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Oral Answers to Questions
(13 years, 4 months ago)
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John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
1. By what means he plans to assess levels of fraudulent use of aid in fragile and conflict-affected states.
The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
The Government are committed to spending 30% of UK aid on conflict-affected and fragile states where the millennium development goals are most off track. We have a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and other abuse and all our programmes include safeguards to ensure that taxpayers’ money is spent properly.
John Cryer
A very high proportion of that taxpayers’ money flows through the EU. Is the Secretary of State satisfied that that EU money is being properly used and accounted for?
Mr Mitchell
About a third of that money goes to the European development fund, which scored highly in the multilateral aid review, and that suits Britain’s interests because around 40% of it goes to Commonwealth countries and we contribute only 17%. The money spent through the budget is £800 million, over which we have much less control, and we are seeking to ensure that it is better deployed.
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
The Secretary of State will of course acknowledge that the Government have committed additional funding to post-conflict states because that is where the greatest poverty and the greatest risk of falling back into conflict lies. Nevertheless, does he accept that, although we must do everything we can to stamp out corruption, it is precisely in those difficult climates that risks must be taken if achievements in poverty reduction and conflict prevention are to be secured?
Mr Mitchell
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that there are greater risks when operating in conflict states, but in such states the very poorest in the world lose out twice over, once because they are poor and again because they are living in frightening and conflicted circumstances.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s commitment to a zero-tolerance attitude to fraud. Will he encourage the World Bank to continue to have its regular survey of 32,000 small businesses across different developing countries, which shows that although fraud is a problem, it by no means absorbs all the aid entering those countries, as bar-room gossip would have it, and that it is more prevalent in south Asia than in Africa?
Mr Mitchell
My right hon. Friend’s analysis is absolutely right. He will have seen the world development report, produced by the World Bank, on working in conflict states, which focuses on security and development. It is a very good report, produced at Britain’s request, which focuses specifically on the points he has made.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
2. What steps he is taking to improve the transparency of bilateral and multilateral aid.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)
We have introduced the UK aid transparency guarantee, under which we have published greater and more detailed information on the Department for International Development’s aid expenditure than ever before, and we have actively encouraged our multilateral and other partners to follow our lead. I welcome the launch today of the Make Aid Transparent website, which is supported by a coalition of more than 50 civil society groups from more than 20 countries.
Jake Berry
I thank the Minister for his answer. Just as the Prime Minister has called on others in the G8 to live up to their promises on their aid budgets, will the Minister assure me that the Government are calling on others to increase the transparency of their spending and will he update the House on the international aid transparency initiative?
Mr Duncan
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the Prime Minister secured agreement in Deauville that the G8 should begin to lead rather than follow on aid transparency. DFID also leads the international aid transparency initiative, an alliance of 19 major donors. Under our leadership, a new aid transparency standard was agreed in February and is already being implemented by DFID, the World Bank and the Hewlett Foundation, with many more set to follow later this year.
Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)
In view of the lobbying of the House tomorrow by international development enthusiasts, will the Minister encourage as many people as possible to turn up, including hon. Members, to make our contribution to international development awareness?
Mr Duncan
I fully share the right hon. Gentleman’s enthusiasm for international development awareness, and when it comes to transparency there is already much praise for what the UK is doing. For instance, Publish What You Fund recently said:
“As well as focusing on its own breadth and quality of publication, its”—
DFID’s—
“commitment to influencing others sets important precedents for aid transparency on a global level.”
Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the better we can demonstrate the effectiveness of UK aid, and that it is not all siphoned off into Swiss bank accounts, the sooner we will get the people of this country behind our excellent and worthy notion of spending 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid?
Mr Duncan
My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and that is exactly why we have set up the Independent Commission for Aid Impact, which can evaluate the impact and value for money of UK aid. Transparency sheds light on all that is done and reduces the sort of corruption that my hon. Friend describes.
Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)
Does the Minister accept that the welcome continued emphasis on transparency in Government aid must also apply to businesses? Given the OECD estimate that poor countries lose $120 billion each year to tax havens, three times more than the aid that they receive, what is he doing to require companies to publish what they pay to Governments in developing countries?
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
3. When he plans to bring forward legislation enacting the commitment to spend at least 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance.
The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
The coalition Government have set out how we will meet our commitment to spend 0.7% of national income as overseas aid from 2013. As the Prime Minister has made clear, we will enshrine that commitment in law as soon as the parliamentary timetable allows.
Catherine McKinnell
Tomorrow I will meet several of my constituents as part of the “Tea Time for Change” event to discuss their and my support for the 0.7% commitment. Has the Secretary of State had any recent discussions with the Defence Secretary on that important issue?
Mr Mitchell
I have discussions on those matters with all my colleagues, not least the business managers for the reasons that I set out in my original answer, but the hon. Lady is right to point out the importance of proceeding with the commitment, and that is why we have made it clear that we will.
Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)
The Secretary of State recently described Britain as an aid superstate. Can he tell us what an aid superstate is—and do we really want to be one?
Mr Mitchell
My hon. Friend refers to a comment that I made on Monday, when I said that just as America is a military superpower, so Britain is a development superpower. I was referring to the fact that throughout the world brilliant work is being done with Britain in the lead on development, and we do so because it is not only morally right but, as my hon. Friend will understand, absolutely in our national interest.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
4. What steps he plans to take to reduce levels of HIV/AIDS in Lesotho.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O'Brien)
The DFID Lesotho programme has helped to reduce the prevalence of HIV in garment factories from 37% to 27%, and we continue to assist 40,000 factory workers. We also provide support to HIV programmes in Lesotho through our contributions to the EU, the World Bank and the Global Fund.
Mark Tami
The Minister will be aware that almost 25% of the population of Lesotho has HIV, and one project that his Department funds is the Apparel Lesotho Alliance to Fight AIDS, which as he says targets almost 40,000 people. Will that funding carry on? If not, who will fund it?
Mr O'Brien
The hon. Gentleman is completely correct that one of the most successful programmes in Lesotho has been the ALAFA programme, which has enabled those 40,000 factory workers to obtain vital services to help with HIV/AIDS. We have just announced that we will continue that programme up to the point when we can secure long-term funding through either the EU or other donor agencies.
Simon Kirby (Brighton, Kemptown) (Con)
Can the Minister confirm that the prevention of HIV is as essential as the treatment of it?
Mr O'Brien
My hon. Friend is entirely right to bring to the House’s notice, and to emphasise, that prevention is as important as the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Indeed, that will be one of the major thrusts of what I say in New York tomorrow at the UN meeting on AIDS. In addition to prevention and treatment, however, we want to ensure that care and support, which has often been the neglected area of HIV campaigning, is addressed too.
Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)
Dolen Cymru has 26 years’ experience of working from Wales into Lesotho, particularly in the field of health care. What consideration have the Government given to using such a non-governmental organisation to administer some of the aid budgets in Lesotho?
Mr O’Brien
I pay tribute to and congratulate Dolen Cymru on its tremendous ongoing work with Lesotho. It has not been a recipient of DFID funds; it has been self-supporting. On 30 June, I will be travelling to Wales on a ministerial visit, so I can discuss the most appropriate way, particularly now that Wales has the newer powers, to take forward the fact that development is a national responsibility while equally ensuring that we involve all parts of the United Kingdom in continuing good development work.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
5. By what means he proposes to determine the level of funding his Department will allocate to UN Women. The Department for International Development recently reviewed the value for money of British taxpayers’ funding to all multilateral agencies through the multilateral aid review. We will apply the same broad criteria to UN Women’s strategic plan by assessing its organisational strengths and the relevance to UK aid objectives. This approach will help to determine the level of core funding for the agency.
Sheila Gilmore
One of the key priority areas for UN Women will be political empowerment of women. What plans does the Secretary of State’s Department have for backing up this work in Governments and legislatures around the world?
Mr Mitchell
The hon. Lady is absolutely right. It is incredibly important to put girls and women at the centre of everything we do in development, which is what empowerment is. We are watching very carefully how the agency is developing. We have given nearly £660,000 as transitional funding to the agency and offered support staff on secondment. I am confident that once the plan is produced we will be able to fund it. I am sure that she will understand, however, that it is right to commit taxpayers’ money only when we can see what it is being spent on.
Margot James (Stourbridge) (Con)
Evidence is coming from Egypt that the position of women is not advancing as a result of the Arab spring; indeed, there are concerns that it is going backwards. Can my right hon. Friend assure the House that he is using all the influence that comes with the additional money that we are investing in that part of the world to ensure that women get their fair share of that resource?
Mr Mitchell
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is a feeling that the role of women in the Arab spring in Egypt was very significant, and it is extremely important that their role should now be advanced. We will try to do that in a number of ways, not least through know-how funds and the Arab Partnership money that we are deploying.
Ms Harriet Harman (Camberwell and Peckham) (Lab)
To follow up the point so ably made by the hon. Member for Stourbridge (Margot James), while there is no doubt that the Arab spring offers huge possibilities for democracy and human rights in Egypt, it will not be progress if women’s rights are set back. Will the Secretary of State ensure that out of the generous funding that we are providing, funds will go to the Alliance for Arab Women in Cairo to make a reality of the demands set out in the Egyptian national women’s statement of 4 June?
Mr Mitchell
I am considering the right hon. Lady’s suggestion. We have exchanged correspondence on this, and I will look very carefully at the proposition that she puts. During my visit to Benghazi at the weekend, I had the opportunity to meet representatives of Arab women’s organisations, who made a similar point. I am sure that we will be able to assist.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
6. What his policy is on tackling HIV/AIDS in developing countries.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O’Brien)
The Government’s policy on HIV in developing countries is set out in “Towards zero infections: The UK’s position paper on HIV in the developing world”, published on 31 May. I have placed a copy of this in the House today.
Mark Pawsey
I thank the Minister for his answer. Following the recent good news about a decline in the number of infections, does he recognise the contribution that has been made by UK-based non-governmental organisations, with young volunteers, often in their gap years, working overseas with young people in their communities to get across the message of how a change in their behaviour can reduce their exposure to the risk of AIDS?
Mr O’Brien
My hon. Friend makes a very good observation. Tremendous, and often brilliant, work is done by NGOs in ensuring that work on the ground is delivering results. While this can be a tremendous, life-changing opportunity for gap year students and other young people, they also need to ensure that they observe a duty of care in ensuring that those experiences are benign and deliver results.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
The Minister will be aware that HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects women in developing countries. Why, therefore, have the Government dropped from their new strategy the specific commitment to measure the impact of AIDS programmes on women and girls?
Mr O'Brien
The hon. Lady is right that in sub-Saharan Africa, HIV/AIDS is primarily a disease that affects women; they are now in the majority compared with men. It is right that in putting women and girls at the heart of all our policies, we measure all the impacts on women, in particular those on the poorest women in the poorest countries. In tomorrow’s meetings at the UN, there will be a keen focus on women, and we hope that something will come of that.
Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)
8. By what means he plans to assess value for money in his Department’s funding for climate change prevention in developing countries.
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)
We rigorously assess costs against benefits in all our programmes. To measure the value for money of our climate programmes, we will look at metrics including the number of poor people protected from extreme weather events, the number of hectares of forest protected, and the number of people with access to energy.
Luciana Berger
The Minister will be aware of the decision at the last climate change summit to establish a green climate fund, and that the UK has a representative on the transnational committee that is designing the fund. Will he update the House on the progress made to date by the transnational committee and on what concrete outcomes the UK Government hope to see by the next summit in Durban later this year?
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
The clearest message from the poorest countries at the world climate change talks in Cancun was that they face immediate impacts from climate change. Will the British Government commit to set an example to other countries by putting a high proportion of our climate finance into adaptation, as well as into climate change mitigation?
Mr Duncan
Climate change will hit the poor hardest and first. DFID will support poor people to protect their lives and possessions from the impacts of climate change, for example by raising homes on to plinths to protect poor people from flooding in Bangladesh, supporting drought-resistant crops in Malawi, and preventing coastal erosion in Vietnam. We aim to spend 50% of our climate change finance on adaptation. That will be kept under full review.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister will know that if we are to meet the commitments we made at the Copenhagen climate change conference, the UK will have to allocate by next year a further £1 billion in fast-start finance to help developing countries tackle climate change. Will he confirm that the Government still intend to allocate that funding by next year?
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
9. What estimate he has made of the proportion of gross national income to be spent on official development assistance in (a) 2011-12 and (b) 2012-13.
The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
British official development assistance as a proportion of gross national income will be 0.56% in 2011 and 2012. The Government are fully committed to delivering 0.7% of GNI as ODA from 2013 and will enshrine that commitment in law, in line with the coalition agreement.
Julie Hilling
The Government have frozen aid for two years and propose to spend money through multinational institutions, which have more expensive bureaucracy. Is it not nonsensical for DFID to cut its admin costs only to spend money through institutions with higher costs?
Mr Mitchell
The hon. Lady is not correct. The way in which we judge multilateral institutions was set out clearly in the multilateral aid review. The whole point of the two big reviews that the coalition Government commissioned on coming to power was to ensure that we deliver best value for money. It is our aim to ensure that for every pound of hard-earned taxpayers’ money that we spend, we get 100p of development results on the ground.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
The brave men and women of our armed forces put their lives at risk every day to protect civilians and rebuild societies in far-off lands. That is real overseas aid. Does the Secretary of State agree that it is surprising that his budget is increasing by £4 billion when the defence budget is being cut by billions and billions of pounds?
Mr Mitchell
Having served in the armed forces, I yield to no one in my respect for them. However, I point out to my hon. Friend, who I know takes a close interest in these matters, that Britain’s security is maintained not only by tanks and guns, but by training police in Afghanistan, getting kids into school in the horn of Africa, and building up governance structures in the middle east.
Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con)
T1. If he will make a statement on his departmental responsibilities.
The Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Andrew Mitchell)
Last weekend I visited Benghazi with the Foreign Secretary to meet the national transitional council and discuss its plans for the future of Libya. I also announced new British support for the clearance of mines in Misrata, Benghazi and other affected areas, to help ensure the safety of 200,000 people.
On Monday, Britain will host the replenishment of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation, to secure global pledges to vaccinate a quarter of a billion children and prevent the deaths of millions of children in some of the poorest countries in the world over the next five years.
Jake Berry
I thank my right hon. Friend for that answer. On behalf of the whole House, may I express a great welcome to those coming to London for the GAVI pledge drive next week? What is the Secretary of State doing to encourage people who are coming to make generous pledges for the vaccination of children in the developing world?
Mr Mitchell
My hon. Friend is quite right that we are bending every sinew to ensure that we have the biggest possible replenishment. Our ambition is to be able to vaccinate 250 million children and save 4 million lives, and replenishment progress is going well. We are not there yet, but I am reasonably confident that we will get there by Monday. [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. There are far too many private conversations taking place in the Chamber. I want to hear Ministers’ answers, and I want now to hear Catherine McKinnell.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
T4. I have been contacted by several constituents who believe that the World Bank should be leading the way towards a green economy and a greener future for the world’s poor. Will the Minister outline what discussions he and his colleagues in government have had with the World Bank to ensure that there is investment in clean energy projects in developing countries?
The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)
The crux of this issue is whether the building of coal-fired power stations should be supported. We believe that such power stations should be a last resort, and that every possible action should be taken to explore the scientific and commercial availability of carbon capture and storage.
Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)
T2. During the Secretary of State’s visit to Benghazi this weekend, what discussions did he have with the national transitional council regarding its plans for the immediate and longer-term future?
Mr Andrew Mitchell
The stabilisation response team is working flat out, together with our international allies in Benghazi, to work out what action should be taken when the conflict is over and early recovery is taking place. That work is going well, and I hope that we will have a plan within the next 10 days. It will of course be owned by the Libyan people under the umbrella of the United Nations, and it will involve all the relevant organisations in helping the Libyans to implement it.
Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)
T8. More than 1,000 supporters of international development charities, including some of my constituents, are coming to Westminster tomorrow to show their support for protection of the aid budget and for further action to tackle global poverty. Given that poor countries lose more money to tax-dodging each year than they receive in aid, what action is the Secretary of State taking to address that issue?
Mr Mitchell
I am very glad that the hon. Lady’s constituents are coming tomorrow, and Members of all parties will want to support that important lobby. The issue that she raises, which was discussed in earlier questions, is very important, and I expect that we will make progress on it in the coming years, not least because of the emphasis that has been put on it in the G8 and the European Council.
Simon Kirby (Brighton, Kemptown) (Con)
T3. Can the Minister assure us that the UK Government will maintain their global leadership role in the response to HIV and AIDS, in both policy and funding?
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for International Development (Mr Stephen O'Brien)
I am pleased to confirm that the commitment of the UK Government, who are the second largest contributor globally to the effort against HIV and AIDS, is set to continue. The matter will be central to the discussions that I have in New York tomorrow at the United Nations meeting.
Pamela Nash (Airdrie and Shotts) (Lab)
As the Minister has just alluded to, the UN General Assembly’s high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS is taking place this week. Can he assure the House that the UK will raise the issue of homosexuals being prevented from accessing information and health care in relation to HIV/AIDS in countries where homophobia is still prevalent?
Mr O'Brien
The hon. Lady is quite right that if we are to make prevention equal to treatment, it is vital that we tackle what leads to the problem, whether it is men having sex with men or injecting drug users. Both those matters often lead to some difficult discussions and policy take-up in countries that do not wish either to discuss or to accept them—
David Rutley (Macclesfield) (Con)
T5. Can my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State tell the House what progress is being made on encouraging other Arab nations to provide much-needed humanitarian aid in Libya?
Mr Andrew Mitchell
In the last two weeks, the humanitarian position in Libya has eased, particularly on the border, which some 950,000 migrant workers have left. Today, under 6,000 people are stuck on the border, so a humanitarian crisis has been avoided.
In general, we encourage all countries to play their roles in providing humanitarian support and to put their taxpayers’ money into those funds. Progress on that is good.
Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)
Given the sensitive time line for change in Sudan, what commitments can the Secretary of State give to people there, and particularly to those in Abyei?
Mr Mitchell
I visited South Sudan and north Sudan recently with troika Ministers from Norway and the US. The position in Abyei is extremely tense at the moment, and we call on all parties to desist from taking aggressive action and to approach the negotiations in a spirit of good will and compromise. That is the way to reach the birth of the new state on 9 July and the full completion of the comprehensive peace agreement.
Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)
Q1. If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday 8 June.
The Prime Minister (Mr David Cameron)
I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in paying tribute to the following brave servicemen who have died in Afghanistan since we last met: Colour Serjeant Kevin Fortuna and Rifleman Martin Lamb from 1st Battalion The Rifles; Lieutenant Oliver Augustin, Marine Samuel Alexander and Lance Corporal Martin Gill from 42 Commando, Royal Marines; and Corporal Mike Pike from 4th Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Scotland. All of them were dedicated professionals serving our country. Their deaths are a reminder of the very high price that we are paying to stop Afghanistan being a haven for terrorists. We honour their memory and we will support their families, and we will not forget their service and their sacrifice.
This morning, I had meetings with ministerial colleagues and others, and in addition to my duties in this House, I shall have further such meetings later today.
Jackie Doyle-Price
May I associate myself with the Prime Minister’s tribute to our fallen soldiers? We do indeed owe them a great debt.
We are reminded on a daily basis that not everyone in the world is as fortunate as we are in respect of the freedoms that we enjoy in this country. In particular, I should like to highlight the absolute horror of the images of the 13-year-old boy who was tortured by Syrian Government forces in recent weeks. Will the Prime Minister give me his assurance that he will use every influence he has to ensure that the international community condemns the activities of the Syrian Government and demands that their reign of terror ends?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend speaks for the whole House in what she says about those dreadful pictures of that poor boy. There are credible reports of 1,000 dead and as many as 10,000 detained. The violence being meted out to peaceful protesters and demonstrators is completely unacceptable. Of course, we must not stand silent in the face of those outrages, and we will not. The EU has already frozen the assets of, and banned travel by, members of the regime, and we have now added President Assad to that list. However, I believe that we need to go further, and today in New York, Britain and France will table a resolution at the Security Council condemning the repression and demanding accountability and humanitarian access. If anyone votes against that resolution or tries to veto it, that should be on their conscience.
Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)
May I join the Prime Minister in paying tribute to Colour Serjeant Kevin Fortuna and Rifleman Martin Lamb from 1st Battalion The Rifles; Lieutenant Oliver Augustin, Marine Samuel Alexander MC and Lance Corporal Martin Gill from 42 Commando, Royal Marines; and Corporal Michael Pike from 4th Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Scotland. They all showed enormous bravery and courage, and our thoughts are with their families and friends. As the Prime Minister said, that number of deaths once again demonstrates the bravery of all our forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world.
We read in the newspapers today that the Prime Minister has torn up the Justice Secretary’s policy on sentencing. Has he?
The Prime Minister
What we want is tough sentences for serious offenders. This Government produced a consultation paper—there was wide consultation and widespread support for many of the proposals that it made—and in the coming weeks, we will publish our legislation.
Edward Miliband
But we read in the newspapers today that the Prime Minister has torn up the Justice Secretary’s proposals because he felt that he had to step in—and frankly I can see why. There is widespread public concern about the proposal to cut by 50% sentences for those who plead guilty. The consultation ended in March. The Justice Secretary was advocating the policy two weeks ago. Has the Prime Minister torn it up, yes or no?
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman should do something more useful than just read the newspapers. One response to the consultation paper came from the shadow Justice Secretary, the man sitting next to him, who said that it is
“a perfectly sensible vision for a sentencing policy, entirely in keeping with the emphasis on punishment and reform that Labour followed in government”.
Why the sudden U-turn?
Edward Miliband
The Prime Minister knows, and the whole country knows, that he is in a total mess on his sentencing policy, just like on all of his other crime policies. I now want to ask about another area where he is in a complete mess. Why has he made such a mess of his health plans?
The Prime Minister
I am not surprised that the right hon. Gentleman wants to move on because on the first subject he was found guilty. On the issue of discounts, it was the last Government who introduced a 33% discount—a third—on sentences. So there is more than a whiff of jumping on a bandwagon.
Bandwagon No. 1 hit the buffers, so let us turn to bandwagon No. 2. Yes, we are having a review of the plans that we announced on health: we want to get them right. I have to say again that there has been widespread support for the review of our health plans, not least from the man sitting four down from the right hon. Gentleman, the shadow Health Secretary—I know I often quote him—who said that
“looking at the evidence of what works, listening hard to those who know the NHS and learning from the views they get…is not rocket science. It’s simply good government”.
What the right hon. Gentleman calls a shambles, his shadow Health Secretary calls good government. The right hon. Gentleman is not really in command of the ship.
Edward Miliband
I asked the Prime Minister why he had made such a mess of his health proposals. The first reason he made such a mess of his health proposals is the promises he made before the election. We all remember the Prime Minister touring round the country promising no more top-down reorganisations. A year before the election, he told the Royal College of Nursing:
“There will be no more of those pointless top-down reorganisations that aim for change and instead bring chaos”.
Why did he say that?
The Prime Minister
What the Royal College of Nursing said yesterday was a welcome for the speech that I made. The reason that we are able to improve the NHS is not only that we are committed to reform, but that we are also committed to more funding. The Labour party is in favour of cutting funding to the NHS. If the right hon. Gentleman wants to look at what is happening in the NHS, Wales is now only one part of the country that is controlled by Labour and there waiting lists are massively up and health spending is being cut. That is what Labour would do to the NHS.
Edward Miliband
I will tell the Prime Minister why he made promises that he then broke—because he is completely shameless and he will say anything. The second reason he has made a mess of the health service is because he did not think the policy through. Last June, he ordered the NHS to stop enforcing Labour’s 18-week waiting time target. As a result, the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks has gone up by 69%. Why did he scrap the instruction to enforce the waiting time target?
The Prime Minister
The best that can be said about this performance is that—quite rightly—the right hon. Gentleman was not thinking about politics on his honeymoon. On waiting times, what actually matters is the time people wait and median waiting times are down. That is what has happened in the NHS, and that is something that he misled the House of Commons about a fortnight ago—
Mr Speaker
Order. I know that the Prime Minister will be a follower of parliamentary protocol, and he will not suggest that the Leader of the Opposition misled the House of Commons. I am sure that he will withdraw that remark.
The Prime Minister
What I meant was that the right hon. Gentleman gave an interesting use of facts on waiting times, which are down in the NHS. What we are seeing today is simply empty opposition and weak leadership. That is what we get from Labour.
Edward Miliband
The whole House will note that the Prime Minister did not withdraw his remark. He is obviously rattled over the health service. It is no wonder he is rattled, because he is making a complete mess of it, and everybody up and down the country knows it. What is the most important reason he is making a mess of the health service? However much he says he loves the NHS, and however many times he says it, the truth is that he has the wrong values. He wanted to put a free market free-for-all at the centre of our health service, and any changes he makes now are not because he wants to make them, but because he has been found out. We know all we need to know about this Prime Minister from what he has done on the NHS: he breaks his promises; he does not think things through; he is reckless; and he has got the wrong values. I will hand it to him though. After one year, he has proved the oldest truth in politics: you can’t trust the Tories on the NHS.
The Prime Minister
This side of the House will not take lectures from a party that, when in government, gave £250 million to private sector companies for doing nothing. That is what happened. What we have heard today is just a series of bandwagons, and anyone who is watching this knows that it is this Government who are boldly making reforms in the public sector; who are dealing with the deficit; and who are reforming welfare, and what do we get from the Labour party? Where is the right hon. Gentleman’s plan for the NHS? There is not one. Where is his plan for reforming welfare? Nothing. Where is his plan for higher education? Nothing. All we get is empty opposition and weak leadership, and the country can see it.
Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
Q2. Following the welcome introduction of the pupil premium, some head teachers in Worcester tell me that owing to long-term underfunding from the previous Government’s flawed formula, the money is needed to make ends meet and cannot be spent on the deprived pupils it was meant for. Can the Prime Minister assure schools in both Worcester and Witney that the Government will not just consult on that formula, but reform it and correct a problem that has been too wrong for too long?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend makes a good point about a serious problem in our country. He is right to welcome the pupil premium, which will put more money in all our schools, particularly those that have many children from free-school-meals backgrounds. However, the current problem with the discrepancy of funding means that at present there can be a difference of £1,800 per pupil between the best-funded school and the worst-funded school. We want to reform the school funding system, and we want to do it in a fairer and more logical way. I am determined that we will make progress on this.
Mr Chuka Umunna (Streatham) (Lab)
I have come here from meeting the family of my 18-year-old constituent, Nana Darko-Frempong, who was fatally shot outside his block of flats on Monday. I am sure that the whole House will want to send its condolences to his family. I raised a similar case with the Prime Minister this time last year. This senseless loss of life is completely and utterly unacceptable, yet it continues, and rightly or wrongly there is a perception that, on all sides of the House, we are not getting to grips with the root causes of this problem, which is blighting our inner-city streets. What reassurance can he give my constituents and the country that the Government are doing all they can to stop this senseless loss of life.
The Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to bring this case to the House of Commons, and I join him in sending condolences to his constituent’s family on their appalling loss. He is absolutely right that the level of gun crime and knife crime in our country, particularly in inner-city areas, is unacceptable. I do not think there is one single answer. Of course, we have to ensure that the police do everything they can to search for guns and knives and have a zero-tolerance policy, but we also have to look at where these problems are coming from, including the growth of gangs in our cities and the fact that in too many cases people are looking to gang, rather than to family and community. It is incumbent on us all to try and work out how we can strengthen the fabric of our communities, starting with our families.
Richard Harrington (Watford) (Con)
Q3. Will my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister advise me on whom to listen to on the UK’s economic policy? Should it be the experts in the International Monetary Fund or the letters page of The Guardian? [Interruption.]
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend was being shouted down because the Labour party does not want to hear what the International Monetary Fund said about the British economy. It said:
“Strong fiscal consolidation is underway and remains essential to achieve a more sustainable budgetary position”—
[Interruption.] Members ask me to read the rest, and I will read the rest. The IMF put the question specifically:
“This raises the question whether it is time to adjust macroeconomic policies”—
the question put by the Labour party—and it said this: “The answer is no”. The IMF could not be more clear in backing the policies that we are pursuing to get this country back on track.
Lindsay Roy (Glenrothes) (Lab)
Q4. What message does the Prime Minister have for the hundreds of women in my constituency in their mid-50s who feel that they have been unjustly thwarted by the extension of their retirement age, contrary to the coalition agreement?
The Prime Minister
What I would say is that the first decision was taken in 1995, when there was all-party agreement that we should equalise men’s and women’s pension ages, and that was done over a long period of time. The second point is that it is right to lift the pension age for men and women to a higher level more rapidly than the last Government decided. However, the key fact is that 85% of the women affected are going to lose one year or less in terms of their pension. The last point that I would make is this. Because we have linked the pension to earnings, people who retire today will be £15,000 better off than they were under the policies of the last Government.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Q5. Why do magistrates have to retire at the age of 70, when the Lord Chancellor, who appoints them, is 71 this year?
The Prime Minister
The point that I would make to my hon. Friend—I speak as someone whose mother served as a magistrate for over three decades—is that it is important to get turnover in the magistracy so that new people come in. To be fair to my right hon. and learned Friend the Lord Chancellor, he has been in his job for only a year. He is doing a superb job, and I can tell the House that there is plenty more fuel in his tank.
Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)
Q6. The Prime Minister has an aspiration of making his Government the greenest ever. Meantime, Proven Energy, a small wind turbine company in my constituency, is making 10% of its staff redundant, not because it does not have a great product, but because planning applications for its product are stuck in town halls and bureaucracy all over the United Kingdom. Will the Prime Minister meet me and members of the Proven Energy team to discuss how we can find a solution?
The Prime Minister
I am very happy to ensure that someone from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills—or, indeed, the Department of Energy and Climate Change—speaks with the company in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency. We are reforming the planning system to try to speed up these processes. We want to ensure that local people benefit when turbines are built, so that they have a share in the success of a scheme. Also, the Government are taking action to attract manufacturers of wind turbines to the UK—for instance, by putting £60 million into our ports infrastructure—and I am talking personally to those manufacturers to try to bring them to Britain.
Annette Brooke (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)
Q7. Notwithstanding the Prime Minister’s previous answer, I would, as a woman not affected by the current pension proposals, like to ask him personally to review this particular proposal, because of the injustice and discrimination against women. The group of women affected, who were born between 1953 and 1954, will be asked to work up to two extra years over and above what they had planned for, whereas men will be asked to work only an extra year. It is the discrimination that concerns me.
The Prime Minister
I do understand the point that the hon. Lady makes, but let me make this point. First, in general, the reason for raising pension ages is twofold: one is that we are seeing a huge increase in life expectancy, but the second point is that we want to ensure that we can fund really good pension provision for the future, and if we do not do this, we will not be able to. Let me repeat the statistic: four fifths of the women affected by the proposals will have their state pension age increase by a year or less. The reason, as she says, that there is this difficulty is that those two things—the equalisation of the pension age and the raising of the pension age—are coming together, but that is enabling us to link the pension with earnings, thus meaning that people will be £15,000 better off than they were under Labour’s plans.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
Q8. Given 1,200 job losses at Tata in Scunthorpe and further job losses in the private and public sectors in north Lincolnshire, will the Prime Minister meet with the taskforce chair and local MPs, so that he can understand how his Government can help the local economy face these demands positively and respond positively to future challenges?
The Prime Minister
I shall be happy to do that, because I am extremely disappointed—as I know the hon. Gentleman and others are—by the job losses in Scunthorpe. I spoke personally to Ratan Tata about the decision.
Tata Steel is still hugely committed to the United Kingdom. It is still investing hundreds of millions of pounds in our country, which I think is wholly welcome. Obviously, however, what has happened in Scunthorpe is not welcome, and we must do all that we can to bring the taskforce together—I know that my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary is doing that—to ensure that we do everything we can to mitigate the impact on local jobs and local communities.
James Wharton (Stockton South) (Con)
Q9. I am sure the Prime Minister agrees that there should be no place for corruption in football. Given that the re-election of Sepp Blatter has brought FIFA even further into disrepute, will he take this opportunity to voice his support for those who are calling for the reforms that we need in order finally to show Mr Blatter the red card?
The Prime Minister
I have personally seen football governance at an international level, and I was not that impressed by what I saw.
FIFA’s reputation is now at an all-time low, and obviously the election involving just one candidate was something of a farce. FIFA must become more transparent and more accountable. It must prove that it is capable of doing the job that it is meant to do. Ultimately, however, change must come from within football, and I am sure that the Football Association will want to play a major role in helping to bring that about.
Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab)
Q10. I love the NHS and I love my local hospital, Ealing hospital. I was delighted to learn that the Prime Minister also thinks highly of Ealing hospital, and that he chose it as the place in which to deliver his speech on the Government’s NHS reforms. Given his personal experience of the high quality of services that Ealing hospital provides, will he assure the House that, faced with budget pressures and merger proposals, it will not close or lose its accident and emergency and other key services?
The Prime Minister
I enjoyed my visit to Ealing hospital, and was impressed by what I saw. There are no plans to close the hospital. Indeed, a new urgent care centre is due to open in July, and the maternity unit has a phased redevelopment programme in process.
As the hon. Gentleman knows, any proposals relating to any hospital must go through a proper process involving public and patient engagement, sound clinical evidence, support by the GP commissioners, and support for patient choice. That is the process that must be followed. As I have said, however, there are no plans to close the hospital.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
Q11. The Prime Minister will be aware that one in seven couples in the United Kingdom suffer from infertility problems, but, notwithstanding that fact, three quarters of primary care trusts do not provide the recommended three cycles of IVF treatment. Will the Prime Minister join me in calling on all PCTs to follow the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines and provide sufficient treatment for infertile couples?
The Prime Minister
I will certainly do that. My hon. Friend is right to raise an issue that affects a huge number of people in our country. We have all encountered constituency cases in which people are frustrated by local guidelines. The deputy chief executive of the NHS is writing to all primary care trusts reminding them of the NICE guidance and its recommendations, and I think that that is very important. Of course some PCTs have worse deficits than others and have a more difficult process to follow, but we want to ensure that everyone has access to this treatment.
John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)
Q12. After four years, 15-year-old Alice Pyne, who lives in my constituency, is losing her battle against cancer. She has posted online her “bucket list”, a simple wish list of things that she wants to do before it is too late. She wants to meet Take That, to own a purple iPod and to enter her dog in a labrador show, but at the top of the list is a call for everyone to sign up to be a bone marrow donor. Will the Prime Minister work with the Leader of the Opposition and me to find out why too few people are currently on that life-saving register?
The Prime Minister
I will certainly do that. I am very sorry to hear about the situation facing Alice and what she is going through. Our thoughts go out to her and to her parents. She sounds like a very brave and very admirable person.
We want to get as many people as possible on to the bone marrow register. This year we are investing some £4 million of new money to improve donation processing and services for NHS patients. However, this is partly to do with a cultural and population change that we must help to drive, and I am sure that the Leader of the Opposition and I can discuss that.
Simon Hart (Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire) (Con)
The Prime Minister will be aware of the terrible explosion at the Chevron refinery in Pembroke last week, as a result of which four people died and one was seriously injured. Will he join me in extending condolences to the families and colleagues of those concerned, and also in commending the safety record of Chevron and its new owner, Valero, in what is a pretty difficult industry?
The Prime Minister
I will certainly do that. This was a tragic incident, and, on behalf of the whole House, may I join my hon. Friend in paying tribute to his constituents and expressing our deepest sympathies to the families of those who have been affected? I am sure there will be lessons to learn, but as my hon. Friend said, the company has had a good safety record, and in an industry in which there are inherent risks. I will be happy to discuss the issue with him.
Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)
Q13. What does it say about our society when a BBC documentary on child poverty ends with a child saying: “And I don’t want to grow up”?
The Prime Minister
It says that, frankly, we need to do far more to tackle child poverty, not just here in the UK, but around the world. That is one of the reasons why, despite difficult spending decisions, we have maintained the pledge of increasing our aid budget to 0.7% of gross national income by 2013. That is a difficult pledge to make, but I think that, even at times of difficulty, we should not break our promises to the poorest people in the world.
In terms of child poverty here in Britain, the biggest challenge today is not just benefit levels, but mobility: how do we help people get out of poverty and stay out of poverty? That is why this Government are putting so much emphasis on measures such as the pupil premium, which will actually help people build themselves a better future.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
Q14. I have the honour of representing the only town to have given its name to an international sport: rugby football. Under the union code of the game, the home nations are preparing for the world cup later this year. Will the Prime Minister join me in expressing gratitude to the New Zealand authorities for proceeding despite the recent earthquake, and will he also join me in hoping that at the end of the tournament the Webb Ellis trophy will be making its way back home?
The Prime Minister
I certainly endorse what my hon. Friend says, and I will do everything I can to support our rugby team. I very much hope the trophy will be coming home—[Interruption.] Calm down. I very much hope the trophy will be coming home to one of the nations of the United Kingdom. When I met the Prime Minister of New Zealand, he kindly gave me an All Blacks shirt, but his advice was, “Whatever you do, don’t be seen wearing this”, and I think I will take that advice.
Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)
As the Prime Minister has previously said, the hacking inquiry should go where the evidence takes it. The Metropolitan police are in possession of paperwork detailing the dealings of criminal private investigator Jonathan Rees. It strongly suggests that, on behalf of News International, he was illegally targeting members of the royal family, senior politicians and high-level terrorist informers, yet the head of Operation Weeting has recently written to me to explain that this evidence may be outside the inquiry’s terms of reference. Prime Minister, I believe powerful forces are involved in a cover-up; please tell me what you intend to do to make sure that that does not happen.
The Prime Minister
I know the hon. Gentleman takes a close interest in this subject, and the point I would make to him is that there is a police inquiry, and a police inquiry does not need terms of reference. The police are free to investigate the evidence and take that wherever it leads them, and then mount a prosecution with the Crown Prosecution Service if the evidence supports that. In the case of phone hacking, which is illegal and wrong, there have been prosecutions and imprisonments, and if that is where the evidence takes them, that is what will happen in the future. There are no terms of reference as far as I am concerned; the police are able to look at any evidence and all evidence they can find.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
The Prime Minister will recall visiting Nuneaton town centre on several occasions, and he will be glad to hear that it is surviving well, with a comparatively low level of vacant premises, but our town centres are facing a vital and difficult challenge from the out-of-town stores and the internet. Given those challenges, will my right hon. Friend assure the House that this Government will be a keen supporter of our town centres?
The Prime Minister
I can, and my hon. Friend speaks powerfully not just for Nuneaton, but for all town centres and all Members who represent constituencies with vibrant town centres. We want to keep them, rather than see everything go out of town. There are two steps we need to take. One is to make sure local people have a real say in the planning process, so they can decide where future development goes. Secondly, we should continue the steps that my right hon. Friend the Chancellor has been pioneering in terms of rate relief, to help local shops in our high streets so we do not end up with identikit high streets, but instead have thriving town centres such as Nuneaton, which I so enjoyed visiting with my hon. Friend on a number of occasions.
Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)
The chairman of the Georgian Parliament is in London this week, and, indeed, is following our proceedings. Some Members of this House went to Georgia during the recess. When the Prime Minister goes to Moscow later this year, will he remind Russia of the commitment it gave in 2008 to withdraw its troops and stop the occupation in Georgia?
The Prime Minister
I will certainly do that. I well remember myself going to Tbilisi when the Georgians were under so much pressure from the Russians, and standing up with them, recognising that Georgia is a country that wants to be a democracy; it wants to be an economic success story; it wants to join NATO; it wants to be able to look west, as well as east; and it wants to have good relations with its neighbour. I am delighted that the hon. Lady is meeting representatives from the Georgian Parliament. I myself have met Georgia’s President Saakashvili on several occasions, and I will certainly make my views clear on the issue of Georgia, if I visit, and when I visit, Russia later this year.
Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the key challenge facing the national health service is how to convert this Government’s welcome commitment to year-on-year growth of real resources into improving productivity and improving quality of care for patients? Did the key to delivering that not lie in my right hon. Friend’s speech yesterday: in his advocacy of more integrated and less fragmented care? Will he continue to—
Mr Speaker
Order. We are grateful to the right hon. Gentleman—I think we have got the thrust of it.
