers which prevent GM food being sold in the EU, legislating in accordance with food companies’ desire to reach new markets rather than citizens’ need for safe, natural food.


The picture is similar for environmental legislation, where standards are currently much higher in the EU than the US. TTIP would bring deregulation across a wide range of sectors, and remove hard-won regulations which protect human rights and the planet above corporations’ right to make a profit. The consequences of this would be dire for Americans as well as Europeans. While the EU would be under threat from the USA’s lower standards on consumer safety and employment law, American citizens would suffer from the introduction of the EU’s looser financial regulations, with the potential loss of the tighter regulation brought in since the financial crash. American businesses would suffer from the loss of the popular “Buy America” scheme to support local enterprise and jobs, while European workers would be under threat from lower US labour standards and poorer trade-union rights. TTIP would introduce a race to the bottom on the standards which help to protect people’s livelihoods as well as their health.


Also of serious concern is the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism which is included in TTIP. This would give companies the power to bypass the courts, and to use private tribunals to sue governments for enacting legislation which protected people or the environment at the expense of corporate profits. Roger said: “This sounds absurd, but it is already happening. The government of Argentina froze utility bills, only to be sued for lost profits by the transnational water and energy companies whose greed had caused bills to reach such a high level. Tobacco company Philip Morris is suing the governments of Australia and Uruguay over their policies on cigarette packaging, which were brought in to protect the health of their citizens. I do not want to see the UK in this situation.”


TTIP also contains provisions to remove distinctions between public and private providers of services, and between national and foreign providers. In practice, this would put the BBC, the NHS and the UK’s comprehensive schools under threat from transnational corporations. The UK’s public sector would be privatised even further, with a consequent lowering of standards and loss of public accountability. Roger commented: “Essential public services, such as health and education, are called ‘public’ for a reason. When these services are provided by the UK Government, they are accountable to UK citizens in a way which they simply would not be if they were provided by transnational corporations which, unlike the NHS, have absolutely no ethos of serving the public good rather than increasing shareholder profits at all costs.”


Roger said: “I am extremely worried about the possible effects of many of the provisions in TTIP on my constituents and on people throughout the UK. What is perhaps most concerning, however, is that these negotiations are taking place in secret. Most people are not even aware of TTIP, and the treaty is being negotiated without the chance for proper public scrutiny. Astonishingly, the European Commission intends to block public access to all documents on the TTIP negotiations for the next 30 years, prioritising companies’ desire for secrecy over the well-being of citizens.”


“I do not believe that most people in the UK would be happy to see food safety standards drastically lowered, or multinational conglomerates given the right to sue the UK Government--at taxpayer expense, of course--for enacting legislation which protects people’s health or the environment. This is deeply undemocratic, and I do not think people want this. I therefore call on the Government to act with greater openness and transparency with regards to this treaty, and for once to act in the best interests of UK citizens rather than to protect multinational companies’ profits. It is completely unnecessary and extremely dangerous to hand over any more power to greedy, unscrupulous corporations at the expense of the people of this country.”

Letters written by Prince Charles to politicians should be made public

Commenting on the news that Ministers and Government Departments have spent over £274,000 on legal fees in the past four years to prevent the publication of letters written by Prince Charles to politicians, Roger said: “I think it is outrageous that this amount of money has been spent on trying to hide letters from Prince Charles on ‘political matters’.

“Prince Charles, as the heir to the throne, is perfectly entitled to express a view to Ministers and Government Departments on political issues if he wants to, but he should not have any elevated status above elected politicians and members of the public. If I write a letter to a Government Department then it is in the public domain, and quite rightly so. Why should letters written by Prince Charles be treated differently? This is particularly important as some of his representations may well be about matters which affect the vast land holdings held by the Crown”.

The reason given by the Attorney General for not making public the contents of Charles’ letters to Government was that it would damage Charles’ ability to perform his duties as king, as the letters cast doubt on his political neutrality. Roger commented: “It is adding insult to injury that these legal costs are being paid for from the public purse. Charles has damaged his own neutrality--and therefore his ability to perform his future role as king--by his meddling in public affairs. Rather than allowing the public to see the truth of his lobbying and make up their own minds about his suitability as head of state, this Government has spent UK citizens’ hard-earned taxes on hiding the truth of Charles’ interference from public scrutiny.”

Prince Charles receives an income of £19m per year from the Duchy of Cornwall, which he “owns” as the heir to the throne. Despite his using this property to engage in a wide range of commercial activities, he is exempt from paying tax on this enormous income and does so only voluntarily. He is therefore able to pay tax under the arrangements which are most favourable to him, unlike all the UK citizens struggling to make ends meet, who are not permitted to pick and choose which taxes they pay.

