Mr Mark Field: I will not detain the Committee for long as I know we have a lot more business to get on with. I want to speak to amendment 49, which is in my name and those of my hon. Friends the Members for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon), for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Brady) and for Epping Forest (Mrs Laing). My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale West went into the amendment in great detail, and I agree with every word that he had to say....

Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): As international organisations and major Governments seek to understand the cause of the global financial crisis, small international financial centres have repeatedly endured political attacks and misguided criticisms-from pejorative sniping about their being tax havens and offshore centres for avaricious bankers, to allegations that they provide secrecy jurisdictions for shady figures in the international business community...

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I congratulate the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) on securing the debate. We have worked together on a problem in our communities concerning the Crown Estate, along with the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), and will continue to do so. I have significant sympathy with some of her concerns, particularly those that relate to London. I fear that elements of the proposals are similar to those adopted by previous...

Mark Field (Cities of London & Westminster, Conservative)This debate arises purely on a procedural motion, instigated at the behest of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch (Mr Chope), who has assiduously sought to safeguard the interests of pedlars on many occasions in respect of other private Bills in the past two years or so. ....

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): Many of us present are old hands at speaking in Westminster Hall on the continued complexities and persistent demands of providing affordable, decent and plentiful homes in the capital. I fear that I have joined the hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn) as one of the usual suspects in that regard, and perhaps in many other ways as well. The frequency of our presence in this Chamber testifies to the difficulty of striking the right balance when dealing with housing need in London. ...

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Staffordshire Moorlands (Karen Bradley) on her charming maiden speech. She spoke with great passion about her constituency, although I felt slightly guilty when she lamented the fact that there were no railway stations in it. There are 32 tube stations in my constituency, along with no fewer than three of the four railway stations on the Monopoly board....

Parliament has returned to a sea of fresh faces, but unlike you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I recognise hardly any of them. They include my brother-in-law, my hon. Friend Charlie Elphicke, and my former association chairman, my hon. Friend Jacob Rees-Mogg. The party political landscape is transformed and there is a feeling of refreshed optimism, but if we do not apply a new way of thinking to fixing our nation's problems, the very same old politics will, I fear, return.

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): As the right hon. Gentleman is coming to funding, does he agree that, although we all appreciate that these are difficult and constrained economic times, in many ways we are beyond the point of no return?...

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I am waiting to hear the Latin tag, and I shall try to get hold of my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) to find out exactly what it was. The sorry tale of what happened in Equitable Life is well documented and, depressingly, was accurately catalogued by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable). It has also been picked over by the House on countless occasions, and I think that we all feel a sense of deep disappointment and frustration that we are gathered here yet again to press for the Government to honour their duties to Equitable Life policyholders. ...

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): For many years, successive Governments have assumed that simply tinkering with the structure of education leads to an almost automatic improvement in educational standards, yet the message that is coming loud and clear from schools and colleges is that much of that constant interference does not work....

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I congratulate Frank Dobson on securing this important debate. I associate myself entirely with his words. As he will know, we have tried to work together, along with Meg Hillier. Underlying much of what the right hon. Gentleman said is the fact that the Crown Estate has traditionally been a very good landlord. The communities that it has built have been more stable than many of...

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I congratulate the hon. Member for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter) on initiating the debate. As he will know, I have raised my general concerns regarding housing provision in the capital a number of times over the past year in the House. However, I would be grateful if you allowed me to take a slightly more parochial approach on this occasion, Mrs. Humble. ...

Mark Field (Cities of London & Westminster, Conservative) I am a lifelong supporter of Bury football club, which beat Macclesfield Town only last night to record a sixth consecutive victory. I was not going to bring up that sore subject. I congratulate Tony Lloyd on securing this extremely timely debate....

Mark Field (Cities of London & Westminster, Conservative)The hon. Gentleman rightly makes the case for the benefits of extending Thameslink to each and every one of the 50 stations from the Sussex coast up to mid and, indeed, north Bedfordshire, but does he recognise that ensuring that we have sufficient capacity in the centre of London-this obviously applies to the Crossrail debate as well as to the Thameslink debate-is of crucial importance if there is not to be the overcrowding to which he referred earlier?

Mark Field (Cities of London & Westminster, Conservative) I warmly welcome today's debate, and thank my hon. Friend Mr. Soames for introducing it. It gives us the opportunity to discuss openly the challenges that we face over immigration control. Unfortunately, as has been alluded to by both my hon. Friend and Mr. Field, some politicians discuss this topic only when quick and populist headlines are required. That is regrettable because it reduces the legitimacy of immigration as an important issue to be discussed rationally and pragmatically.

Mark Field (Cities of London & Westminster, Conservative) I agree with my right hon. Friend Sir George Young that it essential for us to put these matters on to a statutory footing, and I welcome the Government's determination for that to be done. As my right hon. Friend said, nothing would be more damaging to the reputation of parliamentary democracy in this country than for the allowances scandal to permeate the next Parliament as it has permeated this one.

Mr. Mark Field: The Lord Chancellor wishes to belittle the Earl of Stair and the Earl of Glasgow, but doubtless if they had been large-scale donors to the Labour party, they would have been welcomed as life peers for the remainder of their days. The Conservatives would be quite happy to go along with clause 29, if the Lord Chancellor had been true to his word. We made it clear in a Division in the House almost three years ago that we wanted to see how phase 2 would pan out, with an 80 or 100 per cent. elected House. Had he introduced that at the same time as the clause, we would have had no objection whatever, but our objection is the only safeguard to ensure that there is going to be a proper phase 2. Without it, we could wait 100 years, as he and Asquith have pointed out, to get rid of the remaining hereditaries. The risk is that if we allow clause 29 to go through, within 30 or 40 years, there will be no further reform, and the Government will have got their way.

Mr. Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con): I am glad to be able to introduce this important debate, because in the face of difficult economic times, a hitherto united front in favour of the Government's international development programmes is perhaps beginning to crack-not, I hasten to add, in Parliament, but among the public at large. As all politicians look towards cutting the vast budget deficit that we have run up in the past couple of years, some of our constituents-I suspect that this applies as much to Harrow, West as it does to the Cities of London and Westminster-are beginning to ask why we are reducing significantly assistance to British citizens when we continue to channel taxpayers' money into international development.

I appreciate the opportunity to make a brief contribution to the debate. Given the time constraints, I hope that you will forgive me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, if I focus on the aspect of the Bill that is of particular interest to me: home education. Almost exactly one year ago, the Department for Children, Schools and Families launched an independent review of home education by Graham Badman. Fearful that it represented another attempt by the Government to intrude into their lives, two home educating parents from my constituency, Tina Robbins and Helen White, came to meet me in Parliament to see what could be done.

I welcome the fact that we are having this debate today and I thank the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mark Fisher) for introducing it. Regrettably, I must say that I do not entirely agree with the thrust of what he said. I am afraid that the report to which he has referred was far too timid; it needed to be a good deal more robust. I accept that there was an element of compromise about it and one certainly hopes that at least what has been proposed in the report will go through as a starting-point to what I think will be a radical reform.