The Prime Minister
My right hon. Friend’s support for the reforms is hugely welcome, and I know that he follows these issues very closely. It was not just he who welcomed the speech that I set out yesterday: also, I had express support from the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal College of Physicians, the NHS Confederation, Macmillan Cancer Support and Breakthrough Breast Cancer. I think we are seeing a coming together of people who care about the health service, who use the health service, of professional bodies in the health service, who can see that this Government are listening, getting their changes right and will add the money that is required—and that only we are committed to—with the reforms that are necessary to make sure the NHS can go on and thrive in future.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
The Prime Minister will be aware of the dastardly murders of senior police officers Breen and Buchanan, and the subsequent public inquiry, established in consultation between this nation’s Government and the Irish Republic’s Government. Will he make sure that nothing is allowed to impede Anglo-Irish relations by making personal representations to the Prime Minister of the Irish Republic, such that they cannot restrict the time, the effort and the money put into that inquiry, so that we can get to the truth and find out how those two brave police officers were murdered in so dastardly a way?
The Prime Minister
I will certainly look very carefully at the issue the hon. Gentleman raises. There is still, on all sides in Northern Ireland, and indeed in the Republic, huge concern about things that happened in the past. Often, people ask for an inquiry, a public inquiry or a process. I think in most cases, what people really want is the truth. I found with the issue of the Saville inquiry that what really mattered, actually, was not the £120 million, the five years and all the rest of it. What people wanted was the unvarnished truth, so then they can come to terms with what happened in the past. I have said that I do not want to see further open-ended inquiries; but I do think there is still more that we can do to uncover and be frank about the truth, and that goes for us on all sides of this debate.
Mr Speaker
I appeal to hon. Members leaving the Chamber to do so quickly and quietly, affording the same courtesy to the hon. Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), who is about to introduce her ten-minute rule Bill, that they would want to be extended to them in such circumstances.
Post Box Provision (Nelson, Lancashire)
Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)
This petition is from the residents of Nelson, Lancashire, and the surrounding area. It is signed by more than 500 residents.
The petition states:
The Petition of residents of Nelson, Lancashire, and others,
Declares that there is a need for a post box outside the main Post Office in Nelson.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to encourage Royal Mail to take all possible steps to ensure that a post box is provided outside the main Post Office in Nelson.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
[P000924]
Bus Service (Little Harrowden, Northamptonshire)
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Last week, I had the great pleasure to attend a protest meeting in Little Harrowden about the No. 24 bus—or lack thereof. We nearly overflowed into the car park because there were so many people there. A petition has been given to me to present to the House to get Little Harrowden reconnected with Wellingborough. With your permission, Mr Speaker, I shall read the petition to the honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled.
The petition states:
The Humble Petition of residents of Little Harrowden, Northamptonshire and the surrounding areas,
Sheweth
That the decision by Stagecoach bus company to eliminate most of the bus services between Little Harrowden and Wellingborough due to cut backs in subsidy from Northamptonshire County Council has led to considerable hardship to the old, disabled, vulnerable and young in isolating the village from Wellingborough and necessitating a difficult and dangerous walk along a busy and partly unlit road.
Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your Honourable House urges the Secretary of State for Transport to liaise with Northamptonshire County Council and the Borough Council of Wellingborough to find a resolution that will lead to the Number 24 bus service being re-established between Little Harrowden and Wellingborough.
And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray, &c.
[P000925]
NHS (Cornwall)
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
I am proud to present a petition of more than 6,000 residents of west Cornwall, which was gathered by my constituents who have been, and remain, justifiably concerned about the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill. They have gathered support for their petition over the past few months, before and since the Government’s “pause and listen” process. They look forward to the formal outcome of that process and hope that the Government will have been encouraged to scrap the Bill and start again. I have also been given a disk copy of a similar petition undertaken by 38 Degrees. That amounts to a total of 300,000 signatures.
The petition states:
The Petition of residents of West Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and St Ives, and others,
Declares their opposition to the Health and Social Care Bill currently before Parliament as it will take away their single Cornwall National Health Service and replace it with consortia led by GPs. Further, the Bill will allow the increased involvement of profit-led companies in our health service.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons rejects the Health and Social Care Bill.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
[P000926]
Education (Special Educational Needs)
Penny Mordaunt (Portsmouth North) (Con)
I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to increase parental involvement in provision of education for children with special educational needs; and for connected purposes.
I am aware that the business following my ten-minute rule Bill is of great interest to the House, and so, knowing that you are ever the friend of innovation, Mr Speaker, I shall endeavour to make this a five-minute Bill.
The Department for Education’s current guidance is clear about what parents of a child with special educational needs should expect from their local education authority once a statement has been drawn up: to have their choice of school respected, provided it is a suitable use of LEA resources. In practice, this guarantee is often not worth the paper it is written on. I have met the evidence, so to speak: parents of children with dyslexia or a language disorder, struggling in the aftermath of short-sighted LEA decisions which undermine the principle of an education for all.
In these cases, perhaps the LEA has accepted that a child’s needs should be assessed, but refuses to make an assessment or maybe the parents have pinned their hopes on an appeal against the LEA at the first-tier tribunal only to find that the tribunal panel is the LEA. Alternatively, the child might actually have a statement but the school does not have the right provision, and no one is prepared to provide the enforcement. Alternatively, the child might have a statement but no school place, because the LEA has refused the only suitable provision as it is in the independent sector, even though it would be cheaper than the total cost of state provision. In what is perhaps the cruellest of ironies, some parents, for want of a school place, try to home educate their child, not through choice, but through necessity, only to find that they are cut adrift by the LEA without any support or guidance, and their child’s name is also removed from all waiting lists. As far as the LEA is concerned, that is one fewer problem to deal with.
These parents, some of whom have learning disabilities themselves, have no cards to play, no stick to wield and no hope of redress to ensure that their child has access to an education. In Portsmouth, Martin is due to take his GCSE options next year, yet he has never been to a secondary school. His disability is undiagnosed, and the remedial action required is unrecognised. Iris’s dyslexia was discovered by good teachers and demonstrated by an independent assessment, but the private school that would meet her needs was refused, even though it would involve the same cost as placing her in an LEA school without any dedicated special educational needs support. Joanne’s disabilities mean that she is unable to use public transport and so she has been awarded a travel grant to get her to school, but she must make her own way home. James, who is also without a school place, has been required to demonstrate his level of need by failing at school after school, to the extent that failure is now his state of mind. It is little wonder that when he was asked to describe himself by his last teacher, he said he was “unliked” and “alone”.
Change is needed to strengthen the hands of parents and teachers fighting for these children’s rights and entitlements. Five principal areas must be addressed and although the recent SEN Green Paper has made progress on them, improvements could be made. First, in the manner of the NHS constitution, the rights and entitlements of children must be established in law. We must have a document towards which parents can point stubborn local authorities. It is not acceptable for a child to fall through the cracks, and a clear assertion of children’s rights would help to hold authorities to account.
Secondly, there must be means other than a statement by which a child’s needs can be demonstrated and verified. Statementing needs reform, but it can be the only ammunition that parents have. The Green Paper outlined plans for a single assessment process as a replacement for the statement, but to really strengthen parents’ hands other forms of proof should be accepted as evidence of need, even if this simply guarantees that the child undergoes the new assessment. We must remove an LEA’s power to deny that a child has a special educational need despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The third aspect of necessary change is closely associated with the second; the link between the assessor and the financer must be broken. Currently, local authorities sit in judgment on SEN cases with only one eye on the child’s future—the other is glued to its own bottom line—and that is not a tenable situation.
Fourthly, all providers of appropriate schooling, including independent schools, must be listed by the LEA, as is supposed to happen already. The last area to address is funding. I applaud the Green Paper’s commitment to personalised funding, but for this to work properly funding must truly follow the pupil, as with the pupil premium. But unlike the pupil premium, it must include the per-pupil funding derived from the LEA. I urge the Government to consider, as part of their review, how school funding can become genuinely per pupil, whether on a total or top-up basis.
On hearing about my speech today, Iris, whom I mentioned earlier and who is now being funded to attend an independent mainstream school with a specialist dyslexia unit thanks to the generosity of Portsmouth residents and a livery company, suggested that I should tell hon. Members what she told me, and I can think of no better way to conclude. She said:
“At my old school I felt silly and sad because I didn’t understand. I really love school now. I feel so much happier and I understand everything a lot more. I get lots of help and they make it easy to understand. I have great teachers and lovely friends. Now I want to go to school.”
Question put and agreed to.
Ordered,
That Penny Mordaunt, Mr David Blunkett, Mr Robert Buckland, Charlie Elphicke, Charlotte Leslie, Dr Julian Lewis and Jacob Rees-Mogg present the Bill.
Penny Mordaunt accordingly presented the Bill.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 2 December and to be printed (Bill 199).
Ninetieth Birthday of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Prime Minister (Mr David Cameron)
I beg to move,
That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty on the ninetieth birthday of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, to assure Her Majesty of the great pleasure felt by this House on so joyful an occasion.
That the said Address be presented to Her Majesty by such Members of the House as are of Her Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council or of Her Majesty’s Household.
That a Message be sent to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, to offer His Royal Highness the warmest good wishes of the House upon the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, expressing the gratitude of the nation for his lifetime of service to the country and the Commonwealth and praying that His Royal Highness may long continue in health and happiness.
That Mr Speaker, the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Sir George Young and Edward Miliband do wait upon His Royal Highness with the said Message.
This week we celebrate the 90th birthday of a remarkable man who has given years of service to our country. Someone who has defended his nation in time of war. A man who has stood alongside Her Majesty the Queen for more than six decades. A man who has given his time, effort and passion to many great causes up and down the country, across the Commonwealth and indeed around the world. I refer, of course, to His Royal Highness Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Since the time of William the Conqueror there has never been a consort who has served for so long at the side of a monarch and, as such, Prince Philip has seen extraordinary events in life from the end of rationing to man landing on the moon, and from the end of the cold war to the beginning of peace in Northern Ireland. Of course, along the way he has had to put up with listening to the views of no fewer than 12 Prime Ministers. Through it all he has been there for Her Majesty the Queen as a constant companion and source of rock solid strength. Throughout it all he has served us, the British people, with an unshakeable sense of duty. He has conducted more than 300 public engagements a year and delivered more than 5,000 speeches.
Over those years, he has also made more than 600 visits to more than 140 countries. In most of those, he is heralded and much respected as the consort of a monarch, but, of course, there is one—Tanna, part of Vanuatu—where he is treated slightly differently. In fact, no public event in that far off part of the Pacific Islands is complete without the islanders holding aloft pictures of Prince Philip, whom they worship as a god.
Of course, His Royal Highness served this country long before his royal duties began. The Duke of Edinburgh spent 14 years on active service in the Royal Navy. During the second world war he served with the Mediterranean and Pacific fleets. He was awarded the Greek war cross of valour and was mentioned in dispatches when he manned the searchlights during HMS Valiant’s triumph at the battle of Cape Matapan. In a fitting tribute to his outstanding abilities, the late Lord Lewin, the First Sea Lord, said he would most certainly have gone right to the top of the Navy.
Today the Duke of Edinburgh is a patron of more than 800 organisations. Looking through that long list, one passion shines through: supporting young people by giving them the confidence to stand on their own two feet. It was this passion that led him to initiate the Duke of Edinburgh awards, recognised around the world as the gold standard in leadership for young people. Since 1956, about 6 million young people in 120 countries have won awards by building skills for work and life and proving that they can take responsibility for themselves and their communities. To all of us in this Chamber who believe in the value of helping to change people’s lives for the better, that is an inspiration. His is a huge achievement for which this country and many others owe the Duke a deserved debt of gratitude.
He also has an extraordinary passion for wildlife, nature and the environment. As president of the World Wildlife Fund, he helped to save many of the world’s most beautiful creatures from extinction, including the snow leopard and the black rhino.
The Duke is also a passionate family man and I know that all of us would like to congratulate him on becoming a great-grandfather for the first time with the birth of Savannah Phillips at the end of last year.
He has done all these things in his own inimitable way, with a down-to-earth, no-nonsense approach that I believe the British people find endearing. Of course, many of us who give public speeches would be honoured to have a book published of our most famous sayings. There have been several published of his. My own favourite was when, after a long flight, the umpteenth eager-to-please official asked him, “How was your flight?” He replied, “Have you been on a plane? Well, you know how it goes up in the air and then comes back down again? Well, it was just like that.”
I would like to go on for a great deal longer but I am reminded of His Royal Highness’s remark about sermons that overrun. It is not just sage advice for clergy in the pulpit but, I think, probably for us in this place, too. As the Duke put it, “The mind cannot absorb what the backside cannot endure.” With that in mind, let me give the final say to the person who knows him best of all, Her Majesty the Queen. She said in a speech to mark their golden wedding anniversary that he had been her
“strength and stay all these years”
and that she and
“his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”
I am sure the whole House will want to join me in wishing His Royal Highness health, happiness and above all a very special 90th birthday.
Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)
May I second the motion in the name of the Prime Minister and associate myself and my party entirely with the sentiments that he has just expressed? As the Duke of Edinburgh approaches his 90th birthday, he is, as the Prime Minister said, the longest-serving consort and the oldest serving spouse of any British monarch. The Duke and Her Majesty have been married for 64 years. As a relatively new spouse, I have particular admiration for that achievement and I realise that it will take me 63 years, 11 months and 20 days to catch up.
The Duke of Edinburgh has been a constant companion to Her Majesty throughout her reign and he has shown a moving love, support and devotion to Her Majesty that has been unfailing. He has also made an enormous contribution to public life here in Britain and right across the Commonwealth in his own right. He is the patron of hundreds of organisations that focus on the environment, industry, sport and education but he is perhaps best known, as the Prime Minister said, for the Duke of Edinburgh’s award, which he established 55 years ago to give young people a sense of responsibility to themselves and their communities. I am sure that every Member of the House will have had the experience of visiting a local school in their constituency and seeing the eyes of young people light up as they talk about the excitement, passion and sense of achievement they have got from doing the Duke of Edinburgh’s award. For that, we owe the Duke of Edinburgh a huge debt of gratitude.