Roger Godsiff MP writes to DWP to protest effects of mandatory reconsideration

 

Roger has written to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, to protest about the suffering the policy of mandatory reconsideration of ESA claims is already causing in his constituency of Birmingham Hall Green.

 

Roger wrote to the Minister about the case of one of his constituents, who was told that her ESA was being stopped despite the fact that she suffers from a life-threatening heart condition as well as kidney failure. After her ESA was stopped, she was unable to afford to make the journey from Birmingham to attend her appointments at a London hospital.

 

Happily, the result of the reconsideration (which took nearly two months) was that the original decision should be overturned, and the constituent’s ESA reinstated. The original Atos assessment awarded her just 6 points, but at the reconsideration she was found to actually qualify for 15 points. Roger has called on the Department for Work and Pensions to investigate how Atos got this assessment so badly wrong, as he is extremely concerned that similar grossly incorrect assessments are being carried out on a wide scale.

 

Roger is also concerned about DWP’s refusal to set a time limit for how long mandatory reconsideration may take. This means that people are left in limbo, with no money with which to buy food or travel to hospital appointments for weeks or even months. This issue has been raised many times by a number of Members of Parliament, but DWP has consistently refused to set itself standards on this.

 

In his letter to DWP, Roger wrote: “While my constituent’s ESA has now been reinstated, it is not the case that no damage has been done. There is an extra cost to the taxpayer, who had to pay Atos to carry out an assessment which was so incompetent that it had to be redone, again at taxpayer expense. Much more importantly, there is the human cost to my constituent and others like her. She is seriously ill, and has a right to state support because she is too unwell to work. Yet she has been caused an enormous amount of extra stress and worry, as well as having to miss crucial hospital appointments. As she wrote to me, ‘Every day is a struggle but this has made everything that little bit more difficult.’”

 

Roger concluded his letter to DWP with: “Has a cost-benefit assessment been carried out of the savings to the taxpayer of the mandatory reconsideration policy? I am extremely sceptical about the likelihood that that, after factoring in the cost of the Atos assessment and the mandatory reconsideration, this policy will have saved the taxpayer any money at all. Even if it does, it is at the expense of vulnerable and seriously ill people such as my constituent, whose health can only be made worse by the added stress of having their only source of income snatched away while your Department takes months to overturn a hopelessly flawed Atos assessment.”

Roger calls for indefinite delay on plans to extract and sell NHS data

BIRMINGHAM MP ROGER GODSIFF CALLS FOR INDEFINITE DELAY ON NHS PLANS TO EXTRACT LARGE AMOUNTS OF CONFIDENTIAL PATIENT DATA.

Birmingham Hall Green MP Roger Godsiff has tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) calling for an indefinite delay on the introduction of plans known as care.data, which will extract and link large amounts of patient data.

Speaking from Westminster, Mr Godsiff said: "The NHS wants to extract this data to ‘improve the delivery of healthcare and to benefit researchers inside and outside the NHS' but I have grave reservations about the whole project.

“By rights this programme should have been up and running by now, but the Information Commissioner was so concerned about the project that the start date for the harvesting of patient data was delayed by a year to spring 2014, because of issues relating to the confidentiality of the extracted data, lack of public awareness and the extent of information sharing”. 

While welcoming the current public awareness campaign by NHS England, Mr Godsiff believes that these plans are flawed because the whole programme operates on the principle of 'presumed consent'. This means that unless individuals notify doctors that they want to 'opt out' out of the whole process, the NHS takes the default position that individuals have consented to their data being taken and used.

“I believe that the whole process begins to undermine fundamentally the long established principle of patient confidentiality, and is a recipe for confusion”, he said. “The NHS just seems to think patronisingly that all it needs to do is to throw in health-speak phrases such as ‘improve delivery’, ‘for the benefit of the service’ and ‘in the public interest’, and people will just roll over and allow their data to be taken because it’s for their own good!”

He continued: “I have absolutely no faith in assertions by Government that patient data will be coded in such a way as to guarantee anonymity, particularly as the NHS will reserve to itself the right in ‘the public interest and for the benefit of the health service’ to allow access to identifiable data. There is also the Government's record as a whole on data management or rather, chronic mismanagement and leakages. I believe that patients themselves, not NHS England, should determine when and where their own medical information is used and for what purposes”.

Mr Godsiff continued: "It has been one of the blackest years on record for the NHS. The current, deep-seated issues of health mismanagement, accompanied by chronic lack of oversight and corrosive levels of secrecy, have led directly to patient deaths, as the Mid-Staffs NHS Trust saga proved. I find it very difficult to understand why the Government should insist on introducing a measure such as this at a time when it already has its hands full dealing with current problems”.

He concluded: “I believe that the Government should first sort out the problems that face it immediately before even contemplating introducing a new system such as care.data.

