Mr Speaker, we are not honourable ladies and gentlemen.
Let us look back to the Queen's speech debate on 13 May, concerning the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill. At one point the deputy speaker suggested that the member for Warrington North really intended to insert an "inadvertently" in her claim that the Secretary of State had misled the House. Might I suggest that she should have done no such thing?
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The shadow education secretary had observed that it was "concerning... that the Minister for Universities was forced to admit on radio yesterday that this flawed legislation could have dangerous and troubling consequences, including potentially protecting holocaust deniers", to which the secretary of state responded rather histrionically in an intervention that "The Universities Minister never said that this would protect holocaust deniers".
But, as the shadow secretary of state was able to demonstrate by quoting a transcript of the programme, she did.
"The Universities Minister says: 'What this bill is designed to do is to protect and promote free speech which is lawful so any free speech which is lawful...'
The interviewer, Evan Davis, says: 'It is lawful isn’t it? Holocaust denial in this country is lawful isn’t it?'
The Minister says: 'So what I’m saying, yeah, so that’s...'
Evan Davis asks: 'So holocaust denial is okay, you’d defend a holocaust denier being invited to campus because that is part of the free speech argument?'
The Minister responds: 'Obviously it would depend on exactly what they were saying'."
To which the shadow secretary of state responded, "Madam Deputy Speaker, it never depends on what a holocaust denier is saying".
Mr Speaker, we might have ahead of us a long series of debates in committee, to ensure that holocaust deniers are handled correctly, but the simple fact in dispute here - that the Universities Minister told the Radio 4 audience that the bill would protect such a person - is resolved. She did, the secretary of state was wrong, and therefore he did mislead the house.
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By contrast, there are occasions when the mistake perhaps is inadvertent. In PMQs on 28 April the Prime Minister claimed: "it is this Conservative Government who have built 244,000 homes in the last year, which is a record over 30 years". I can remember several ministers making the same mistake - Lord Pickles when he was a minister in David Cameron's government for example, or the Right Honourable member for Maidenhead when she was Prime Minister.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government publishes a series of documents which allow us to answer these questions quite easily. The figure 244,000 seems to come from the one entitled "Housing supply; net additional dwellings, England: 2019-20". Here we see that the number of net additional dwellings produced during 2019-2020 was 243,770, which is indeed a record for. . . the 29 years for which numbers are given. This number includes homes produced by conversions and change of use - and 9020 demolitions - as well as actual new homes, of which there were 220,600 in the year concerned.
Surely it is an inadvertent mistake that the prime minister - or his researcher - has taken the form of this answer from a series of old speeches and the latest important number from the front page summary of the statistics release. Surely.
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So, Mr Speaker, I would like us to be considered honourable ladies and gentlemen. I would like our voters to remark on it, and I would like not have to use the phrase in every other sentence to assert something that may not be true.