The Duke is a reminder to us all of the unique spirit of public service that the monarchy discharges to the British people at home and abroad. That affection was evident at the wedding last month of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The Duke of Edinburgh has been a prince among consorts, but is, if I might put it this way, a king among characters. His unique turn of phrase has become a much-loved feature of modern British life. There are two repeatable examples that I want to share with the House. To the matron of a hospital he visited in the Caribbean, he commented:
“You have mosquitoes. I have the Press.”
That is a sentiment that many of us should share at various times in politics. Legend also has it that following the coronation in 1953, he turned to Her Majesty and said:
“Where did you get that hat?”
Humour is a great part of British life and we thank the Duke for his unique contribution.
We owe the Duke a great debt for the personal and professional sacrifices he has made to serve our country. He was, as the Prime Minister said, a distinguished naval officer who, at just 21, became one of the youngest first lieutenants in the Royal Navy, but he put his professional ambitions aside to be the loyal consort to the Queen. When asked in a recent interview if he had been disappointed to give up his naval career, he said that he had been a little disappointed but that, more importantly, it seemed to him that his duty was to serve the Queen
“in the best way I could.”
The Duke embodies qualities of duty, loyalty, public service and good humour—great British qualities. He came from a generation who were prepared to sacrifice everything they had for this country and their values. As he approaches his 90th birthday, I once again pay great and humble tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh for all he has done for Queen and country.
Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)
May I, with the indulgence of the House, add a few personal words in support of the excellent speeches of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition? I have had the great good fortune and the inestimable honour to have known His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh for 50 years. I first met him when I was, as the psalmist said, yet
“in the slippery paths of youth”.
I want to take this brief moment, therefore, to add my own salute to Prince Philip. He is, in my view, one of the most exceptional men of his generation. No one can fail to be struck by the great breadth of his interests, the profound depth of his knowledge of them, and his distinguished and energetic contribution to our national life through the many organisations with which he is closely associated and over which he takes so much time and trouble.
As both my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition made clear, all of us in our constituency duties will have come across the beaming faces of the young who have taken part at one level or another in the Duke of Edinburgh’s award schemes, an organisation in which millions of young people in more than 60 countries have taken part. That in itself is a remarkable achievement and one of which I hope Prince Philip is properly proud. In his work as the first president of the World Wildlife Fund—in which, incidentally, he was well ahead of his time—and through his profound interest in nature and wildlife conservation, as well as in environmental questions more generally, he has played an important, innovative and highly influential role for many years, both at home and abroad.
On a day like today one cannot hope to do full justice to Prince Philip’s inspirational work in the promotion of science, design and industry, or his work with the armed forces, but I conclude by saying that we in the House feel gratitude, respect and pride for Prince Philip’s exceptional service to his country, and recall that he is part of that remarkable generation that served with distinction during the war, did their duty and just got on with it, and then got on with the rebuilding of Britain afterwards.
Prince Philip certainly is a formidable man and, refreshingly, does not suffer fools gladly, as I know to my cost. He is, above all, to himself true, and a most especially devoted and loving husband, father and grandfather. His many qualities should shine brightly for us today since they march with great good humour, a complete lack of any side or pomposity, and a clear, thoughtful and generous understanding of the world in which we all live. I join my parliamentary colleagues in sending to His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh my warmest congratulations and most profound respects on his 90th birthday.
Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
The supreme achievement of the Duke of Edinburgh is that he is working at the age of 90. This is a magnificent example and one that has been followed by a constituent of mine, Mr Harry Polloway, who is working as a toastmaster at the age of 97. I last saw him in the Jewish cemetery in my constituency, where we were commemorating the death of May Mendleson, who died last year at the age of 108. Continuing work into that period of life is a wonderful example to set, and one that we can look at with some embarrassment and shame in the House, where I believe the oldest Member—a distinguished Member—is just 80 years of age, and we have only five Members over the age of 76.
This group of people are disgracefully under-represented in the House. If we are to have a proper reflection of senior citizens, we must look to have all-80-year-old shortlists at the next general election. In the light of the heroic examples set by Prince Philip, Harry Polloway and May Mendleson, that fault needs to be corrected.
However, my purpose in speaking today is to make another point. As someone who is not a royalist and is happy to say that I am a republican and always have been, I want to ask why on earth, in this age, the address is to be “humble”. Are members of the royal family superior beings to the rest of us? Are we inferior beings to them? Is Prince Philip superior to Harry Polloway and May Mendleson? That was the feeling of the House seven centuries ago, when we accepted the rules under which we speak now.
We live in an egalitarian time when we recognise the universality of the human condition, in which royals and commoners share the same strengths and frailty. In the House, when we speak of the royals—not just the monarch, but all the family, without any limit—we are denied the chance of making any derogatory comment. That might extend to first cousins who are a long way distant from the monarch. There is no question but that the monarch—the Head of State—should remain above the political fray. We have been well served by this, particularly recently.
However, if these occasions are to be greatly valued, it should be possible for Members to utter the odd syllable that might be critical. I do not have anything to say in this case, but the sycophancy described by the Prime Minister when he referred to someone asking Prince Philip a fairly obvious question when he came off a plane must sicken the royal family. When they have an excess of praise of this kind, it is devalued.
Mr David Winnick (Walsall North) (Lab)
No one would accuse me of being an ardent royalist, but will my hon. Friend bear in mind the fact that the most terrifying dictatorships—terrorist dictatorships—of the last century, including Germany, Russia and China, have been republics?
Paul Flynn
I was coming to the final sentence of my speech, but I would be happy to discuss that at some length. If my hon. Friend is asking whether the Queen has been a monarch of whom we should be proud, a monarch who has served this country in a way that is probably unparalleled, and whether she has maintained political neutrality throughout those years, I would say yes. We particularly appreciated her work in Ireland recently, where she has done much to restore the link. That is not the point of what I am saying today.
I am saying that the House has allowed itself to be infantilised by our own history into a position in which we are not allowed to make any criticism—not just of the person whom we are talking about today, but of other members of the royal family as well. It stretches to all of them. By accepting today that the address is a humble one, we demean the honour of our elected office. We were elected by the first-past-the-post system, but those with hereditary offices are in their place as a result of what Tony Benn once called the first-past-the-bedpost system. We should be free in this House to tell the whole truth as citizens, not gagged as subservient subjects.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
I have no difficulty in supporting the motion proposed by the Prime Minister and seconded by the Leader of the Opposition, and on behalf of my right hon. and hon. Friends, sending our very warmest wishes to Prince Philip for his birthday on Friday.
The Prime Minister referred to the fact that Prince Philip is already in the record books as the longest-serving consort. My limited research immediately revealed two other things. He is also in the record books for being the last surviving great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria—and, even more extraordinarily, is apparently currently in the line of succession to 16 thrones. If ever we wanted an example of how interconnected our European continent is, he is probably the living embodiment of that.
Prince Philip was born in the same year as my late mother, so when we were growing up, my parents, my brothers and I often found him featuring in the conversation as a sort of point of comparison in youthfulness and activity on which we were asked to model ourselves.
In addition to his obvious loyal, steadfast and wonderful roles as husband, consort, father, grandfather and great-grandfather, I suggest that the Duke of Edinburgh also plays the role of the most active citizen. He is an active citizen in many countries of the Commonwealth, which he has supported throughout his time in public life. He is wonderfully active in his inspired award scheme, which has already been referred to. I am one of the lucky people who benefited from being a Duke of Edinburgh’s award winner. The prize was going to receive the award from him at Buckingham palace. The punishment—the preparation for the prize—was being nearly frozen to death in Snowdonia on an expedition the previous Easter; it was not an award achieved lightly.
The Duke of Edinburgh has always encouraged participation in sport, which is very important. Reference has rightly been made to his very early commitment to conservation world wide. When he became president of the World Wildlife Fund, he encouraged millions of people, particularly young people, to realise the importance of conservation, not only at home but on the other side of the world.
Lastly, we cannot avoid referring to the fact that the great thing about Prince Philip is his ability to comment, and to do so publicly from time to time, in a no-nonsense, down-to-earth and—thank God—humorous manner. At least two of his children have the same quality, for which we should be grateful. It is typical that he is working on his birthday this week. That should encourage everyone in the country who sees retirement looming to think that they may still have a long time to go. We wish him a very happy birthday on Friday, happy and enjoyable celebrations over the weekend and continuing robust health and much happiness in all his years ahead. We thank him for a lifetime of incomparable public service.
Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
On behalf of my hon. and right hon. Friends, and indeed the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland, I heartily endorse the sentiments that have been so eloquently expressed this afternoon on the occasion of His Royal Highness’s 90th birthday. We send him our warmest congratulations.
His Royal Highness bears many titles. When I looked at them the other day, I found that reading them all out would almost be a speech in itself. Some people today might dismiss such titles as anachronisms, but in my view they are not: they speak to us of the history of our Union, our nation and our Commonwealth. With nearly 60 years as royal consort, Prince Philip has been a living example of the steadfast values that created and sustain to this day our Union, our nation and our Commonwealth. Throughout his life he has exemplified the qualities of duty, sacrifice and service to country and Commonwealth, and all carried with great humanity and humour, as we have noted. In the course of that service, he has visited Northern Ireland on many occasions, and we look forward to further such visits, when he can again be assured of the warmest of welcomes.
Beyond his formal duties, the Duke of Edinburgh has worked with hundreds of different causes and organisations and maintains to this day a schedule that many younger people would baulk at. Of all this work, the crowning glories are undoubtedly the World Wildlife Fund and the award that bear his title, the Duke of Edinburgh’s award. His work with WWF was literally decades ahead of its time, as has been said, and the Duke of Edinburgh’s award will this year break the 2 million mark for the number of children and young people who have gained an award. Proudly, Northern Ireland boasts the highest participation levels in the award scheme in the United Kingdom. Few individuals on earth can boast that they have written the rulebook of a sport, but he can—for carriage driving, which he once described as a geriatric sport.
As we approach the diamond jubilee of Her Majesty’s accession to the throne, we rightly reflect on the tremendous service that the monarch has given to this country, its people and the Commonwealth. When Her Majesty was crowned in Westminster Abbey, Prince Philip pledged to
“become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.”
Truly it can be said today that he has fulfilled that pledge in both word and spirit. For any man or woman, there are few better compliments that can be paid than to be recognised and respected for a lifetime of loyalty, steadfastness and truth to their word. For that and so much more, His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, deserves our nation’s deepest gratitude, our heartiest congratulations and our sincere prayers for God’s blessing and continued health and happiness.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak today to the motion for a humble address to be presented to Her Majesty on the 90th birthday of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh. I was fortunate enough some time ago to be given a role in the royal household, working for Her Majesty and senior members of the royal family, advising on strategic changes to the monarchy and briefing on key areas of national life. What struck me most when working at the palace was the incredible work load not just of Her Majesty the Queen, but of His Royal Highness. I commend him highly on his commitment to service over the years.
The Duke of Edinburgh not only attends many engagements on his own, but accompanies the Queen on her Commonwealth tours, state visits overseas and visits to many parts of the United Kingdom. On average, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said earlier, he carries out more than 350 engagements a year. He is also patron or president of some 800 organisations, with special interests in scientific and technological research and development, the encouragement of sport, the welfare of young people and conservation and the environment.
In 1956 the Duke founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s award in order to give young people
“a sense of responsibility to themselves and their communities”.
That has made a lasting contribution to our society and benefited many thousands of young people. A sense of responsibility to themselves and their communities is exactly what we are trying to create with the big society, so perhaps after all it was His Royal Highness who led the way and helped to inspire the policy.
In my constituency, many young people and schools are involved in the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme. Chiswick community school is particularly grateful for the award scheme. In the words of Tony Ryan, the school’s head teacher:
“We value the Duke of Edinburgh award more than I can say. The award helps build social and team building skills and independence. It takes kids out of their comfort zones—many kids have never been to the countryside before and often you see a completely different side to them. It really makes them think differently.”
When I visited Gunnersbury Catholic school recently, people were also talking about the benefits of the award scheme. Kevin Burke, the school’s head teacher, sent me pages of comments from students, a few of which I want to mention. James Phelan said:
“The Duke of Edinburgh award scheme opened my eyes to many new and challenging experiences, from which I learnt many life skills and values”.
Tom Sylvester said:
“The Duke of Edinburgh award scheme was a fantastic experience which has allowed me to put myself through all of my paces. I have managed to learn new skills that would have been nigh-on impossible. What I liked the most about this epic journey was the choice that was available and that I could complete it with my friends. I believe this experience has changed my life forever and has adjusted my perspective on life.”
Felix said:
“The Duke of Edinburgh bronze award brought many challenges and people could gain many valuable skills such as leadership.”
Jack said:
“The award scheme was an amazing experience”.
Jesse said:
“My Duke of Edinburgh experience was an experience of a lifetime”.
I would like to conclude by thanking His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh for his contribution to our society, his patronage of more than 800 organisations, his unstinting commitment to public life as the longest-serving royal consort in British history and, in particular, for the truly remarkable legacy for young people today from the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme, and finally for the personal support he gives Her Majesty on a daily basis.
His Royal Highness is a real example and inspiration to us all. If more people were encouraging many others to support voluntary organisations and helping young people gain life skills and experience for their future, bringing out the best in them, this country would be a much better place. I support the motion, which is our way of thanking His Royal Highness for his lifetime of service to the country and the Commonwealth.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I wholeheartedly support the motion in the name of the Prime Minister and my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition. I do not want to repeat all that has been said by other Members, but I will mention one further capacity that His Royal Highness has: the ability to put MPs in their place.
