Prime Minister Boris Johnson's speech to the Commons during the debate on the Queen's Speech

Mr Speaker, in a matter of five months this country has inoculated over 35 million people - two thirds of the adult population – with the biggest and fastest programme of mass vaccination in British history that has helped us to take step after decisive step on our roadmap to freedom and as life comes back to our great towns and cities like some speeded up Walt Disney film about the return of spring to the tundra, we can feel the pent-up energy of the UK economy the suppressed fizz like a pressurised keg of beer about to be cautiously broached on Monday in an indoor setting and I know how hard pubs and restaurants and other businesses have worked to get ready and everything they’ve been through, I thank them again and I can tell them that the government has also been working flat out so that we can bounce not back but forward because this government will not settle for going back to the way things were.

The people of this country have shown by their amazing response to covid that we can do better than that and the people of this country deserve better than that and the purpose of this Queen’s Speech is to take this country forward with superb infrastructure and with a new focus on skills and technology and by fighting crime by investing in our great public services – above all our NHS by helping millions of people to realise the dream of home ownership. We intend to unite and level up across the whole of our United Kingdom because we, as One Nation conservatives, understand this crucial point that you will find flair and imagination and enthusiasm and genius distributed evenly across the whole country while opportunity is not and we mean to change that because it is not just a moral and social disgrace, it is an economic mistake, it’s a criminal waste of talent and though we cannot for one moment minimise the damage that covid has done the loss of learning, the NHS backlogs, the courts’ delays, the massive fiscal consequences we must use this opportunity to achieve a national recovery so that jabs jabs jabs becomes jobs jobs jobs and that is our plan and also to address decades-old problems that have held us back and to transform the whole United Kingdom into a stronger, fairer, greener and healthier nation and that is the central aim of this Queen’s Speech.

All of those qualities – strength, purpose, greenness – are incarnated by my Hon Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire, who proposed the Loyal Address, a kindly man, a lawyer – but so tough on crime that when three thugs were so rash as to attack him in Covent Garden he transformed himself like Hong Kong Phooey and floored all three with moves that have earned him a black belt in Tai Kwon do and a blue peter badge. He has served in many distinguished political roles and can be proud of his campaigns on behalf of sufferers from breast cancer on behalf of home-owners who surprise nocturnal burglars with cricket bats and on behalf of the Cambridgeshire village of stilton where the eponymous cheese originated and where he claimed that local cheesemakers were forbidden from calling the cheese of stilton, stilton cheese. A bizarre prohibition that he blamed on Brussels and though I have yet to discover whether he was entirely right in this and whether he has actually solved this problem by getting brexit done. He spoke with pungency and maturity, he spoke for Stilton and he made a speech in the best traditions of this House. He was ably seconded by my Hon Friend, the Member for South Ribble, a palaeontologist, a biologist, a former safari guide who knows that in any pride of lions it is the male who tends to occupy the position of nominal authority while the most dangerous beast and prize hunter is in fact the lioness, a point that I am sure the Rt Hon gentleman bears in mind as he contemplates his Rt Hon friend the member for ashton under lyne, the deputy leader, the shadow first secretary of state, the shadow chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for the future of work though the more titles he feeds her the hungrier she is likely to become.

Judging by her excellent speech, my Hon Friend has a long and successful career ahead of her as we work together to deliver for South Ribble and everywhere else in Lancashire and the whole United Kingdom. But we are all the poorer for the absence of my RH Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham. During her long career in this House, Dame Cheryl Gillan passed the Autism Act, which helped many vulnerable people, served as secretary of state for Wales, and she always stood up for her constituents, including by securing important concessions on their behalf from HS2 Ltd. Dame Cheryl was both an effective Member and an extremely popular one. She was my whip for many years, kindly, protective and supernaturally well informed about my whereabouts and I’m sure I speak for the whole House when I say that we will miss her deeply. I also know that Cheryl was a One nation believer in the conservatives as the party of hope, and change and opportunity and she would therefore have been as thrilled and proud as I am to welcome my Hon Friend the Member for Hartlepool and to her place and to congratulate her on her victory, and to thank everyone who placed their trust in this Government many thousands of them again for the first time in their history and in their family’s history.