“I'm sure that many commercial companies which want to bid for lucrative NHS contracts would relish the prospect of being able to access this kind of data in any form, anonymous or otherwise, in developing a bid for such work. However, at the moment it is just another worrying example of Government encroaching on confidential, personal data, seemingly oblivious to the consequences for individual citizens.”

You can read the Parliamentary Questions Roger asked the Government on care.data last week at:

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm140115/text/140115w0002.htm#140115101001135

Roger asks DWP for answers on people affected by Coalition bedroom tax mess-up in Hall Green

Roger has tabled a Written Parliamentary Question to ask the Department for Work and Pensions how many people in his constituency have been affected by the latest bout of Coalition incompetence on benefits.

The Government’s failure to introduce full retrospective legislation when bringing in the bedroom tax left a legal loophole which makes a number of tenants exempt from this charge. Social housing tenants who have been living at the same address and claiming housing benefit continuously since 1 January 1996 were not legally obliged to pay the bedroom tax and should not have been charged.

It is estimated that between 4% and 15% of people forced to pay the bedroom tax were charged incorrectly, and will be able to claim reimbursement.  

After tabling the question to DWP, Roger commented: “This is extremely embarrassing for the Government. How can people trust them to run the country if they can’t even legislate correctly to introduce their own policies? Yet for once the effects of Coalition incompetence will be positive, with thousands of people being repaid their bedroom tax payments.”

“However, this is really just a stay of execution. While some people will receive refunds of their bedroom tax payments, a much larger number will not. Those who are exempt are not likely to remain so for long, as the Coalition will soon close the loophole.”

“This reimbursement will not compensate people for the stress and worry inflicted by this policy or return people to homes they were forced to leave. Nor will it prevent further suffering being inflicted on ill, disabled or low-paid people by a Government addicted to cutting their support.”

Councils will not necessarily notify social housing tenants that they may be liable for reimbursement. If you think you might qualify for this exemption and have wrongly been charged, you will need to contact your local housing benefit office to find out. A template letter is available online at 

http://speye.wordpress.com/2013/12/17/continuous-hb-since-before-1-jan-1996-are-you-exempt-from-the-bedroom-tax/

Roger Godsiff MP challenges DEFRA claim of intellectual property rights in dead badgers

Roger has written to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs to challenge its claim that intellectual property regulations justify withholding the results of TB tests carried out on culled badgers from public scrutiny.

DEFRA refuses to carry out routine TB tests on shot badgers, making it more difficult to assess the “effectiveness” of the badger cull. However, while it refuses to respond to calls by MPs and taxpayers to institute routine testing, it will carry out tests at the request of landowners.

Roger tabled a Parliamentary Question to ask for the results of these tests, but was told by George Eustice MP, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Farming, Food and Marine Environment, that these results are being withheld under regulation 12(5)(c), which protects intellectual property.

Roger wrote to DEFRA to express his concern that this section of the intellectual property regulations, which are supposed to protect the creators of works of art, is being applied to dead badgers. He requested an internal review and a full explanation of the reasoning behind DEFRA’s decision that tests on culled badgers fall under IP protection.

Roger said: “I find it worrying that the results of an extremely unpopular policy, carried out at public expense but without any approval from the taxpayer, are being withheld from the public and from proper public scrutiny. It is a stretch of credibility that landowners can hold intellectual property rights in dead badgers, and I would like DEFRA to justify this decision.”

Roger demanded an explanation from DEFRA on a number of issues, including how the results of post-mortems carried out on animals at taxpayer expense fall under IP regulations. Roger also asked DEFRA to explain why it decided that the public interest in withholding the results outweighed the public interest in disclosure, and reminded Mr Eustice that the same regulations state that a public body will apply a presumption in favour of the disclosure of information.

END

You can read Roger’s question to DEFRA and the response here, and Roger’s letter to DEFRA here

Roger protests against human rights violations in Colombia

Roger was among a small group of MPs who voted against approving the draft European Union (Definition of Treaties) (Colombia and Peru Trade Agreement) Order 2013. Sixty-one MPs chose to vote against accepting this free-trade agreement with Colombia in protest against the country’s failure to honour its commitments on human rights.

Roger explained the reason for his “no” vote: “Once again, this Government have put economic interests above human rights. In just one year, 37 human rights activists were murdered in Colombia, sixteen of whom were murdered by Government forces during strike action. The free trade agreement sets out standards for human rights protection, but I am concerned that this is just empty rhetoric that will not be enforced. This House should not condone the murder of innocent people by their own Government.”

The trade agreement was passed by the House, but Roger and his colleagues who voted against it felt that it was important to make a stand against human rights abuses, wherever in the world they take place.