Parmjit Dhanda, when he was the Member for Gloucester, was invited in 2001, as I think was the current Prime Minister and others elected that year—it was our 10th anniversary yesterday—to Buckingham palace, and the Duke of Edinburgh went up to Parmjit and said, “So, what did you do before you got this job?” Parmjit said, “I worked in a trade union.” The Duke immediately replied, “Bugger all, then.” Parmjit, somewhat offended and thinking that he would retaliate with force, asked, “Well, what did you do before you got this job?”, to which the Duke replied, “Fought in the second world war.”
So, notwithstanding the remarks of my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn), I think that there are occasions when a little humility from this House towards His Royal Highness is entirely appropriate.
Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)
The Duke of Edinburgh is clearly someone who does not take well to compliments, but he will just have to put up with them this week, because quite frankly he deserves those compliments, not just because it is his 90th birthday on Friday, but because for more than 60 years, since their marriage in 1947, he has been the bedrock of support for Her Majesty the Queen—the constant and loyal support and the dutiful and honourable consort, perpetually at her side over the 59 years of her reign so far and, please God, for years to come. He is the longest-living consort in 1,000 years of British history, surpassing, only a couple of years ago, Queen Charlotte, the consort of King George III—but I am reliably informed that that is the only thing he has in common with Queen Charlotte.
The Duke may be 90 years old, but he has something to teach the youngest generations, and that is the principle of duty and service, as we have heard from other hon. Members. Nowadays, many people are accustomed to doing something only if they want to do it and only if it suits them. Many have an expectation of what their rights are, but not of what their responsibilities may be.
Many of the prince’s generation, maturing in the 1940s, understood the importance of doing a thing because it was the right thing to do for someone else, or for the country—but of course that sense of duty is not entirely extinguished today; very far from it. I had the honour of spending two days at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, last week, and I met many young cadets in their 20s and even younger who are very much focused on serving others—a willingness to serve, and certainly not for financial reward. They want to give something back.
The British are a very generous people and give vast sums and amounts of time to charities, and that is reflected in Her Majesty’s Government’s international development policy, but the Duke has done a great deal for this country over generations, as well as supporting the Queen. Not the least of those is the welfare of young children, as my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister said a few minutes ago. The Duke established the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme in 1956, and it has seen more than 7 million work to achieve an award. He meets the gold award winners personally.
The Duke is patron of some 800 organisations and has flown almost 6,000 hours in dozens of aircraft, but he was always what would now be called a type A personality—a leader. At Salem, as a pre-teenage boy in the early 1930s, the Nazis started to creep into school life, but Prince Philip used apparently to break into fits of laughter when he saw them and clearly even then considered them contemptible. Perhaps that is not surprising when one considers that his late mother is honoured in Yad Vashem in Israel as “Righteous Among the Nations”.
The Duke went on to be head boy, or guardian, at school in Gordonstoun. At the Royal Naval college he came top of the class and won the King’s dirk. He captained a warship at an extremely early age during world war two, and he served on battleships and destroyers throughout the second world war, even being mentioned in dispatches. He was involved in the allied invasion of Sicily, and was in Tokyo bay to witness the surrender of the imperial Japanese.
Still carrying out hundreds of public engagements a year at the age of 89, the Duke has given so many speeches that they apparently take up several volumes of shelf space, and he has never done anything that would affect his personal integrity or the integrity of the Crown. It is clear that his grandchildren love and respect him. He has borne the vicious cruelty, at times, of the press in this country with dignity and poise, and he has never once in public life done anything to embarrass Her Majesty the Queen or to weaken the dignity or integrity of the Crown—despite the odd controversial remark.
The Duke should be, and I believe is, a guiding light to others showing the correct way to behave with duty, honour, service and tradition.
Question put and agreed to, nemine contradicente.
Opposition Day
Women (Government Policies)
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
16:14 - The House divided: - Ayes: 238 / Noes: 296 - Question accordingly negatived.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I beg to move,
That this House regrets that the Government’s policies are hitting women and families hardest, including direct tax and benefit changes, cuts to childcare support and Sure Start which are making it harder for women to work, reductions in domestic and sexual violence specialist support, and their impact on the provision of social care; opposes plans that will make 300,000 women born between December 1953 and October 1954 wait an additional 18 months or longer to receive their state pension; calls on the Government to maintain the commitment given in the Coalition Agreement that the state pension age for women will not start to rise to 66 sooner than 2020; believes that promoting equality for women is vital to building a fairer society; and calls on the Government to commission independent, robust assessments of the impact of its policies on women and to prevent the implementation of policies that could widen inequality between women and men.
I got an e-mail from a woman called Michelle, who lives in my constituency. Michelle is a single mother with a toddler; she works part-time in a bank to support her family; and she studies part-time at the Open university, because she wants to get on and build a better future for herself and her child. Right now, she is very worried. Her train fares are going up and she is afraid that her course fees will go up, but the really big blow for her is that her child tax credit is being cut from 80% to 70%.
Michelle wrote:
“This is really devastating for me. My nursery fees are £530 a month, and my salary is £600 a month. This is an extra £50 each month out of my already very tight budget. This sadly is going to force me out of work and onto benefits, which I desperately don’t want to do. It is so unfair and I am very angry. I want David Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of the coalition to acknowledge this is happening to myself and thousands of other single parents, but that will never happen.”
It is because of Michelle and the stories that we have heard from so many women throughout the country that we have called this debate today. We are deeply worried about women who are struggling to work because of the changes that the Government have made; women who are finding it harder to make ends meet; women who are losing their own income and some of the independence that they value; women who are losing thousands of pounds of their pensions; and women such as Michelle who are finding it more difficult to work because of the sheer scale of the assault on families throughout the country—20% cuts to the Sure Start budget, cuts to child care tax credit and cuts to child tax credit.
The Government are taking more money from support for children than they are from the banks as part of their deficit reduction plan, and mothers throughout the country are taking the strain. Time and again, the Government hit women and families hardest, and I fear that for the first time in many generations equality and progress for women is being rolled back.
All Members know and will celebrate the major advances that we have seen in women’s equality over the past century. When we celebrated the centenary of international women’s day, I met a woman called Hetty Bower, who is already more than 100 years old and has received her telegram from the Queen. When Hetty was born, however, women did not have the vote, and when she had her first child there was no maternity care on the NHS—indeed, there was no NHS. She worked, but she certainly did not get maternity pay, family allowance or child benefit. By the time her daughter started work, it was still legal to pay women less than men to do the same job, and even when her granddaughter started work there was still little child care and little help for women wanting to work part-time or to care for their elderly parents.
When the Secretary of State and I were elected to Parliament, maternity leave was just 14 weeks, compared with 52 weeks today, and there were child care places for only one in eight children, rather than the one in four today. Of course, here in Westminster itself we had no nursery, but we still had a shooting range.
All the progress that we have seen for women over those years has been hard-won, and we should not take it for granted. From the suffragettes to the Dagenham strikers, women have campaigned and worked hard for those changes.
We know that there is still a long way to go, and if we look at the facts we find that, even some 40 years after passing the Equal Pay Act 1970, the pay gap remains at 15%. Women still make up only 12.5% of the boards of the UK’s top 100 companies. One in four women is a victim of domestic violence in their lifetime. Women here still represent only 22% of our Parliament. Some 30,000 women lose their jobs every year because of pregnancy. So yes, we have come a long way, but we have further to travel yet.
I think that the Minister for Women and Equalities and the Minister for Equalities support progress for women and agree that it should go further and faster. The trouble is that their Government are not delivering; instead, they are turning back the clock.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
Would the right hon. Lady like to take this opportunity officially to dissociate herself from her previous Government’s disastrous 10p tax policy, which did so much to hit the lowest paid, especially women across the country?
Yvette Cooper
I think that it was right to change the policy on the 10p tax rate, which did cause problems for a lot of women—the hon. Lady is right. However, often the very same women for whom we had to make changes to ensure that they got help because they were being affected by the 10p tax rate are now being affected by what her Government are doing to change the pension age and equalise pensions so quickly. The 10p tax rate did affect women, but not on the scale under this Government of hitting them with more than £10,000 of losses. Yes, she is right to point out the problems with the 10p rate, but she also needs to point out to her Government the serious damage that they are doing not only to women approaching pension age but to many other women across the board.
Yvette Cooper
I will make progress and then take an intervention from the hon. Lady.
In area after area, whether it is income, employment, child care, public services or action on violence against women, we are seeing the clock turned back. Today we want to concentrate on the Government’s reforms to the pension age and what is happening to women as a result. We understand the Government’s concern about rising longevity; of course we are all living longer and that has consequences. However, the nature and timing of the changes they have chosen is hitting women much harder than men. Bringing equalisation down to 2016 from 2018, combined with increasing the age again straight after that, means that women currently in their late 50s are getting a very bad deal. No men will see their state pension age increase by more than a year, but half a million women will do so. Those women, who are already in their mid to late 50s, are suddenly seeing their retirement plans ripped up. A third of a million women will have to wait an extra 18 months, and 33,000 women will have to wait an extra two years.
Let us think about what that really means. These women are already around 57 years old. They have been expecting to get their retirement pension in about seven years’ time. They will already have made financial plans; many will already have made retirement plans. These women are often the rock of their families. They are the ones who stopped work to look after their grandchildren so that their daughters could work, or they are working part-time and looking after elderly relatives. They have worked out how they can manage it, and how they can stretch their savings until the pension kicks in, and suddenly the Government are ripping all that up.
Dame Anne Begg (Aberdeen South) (Lab)
The group of women who, when they started work, would have expected to retire at 60, had already accepted that because of the equalisation of the state pension age they would have to work until they were 64, but it is the two years on top of that which is very difficult for them to swallow.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is exactly right. Those women have already made changes to their retirement plans, but these further changes are very late in the day, when it is extremely difficult for them to rearrange their plans. The consequence is that the equivalent of about £5,000 is being taken from half a million women, £10,000 is being taken from thousands of women, and £15,000 is being taken from those who are hardest hit—and they have less than seven years to work out how to cope. For most of those women it is too late to make changes to their financial plans and their career plans.
Let us take the case of Christine. She was born in July 1954. She is still working as a self-employed bookkeeper, and works about 25 hours a week. Like a lot of women her age, Christine says that she put her career on hold to bring up her children, so she does not have much of a private pension. She does not have extra savings to help her to cope and to make good the gap. Women in their late 50s have average pension savings of £9,100 compared with an average of £52,000 for men of the same age. These are women who took time out to look after their families, who worked part-time, and who started work in the ’70s when the pay gap was bigger. The pension system never properly recognised the contributions that they made to their families and to society, and now, as a result of what the Government are doing, it is kicking them in the teeth again.
The Government cannot tell us that this is being done to cut the deficit, because in 2016, when these changes come in, their structural deficit is supposed to have been eliminated. The best that the coalition has been able to come up with in its defence is to say that some of the poorest male pensioners who get pension credit will be quite hard hit too. I do not think that people such as Christine will consider that much consolation. Today, the Prime Minister tried to claim, “Well, it’s all right, it means that pensioners will be £15,000 better off because this is restoring the link with earnings,” but the link with earnings had already been restored as part of the Turner review. Making such a change now does not provide any benefits for women for many years to come. Instead, in the next few years, it hits extremely hard women who have worked hard for their families and for society.
Women on the Government Front Bench and Back Benches ought to do something about this. They should stand up and be counted; otherwise they are letting down women in their constituencies.
Dame Anne Begg
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it was not good enough for the Minister responsible for pensions to say to my Select Committee that it is all right because these women can get jobseeker’s allowance or employment and support allowance instead?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is exactly right. It is appalling to suggest that these women can get jobseeker’s allowance, because many of them have claimed very little throughout their lives. They have believed in working hard, doing their bit, and making their contributions to their family and their society, and the state pension was what they had earned—what they had saved for and contributed towards. Saying to them that they should claim jobseeker’s allowance, which is set at a much lower level, or that, having perhaps taken early retirement to look after the grandchildren only now to find that they cannot do so because they cannot make their savings stretch, they must suddenly try to find work after so long out of the labour market, misunderstands the reality of their lives and the pressures they are under. Something needs to change. The Government have done U-turns on issues such as forests; they have paused on the NHS; and they should make a massive change on this policy.
Jessica Morden (Newport East) (Lab)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that not only is this change coming in very quickly but thousands of women out there are not aware of it, despite the excellent campaign, because the Government have provided very inadequate information?
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. To the extent that women can plan for such change, they need to know what is going on. At the moment, a lot of women do not know what is happening and are worried. They are starting to hear about the change, but do not know what it is going to mean for them and for their personal circumstances.
Unfortunately, I heard one of the men on the Conservative Benches mutter “Deluded” in response to my call for the Government to U-turn. I have to say to him that he is deluded if he thinks that women across the country will not feel extremely angry. The more that they realise what the Government are doing, the more they will be knocking on the doors of their constituency MPs and asking why their MP is allowing them to lose up to £10,000 as a result of deeply unfair changes.
Yvette Cooper
I give way to the hon. Gentleman; I hope that he can defend the proposals.
Mr Gray
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. As one of the two Conservative men who signed the early-day motion on this subject, the other being my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley), I very much sympathise with the point that she is making on behalf of women born in 1953 and 1954—like me; 1954 was a vintage year. Does she not regret that in the motion she has chosen to make a broad sideswipe at the Government that is much less well thought through than her point about that particular cohort of women? Had she focused her attention on that, she might well have found one or two of us joining her in the Lobby.