While we get on with our work, taking forward our programme of change and regeneration, filled with obligation towards those we serve, who have every right to hold us to account, with the wisdom and common-sense the British people have always exemplified. We will get on with safeguarding the health of the nation, pressing full tilt with our vaccination programme until the job is done and our people are as safe as science can make them. We will accelerate the recovery of our public services from the crisis of the last year, investing in our NHS and introducing vital reforms, making it easier for the different arms of the health and care system to work together to provide the best service, by means of the Health and Care Bill. And later this year, we will bring forward proposals for adult social care reform so that every person receives the dignity and security they deserve in old age.

We shall build on the expertise and originality of our scientists, who have allowed Britain to contribute more to the global struggle against Covid than any other country of our size, providing an object lesson in the value of British life sciences. We are determined to harness the concentration of knowledge and excellence in this country to secure Britain’s place as a science superpower, so we are going to invest nearly £15 billion in research and development this year alone and the Queen’s Speech includes a Bill to create an Advanced Research and Invention Agency, charged with backing scientific discovery in new ways, and ensuring that the breakthroughs of the future happen here in the UK as they have so repeatedly in the past. And with those breakthroughs will come jobs and opportunities and new enterprises in fields that we can at present scarcely imagine, and it is our levelling up mission to spread those jobs across the UK.

We will establish a new UK Infrastructure Bank, headquartered in Leeds, with £40 billion to invest as part of the greatest renewal of British national infrastructure since the Victorian age. We will ensure that the British people derive maximum benefit from the £300 billion of their money that the Government spends each year on public procurement, by creating a wholly new system, consolidating 350 separate regulations into one regime, so that public investment can be an even more effective instrument for levelling up the country.

We will use the sovereignty we have regained from the European Union to establish at least eight freeports, including in Teesside, and now that we are free of EU state aid rules, the Queen’s Speech proposes a new national subsidy system, allowing the Government – and the Devolved Administrations – to spur the creation of jobs and businesses. We will use the powers we have recovered from the EU to strengthen our borders and reform the asylum system cracking down on the criminal gangs which profit from trafficking human beings, by ensuring that, for the first time, the fact of whether people enter the UK legally or illegally will have an impact on their asylum claim. And at the same time we will uphold Britain’s great tradition of providing a haven for those facing persecution and repression opening our arms to our friends, the British nationals in Hong Kong, safe in the knowledge that our Government has recaptured the overall power to control our borders. And as the compassionate one nation government we know that crime falls disproportionately on the poorest and the most deprived areas. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill in this Queen’s Speech will end the outrageous injustice of serious violent and sexual offenders being automatically released halfway through a standard sentence of between 4 and 7 years. This Bill will support our police with new powers to deal with highly disruptive protests, and double the maximum sentence for assaults on emergency workers.

We will work to improve neighbourhoods by making them safer and we will help people to achieve the dream of home-ownership not just with 95 per cent mortgages but by modernising the planning system – most of which remains unchanged since the 1940s. We will introduce a Lifetime Skills Guarantee allowing everyone to train and retrain and acquire new expertise whenever they wish. Everything we do will be done as one United Kingdom, combining the genius of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, joined together by blood and family, tradition and history into the most successful political, economic and social union the world has ever known. In all its centuries, the Union has seldom proved its worth more emphatically than during this pandemic, when the United Kingdom – the fifth biggest economy in the world –had the power to invest over £400 billion to preserve jobs and businesses everywhere in these islands, including one in three jobs in Scotland, safeguarded by the combined resources of Her Majesty’s Treasury under my RH Friend the Chancellor.

Now, as we build back better, greener and fairer, we shall benefit as one United Kingdom from the free trade agreements we have regained the power to sign opening up new markets across the world. Only last week, I agreed an Enhanced Trade Partnership with the Prime Minister of India, covering £1 billion of trade and investment and creating over 6,500 jobs across the UK. As one United Kingdom, we will be a force for good in the world, leading the campaign at next month’s G7 summit in Cornwall for global vaccination, education for girls and action on climate change. As one United Kingdom we host the UN climate change conference in Glasgow, and help to rally ever more countries to follow our example and pledge to achieve net zero by 2050.

And as one United Kingdom, we will continue to connect talent with opportunity, mobilising the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the British people to achieve their full potential at last. It is an enormous task, a task made both more difficult by the pandemic and yet more urgent. It is the right task for this country now. I know that this country can achieve it and this Queen’s Speech provides us with the essential tools and I commend it to the House.