Yvette Cooper
I apologise for my slightly aggressive reaction to the hon. Gentleman when he stood up; I should have checked the EDM beforehand. I commend him for his defence of his vintage, of all sexes. He is right that this issue is of extreme concern, and I hope that we will have further opportunities to vote on it.
I will turn to the wider points in the motion that the hon. Gentleman criticised, but which I think are important. It is women rather than men who are taking the biggest burden in the Government’s deficit reduction plans. The Government know of our deep concern that they are cutting too far and too fast, and that they are hitting growth and pushing up unemployment, which will cost us more. However, even those who support the scale and pace of the Government’s plans should be worried about the way in which they are carrying them out.
The House of Commons Library has produced detailed analysis of the direct tax and benefit changes in the Government’s emergency Budget and the spending review. A net total of £16 billion is being raised. That takes account of the increase in tax allowances and the cuts to tax credits. It looks at the extra money as well as the cuts. The conclusion is that £5 billion is coming from men and £11 billion is coming from women. Women are paying more than twice as much as men to get the deficit down, yet women still earn less and own less than men. How can that be fair?
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
Will the right hon. Lady confirm that the numbers she is citing include the £3.75 billion from the child benefit cuts for higher rate taxpayers such as me, who obviously are predominantly women?
Yvette Cooper
The figures include everything, so they do include the child benefit changes, as well as the change in tax allowances, the cuts to housing benefit, the cuts to public sector pensions and a series of other things. The point is that the cumulative impact will hit women much harder than men. Women who are on higher incomes will be hit much harder than men who are on higher incomes. Women who are on lower incomes in households where the man is on a higher income will also be hard hit, even though they may only be on part-time or low earnings. The hon. Lady is right that the analysis does not separate women on the basis of different levels of earnings, but it does show that at every level of earnings, in every sector of the economy and in every sector of society, women are being hit harder than men.
Yvette Cooper
I give way to the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) first.
Harriett Baldwin
Is the right hon. Lady saying that she would like my child benefit of £81.20 every four weeks to be reinstated, despite the fact that I make more than £65,000 a year as an MP?
Yvette Cooper
We have said that we think there is a serious advantage in some universal benefits. I do not think that the hon. Lady should be paid child tax credit, and she is not, because it is right that some things depend on people’s incomes. However, it is important that some things are universal. That is why we have said that there are serious problems with what the Government are doing on child benefit. She needs to take seriously the point that at every level of income and in every sector of society, women rather than men are the hardest hit.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
As someone who has staunchly defended universal child benefit precisely because of the reach that it secures for the poorest families—better than the means-tested benefits that are designed to reach them—I am pleased to tell the hon. Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) that I will certainly campaign for the reinstatement of child benefit for all parents. Does my right hon. Friend agree that one reason why it is so important to have benefits that are predominantly directed at women is that even in the best-off households, the way in which income is divided between a couple often favours the man? It is important to give women some independent income to protect their financial independence within the household.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right, because who gets the income in the household matters for a lot of women. Child benefit was about giving women an independent income, and it has given women a greater ability to make choices about their own lives.
The Government have dismissed the figures about the impact on women and men. They say that those figures cannot be calculated, but they have calculated no figures of their own. They claim that it cannot be done. That is rubbish, because the House of Commons Library did it, and pretty quickly. They also claim that it is not possible for the Government to come up with such figures, but the Treasury has done it before. When the Minister for Women and Equalities and I were new Back Benchers, I asked Treasury Ministers a written question on exactly the same thing. I asked what was the impact on women compared with men of the 1997, 1998 and 1999 Budgets. Treasury Ministers were able to calculate it then and they can calculate it now. The answer was that men benefited by £2.30 per week and that women benefited by £5.30 per week from the changes brought in by the Labour Government. This is the contrast: the Labour Government’s first Budget helped women twice as much as men; the Tory-led Government’s first Budget hit women twice as hard as men.
The Government say that one cannot look at men and women separately, but that one must look at households. That is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) made. The Government’s plans for universal credit have the same kind of flaw. They are talking about a single payment being paid to a single household member, with the risk that it will go predominantly to the man. What the Government say is just not true. Of course people choose to share their money in the household and in the family, but that is the point—they choose to share their money. Who gets the money in the first place matters. Beveridge understood that 60 years ago. That is why he introduced the family allowance, which led to child benefit. I do not understand why Government Members and the Government are so blind to this issue. Women on the Government Benches would be horrified if suddenly their salaries were paid to their husbands on the basis that it does not really matter because they are in the same household. That is the logical consequence of the Government’s arguments about households and for not being able to do such analysis.
Mrs Louise Mensch (Corby) (Con)
The right hon. Lady is pretending that child benefit is an income for women that is paid to women, but it is a benefit that is paid for the benefit of the child. It is not and never has been income for women.
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Lady does not seem to understand that most women do the spending for the children. That is why, originally, Beveridge wanted to ensure that women got some money. Right now—[Interruption.] Government Members obviously do not talk to women in their constituencies about the way in which child benefit money matters massively as part of their income. Of course a lot of that money is spent on children, but however women spend it, the fact that it is they who get the income gives them choices about how it is spent.
I suggest that the hon. Member for Corby (Mrs Mensch) listens to the recording of “Woman’s Hour” from soon after the Government’s announcement of their plan to take child benefit from those on the highest earnings. A lot of women called in to describe how they were on a low income, even though their husbands were on a higher income. They spoke about the difference that it made to have some money that came to them and over which they made the decisions, even if it was then spent on the children and their future.
Mrs Mensch
I am grateful to the right hon. Lady for being generous and giving way to me again. My constituency of Corby in east Northamptonshire has a large proportion of lower-income women. The women who come to my surgeries are delighted that higher-income women and families will not be paid this benefit, because they regard it as fundamentally unfair that rich people receive benefits. They cannot understand why it is the Labour party that is protecting benefits that are paid to the rich.
Yvette Cooper
Are those constituents equally delighted by the cuts to child tax credit, the cuts to the baby tax credit that is paid in the first year, the cuts to the Sure Start allowance, the cuts to their Sure Start centres, and the huge cuts that are hitting low-income women across the country? I bet they are not. I bet the hon. Lady did not ask them about those things when they came in and she started talking to them just about child benefit for higher earners.
Nicky Morgan (Loughborough) (Con)
Those same women—we are talking about these abstract women—are also extremely unhappy about the massive deficit left behind by the previous Government. Whether someone is a mother or a father, their children are facing an enormous debt. This Government are tackling the debt that the right hon. Lady’s Government left behind.
Yvette Cooper
If we had not had the increase in the deficit during the global financial crisis, we would have seen recession turn into slump. We would have seen huge numbers of women lose their jobs and be stuck in long-term unemployment. We would have seen women and their families lose their homes and savings, so it was right to support the economy during the recession. As a result of our decisions, the economy grew and the deficit came down. Unfortunately, the Minister’s Government have decided to put a political timetable for deficit reduction into place far ahead of the interests of the economy. They are hitting public services far faster than they needed to, but they are also hitting jobs and pushing far more women out of work and on to benefits and the dole, so that they cannot support their families.
Even if the Minister for Women and Equalities believes that the Government should cut the deficit this far and this fast, how can she possibly think it is fair for women to be paying £11 billion of the £16 billion reduction that is coming from tax and benefits, while men pay £5 billion? How can it be fair for women to pay twice as much as men, despite the fact that they still earn less and own less?
Sometimes I think that the Prime Minister has a blind spot about women, but most of the time I think the truth is probably far worse. This is an ideological problem for the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Despite the fact that there are many women in both parties who strongly want to see greater progress for women, the overall ideology of both parties at the moment is that the public sector should not worry about supporting families, about who gets the money within families or about what happens to families, because that is a private matter that the public sector should not engage in. They believe that such things as tax credits are bad, because they breed dependency. The truth is that for millions of women, pension payments or tax credits create not dependence but independence. They give women greater choice about how to balance work and family life, and about whether they can afford to stay at home while the kids are young or cover their child care payments so that they can go out to work.
I know that this is not easy for the Minister, because she does not control what happens in other Departments. She did the right thing at the very beginning of the Government’s time in office when she warned Ministers of their obligations to consider equality and the impact of policies on women. Unfortunately, few of those Ministers seem to have been listening. Several may indeed have told her to calm down.
Even if the right hon. Lady is not fully aware of what is happening across the Government, she does have responsibility in her own Department, the Home Office, and there are serious grounds for concern there. The committee on women in policing, for example, did not meet for more than a year. It would be helpful if she told the House whether it has yet met, and whether it is now doing any work to support more women to get into the police.
The right hon. Lady has followed the previous Government’s example of announcing a cross-Government strategy to tackle violence against women, which we welcome. We also welcome her support for rape crisis centres, but she does not seem to be reflecting what is actually happening on the ground, with one in five domestic violence courts closing; specialist domestic violence officers in police forces up and down the country being cut as a result of her 20% cuts to the police; refuges having to close their doors; DNA not being held in rape cases in which charges are not brought; and sentences for rapists potentially being halved if they plead guilty. We have seen her refusal and reluctance to sign the trafficking directive until pressure mounted in the House, a U-turn on anonymity for rape defendants only after pressure from the House, and her resistance, still, of the Council of Europe’s convention on violence against women.
Those matters have deep consequences in practice. The POPPY project has told me of the story of Lucy, who was heavily pregnant and being treated for a life-threatening disease, and who had been severely beaten by her father. Lucy’s doctor was trying to find accommodation for her. Due to the squeeze on local government budgets, the homeless persons unit said that it could not treat Lucy as being in priority need, and social services wrongly said that they did not need to help her because the baby had not yet been born.
Lucy was getting ready to sleep on the street for the weekend. The doctor could find only one refuge space, but it was too far away. The worker explained to the doctor that Lucy needed a legal letter telling social services and the homeless persons unit that they had a duty of care to her. Experience showed that only that legal threat would make the services act. Unfortunately, as hon. Members know, legal aid cuts are now biting, and solicitors were scarce and none had the space to take Lucy’s case. In the end, her doctor persuaded the hospital contract doctor to write a letter. It was not his responsibility, but he did so, and Lucy was given temporary accommodation. It came in the nick of time, because the refuge workers said that on that day, five other women fleeing domestic violence came in and asked for help, and were not as lucky as Lucy. They tell me that some ended up sleeping on the street. That is the reality of what is happening to vulnerable women at the sharp end of the cuts.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
My right hon. Friend mentioned in passing the fact that 65% of public sector workers are women, so they will be hit disproportionately. In my constituency, some 40% of workers are in the public sector. Does she accept, given what she has just said, that further cuts will tend to generate more domestic violence because of the economic pressure put on family life? There is a disproportionate impact on women not just economically but through domestic violence and the lack of funding to support increasing demand for services at a time when there are also cuts to the police budget. That is terrible for communities such as the one I represent.
Yvette Cooper
My hon. Friend is right. There are increased pressures on services, as well as cuts to many resources. Women workers in public services are feeling the strain, too.
The Minister for Women and Equalities will doubtless tell us about the good work that she and the Minister for Equalities are doing to improve women’s lives, which we welcome, but we believe that we need to go further and do more. We want to support them in their work, but we need them to do much more than they are doing now. We need them to start standing up for women in the Government. We will back them if they do, and we will support them even if their colleagues do not. However, they must act. They cannot just stand on the sidelines. They have a duty to stand up for women in this country, and to get in there and fight. They need to undertake some proper, independent research on the impact of the cuts and their reforms on women. They should use the work that has been done by women’s organisations in Coventry with the university of Warwick, because if they do not, we will. We will work with local groups and institutions to monitor what is happening to women across the country.
The truth is that equality for women is not just about women, it is about everyone. A fairer society for women and an economy that uses women’s talents is better not just for families but for everybody. I have always believed that every generation of women would do better than the last, have more opportunities and choices, break through more glass ceilings and challenge more conventions. However, I fear for our daughters and granddaughters as a result of what the Government are doing. We owe it to them to further the march for women’s equality and not to be the generation of women who turn back the clock.
The Secretary of State for the Home Department and Minister for Women and Equalities (Mrs Theresa May)
Yet again, we have heard a speech from the Opposition Benches that included no recognition of the economic mess that the last Government left us, no constructive suggestions and no positive policy proposals for the future of this country. That is not constructive opposition, it is shameless opportunism.
Let me remind the Opposition once more why we are having to take action to restore sanity to our public finances. They left us with the largest budget deficit in our peacetime history, and they left us spending £120 million every single day just on paying the interest on the debt that they racked up. That is more than we spend each day on policing, schools or child benefit. They left us with a deficit higher than that of Portugal or Greece, which have had to go cap in hand to the EU for a bail out. The experience of those countries shows that the risks of not dealing with Labour’s deficit are not imaginary but very real.
Yvette Cooper
Does the right hon. Lady think that the Labour Government should have cut public spending in the middle of a recession, and not allowed additional support for those who were unemployed and for businesses? If so, does she think the economy would have been growing at the time of the election if that had been done?
Mrs May
The Labour party, and the right hon. Lady as a former Treasury Minister, knows full well the risks of failing to deal with the deficit today. That is shown not just by what we are doing, but by what the Labour party itself said it would do if it was in government. I am talking about the position that we are in today, which was left us by the Labour Government, and the actions that we are having to take to deal with it. She must recognise that if the Labour party were in government today, it would be cutting £7 for every £8 that the current Government are cutting.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
The Opposition understand that the deficit must be dealt with and we want to get growth moving, but does the right hon. Lady think that that will happen if women are forced out of their jobs because they cannot pay their child care costs?
Mrs May
I am afraid that the hon. Lady’s claim that the Opposition understand dealing with the deficit rings false when we hear what they say the Government should do about the deficit. On the one hand, the Labour party tries to argue that what the Government are doing to address the deficit is wrong, and on the other hand Labour Members remain silent about the fact that a Labour Government would cut £7 of every £8 that this Government are cutting this year. We hear nothing from the Opposition about where those cuts would fall.
Kate Green
The issue for the Opposition is exactly where the cuts fall. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, not only is the bulk of the Government’s deficit reduction programme hitting women, but women’s unemployment is increasing disproportionately compared with men’s unemployment.
Mrs May
In the last three months, the increase in employment for women was greater than the increase in employment for men. Opposition Members, including the hon. Lady and the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), have said today that what the Government are doing is wrong. We hear that in debate after debate. Opposition Members stand up and tell us that the cuts in virtually every area of public sector expenditure are wrong. If they were in government, they would be making cuts. In that case, the question for them is where they would make those cuts.
Geraint Davies
Does the right hon. Lady accept that the deficit was the price we paid to avoid depression? The choice for the Government is whether to make deep and savage cuts that will stop growth, and to increase VAT, which will stoke inflation, or to focus on growth and make more balanced savings over time, and, obviously, to make the bankers pay their fair share. In the case of the police, the Opposition would cut 12% rather than 20%. That is a more balanced approach that would not undermine growth or increase the deficit in the process.
Mrs May
The premise on which the hon. Gentleman began his intervention was incorrect, because he failed to recognise that we are dealing with a structural deficit. This is not about the world recession, but about the structural deficit that was built up by the previous Labour Government.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. We must remember that this is a debate about women. We do not want to go too far talking about the deficit. I know that the two tie in, but we are in danger of having a deficit debate rather than ensuring that the women’s debate is heard.
Geraint Davies
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that something like a third of the deficit was excess investment—
Mrs May
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Answer came there none to my challenge to the hon. Gentleman.
The Government’s action is taking Britain out of the danger zone, but we are also taking action to deal with Labour’s record deficit in a way that protects the most vulnerable, whether they are men, women or children. We have therefore had to take some difficult decisions on public spending, but in a way that has allowed us to protect the public service on which women most rely—we are increasing spending on the NHS in real terms every year. The Opposition cannot say that they would do that, because they would cut spending on the NHS.
Yes, we have had to implement a public sector pay freeze, but that has allowed us to protect against more public sector job losses. Even as we implement the pay freeze, we are protecting the lowest-paid public sector workers, almost two thirds of whom are women. Again, the Opposition cannot say that they would do that.
Yes, the Government have had to make tax changes, but as we have done so we are lifting 880,000 of the lowest-paid workers out of income tax altogether, the majority of whom are women. That was opposed by the Labour party, which is surprising given that it claims to be committed to redistribution.
Mrs May
I shall make some progress.
Yes, the Government have taken the difficult decision to remove tax credits from higher earning families, but that has meant that we can increase child tax credits for the poorest families, protecting against increases in child poverty. In fact, that decision has meant that we can increase child tax credits by £180 and then £110 a year over and above the level promised by Labour. Those policies are not just about helping women, but about protecting the most vulnerable.
Yvette Cooper
The right hon. Lady said that the increase in tax allowances helps women. In fact, the figures produced by the House of Commons Library show that the increase in the tax allowance benefited 13,500 women and 16,800 men. Even what she did to benefit households benefited more men than women. In addition, her cuts—in child tax credits, child benefit and so on—all came from women. That is the point. She is taking far more from women, but when she gives some back, she gives more back to men.
Mrs May
It is absolutely clear that the majority of the lowest-paid workers are women, as are the majority of workers who were taken out of tax. The right hon. Lady refers again to the House of Commons Library figures—she keeps quoting them—but they were produced on a remit that she gave to the Library. Interestingly, she earlier spoke of the distribution and sharing of incomes within households. However, the assumptions on benefits made in the figures that she quotes go against what she was saying about what happens within families.
For the first time, people will have the information to judge for themselves whether they think the Government’s decisions are fair. We have been making some difficult decisions, but for the first time the Government published an overview of the impact of the spending review on groups that are protected by equalities legislation, including women. The analysis demonstrated that our decisions mean that services used by women are protected. With our Budgets in 2010 and this year, and with the spending review, we published unprecedented distributional analysis of our proposals, as the IFS has acknowledged. Such analyses were never published by the previous Government. Perhaps if they had thought to publish such information, they would have avoided policies that hit some of the poorest the hardest, such as scrapping the 10p tax rate, which my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) mentioned.
I reject the Opposition notion that we can judge the value of a policy simply by looking at the number of men or women who are affected by it. We should not reduce the amount that we invest in tackling youth unemployment just because more young men than young women are unemployed, but that is exactly what the Opposition’s analysis suggests we should do. They say that spending on tackling youth unemployment would be unfair on women.
We should not stop investment in policies that will return Britain to growth, such as cutting corporation tax, because more men run companies than women. However, again that is exactly what the Opposition’s analysis suggests we should do. I reject that argument. We need to ensure that more women can start businesses as we invest in getting Britain’s economy going. In fact, one symptom of the inequality between men and women is that more women than men rely on state spending.
We need to continue to support all women who need it, which is why we have ensured that we have protected child benefit and tax credits for women on low incomes, and why we will increase the value of the state pension, and protect benefits such as the winter fuel allowance and free bus passes for older women. However, if the previous Government taught us one thing, it is that more state spending might help to deal with the symptoms of inequality, but it does not address the causes. This Government are determined to get to grips with the causes of inequality between men and women, from job opportunities to the number of women in top, senior positions, to tackling the shameful levels of violence against women, and working to reverse the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.
Liz Kendall (Leicester West) (Lab)
The Home Secretary will know that some of the key causes of inequality come into play during the very earliest years of a child’s life. Can she explain why her Government are cutting £5 million from the early intervention grant in Leicester, which covers children’s centres and Sure Start, which are crucial to giving all children the very best start in life?
Mrs May
We agree that early intervention is very important and, as the hon. Lady will know, the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) produced a very significant report for the Government on the whole issue of early intervention. The Government are ensuring that, within the early intervention budget, there is sufficient funding to provide for a network of Sure Start centres. We are also ensuring—as we are in other areas, as I have mentioned in terms of focusing what the Government spend on the most vulnerable and those most in need—that Sure Start is returned to the early focus it was intended to have by the last Labour Government, which was helping those who are most in need, those on the lowest incomes and those who most need access to the sort of provision that Sure Start and children’s centres can provide.
I want the Government to take a new, more mature approach to engaging with women. I want to see women’s voices in government strengthened. That is why we launched a consultation on how the Government listen to and engage with women, which has already received nearly 900 responses. In today’s world, we need to make full use of communications technology, social media and other techniques to allow us to talk to women directly.
The Government are focused on giving opportunities to women. We need to move beyond just protection from discrimination and help women to get on in modern businesses and modern workplaces. Many women have benefited from the introduction of the right to request flexible working for parents and carers, but by restricting flexible working to certain groups, the idea was perpetuated that this is some sort of special treatment. We will therefore extend the right to request flexible working to all employees. This will not only shift attitudes, but will help to shift behaviour away from the traditional 9-to-5 model of work that can act as a barrier to many women and that also does not make sense for many modern businesses.
Another stereotype we need to shift is the idea that women should do the caring and men should earn the money when a couple decide to start a family. Our policy to introduce a new system of flexible parental leave will make a real difference to working women who want to have children. For the first time, it will allow both parents to choose what is right for them and what is right for their family. If fathers want to take more of a role, they can. If mothers want to return to work earlier, they can. If parents want some time at home together after the birth of their child, they can have it. What matters is that they will have a choice.
Helen Goodman
I agree with the Home Secretary that we want to maximise people’s choices, but she must be aware that most non-resident parents are men and most parents with care are women, and that the latter have lower incomes. How can she justify putting a charge on those parents with care when the non-resident parent is not paying up on child maintenance?
Mrs May
As the hon. Lady knows, we have had a consultation on how we deal with the child maintenance issue. I hope that she would agree that despite the efforts of both Conservative and Labour persuasions over several years, we have not got the child maintenance system right in this country. There are too many people who do not see the absent parent paying child maintenance and we need to do everything we can to get a system that will work. As she will know, the Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller), is looking at this issue and the alternatives available under the child maintenance proposals.
As well as giving all women better opportunities in the workplace, we need to do more to help those who aspire to the very top. Last year, only 12.5 % of all FTSE 100 board members were women. That is simply not good enough, and that is why the Government commissioned Lord Davies to look at how we can increase the number of women on company boards. We have made good progress in implementing Lord Davies’ recommendations. In May, the Financial Reporting Council launched a consultation on changes to the UK corporate governance code in order to help to achieve more diverse and more effective boards. The head-hunting industry has agreed a voluntary code on diversity, and we are building a strong sense of ownership and action in FTSE 100 companies. We have agreed with them a plan for how company aspirational targets should be published by September.
The latest figures suggest there has already been an improvement in FTSE 100 companies, just by our shining a light on this area. Some 31% of new board members appointed since Lord Davies’ report have been women, up from just 13% last year, and the number of male-only boards has dropped from 21 in October to 14.
We are also helping women to break through the glass ceiling by providing an all-age careers service. The new service will be fully operational by next April, and will provide high quality, professional careers guidance that will be open to all young people and adults. That will help women to make the right choices for themselves and for their careers. For the lowest paid, we will raise the minimum wage to £6.08—two thirds of those on the minimum wage are women.
In other areas we are also making the right decisions to help the most vulnerable. On pensions, again we have had to make some difficult decisions. Yes, we have proposed accelerating the rate at which the state pension age for women becomes the same as the state pension age for men. With life expectancy rising—and one in nine women pensioners is now expected to live to more than 100—and with the overwhelming need to reduce the deficit, this was a decision we could not duck. But it means that at the same time we have been able to commit to a triple guarantee, which will increase the basic state pension by earnings, prices or by 2.5%, whichever is highest.
The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford claimed that the earnings link had been restored by the Turner report. Of course the Turner review referred to the earnings link, but the last Government did not restore it. This Government have restored the earnings link and gone further with the triple guarantee.
Dame Anne Begg
Do I take it from what the Home Secretary says that the reason for the acceleration of the state pension age to 66 by 2020 is that the Government can pay for the triple lock on today’s pensions? It cannot be about deficit reduction because it comes after the deficit is supposed to have been abolished.
Mrs May
In fact, by the end of the comprehensive spending review period we will still have a debt of £1.4 trillion, which is three times the debt in 2006-07, so we will still need to look carefully at our public sector finances. It is this Government who have introduced that triple lock on pensions that will benefit today’s pensioners. For too long under the previous Government, older women had to rely on means-tested benefits, with many not claiming their entitlements at all. Our triple guarantee will help to improve the value of the state pension, giving real security and a decent income for all women pensioners. Although women will experience the rise in the state pension age more quickly than previously planned, they will still draw the state pension for an average of 23 years.
Dame Anne Begg
To be clear, is the Home Secretary agreeing that the triple lock will be paid for by the 500,000 women who will have to wait longer for their state pension in order to reduce Government debt? That returns us to the essence of this debate—why should women bear a higher proportion of reducing the deficit than men?
Mrs May
It is not the case that there is a simple link between the acceleration of women’s pension age and the expenditure on the triple lock. What is happening with pensions is more complex. Two things are happening in relation to the state pension age. The first is the overall acceleration for men and women, raising the age of state pension entitlement. That will bring in significant sums of money and is a reflection not only of Government finance issues but of increased longevity. When the state pension was first introduced, people lived for a very short period, comparatively speaking—a matter of two to five years—beyond their retirement. Today, people live for a significant length of time beyond their retirement. The Government therefore need to raise the state pension age, as has been recognised by previous Governments—the initial decisions to accelerate the rise and raise the state pension age were taken by previous Governments. We have had to take these difficult decisions. As I said, however, although women will experience the rise more quickly than previously planned, they will still draw the pension for an average of 23 years.
Claire Perry
I am sure that my right hon. Friend is aware of this point, but in the proposals for 2016 and thereafter will we not be addressing the long-standing problem of women who have taken career breaks being ineligible for a state pension, which is a travesty that we should have sorted out before? Under the proposals we will bring forward, there will be much more parity in that area.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend makes an important point that I was about to deal with. In the longer term, we want to take reforms even further. The state pension Green Paper proposed a single-tier state pension combining the state pension and the state second pension to provide an estimated £140 per week, which would be of particular benefit to women who have had to take time out of the labour market because of their caring responsibilities. The coalition Government are not just talking about this—we have actually made proposals to help women in this regard.
On health, we are pursuing policies that give real help to women. We have stuck to our promise to increase health spending in real terms; we are sticking to our coalition agreement commitment to increase the number of health visitors by 4,200 by 2015; and we are making available £400 million over the next four years to support breaks for all those hard-working carers, many of whom are women.
I have made it absolutely clear, as has my hon. Friend the Minister for Equalities, that tackling violence against women and girls is one of my top priorities, which is why in March we published an action plan to tackle the problem; it is why we have provided more than £28 million of stable Home Office funding until 2015 for local specialist services; it is why we have provided £900,000 until 2015 to support national helplines; and it is why for the first time we have put funding for rape crisis centres on a stable footing. We will provide more than £10 million over three years to support their work, and we will open new centres where there are gaps in provision. This should not be a party political issue. It is about helping the 1 million women who suffer domestic abuse each year; the 300,000 women who are sexually assaulted; and the 60,000 women who are raped. As the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford said, one in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, and that will often be accompanied by years of psychological abuse. That is why the Government take violence against women and girls so seriously.
We will only change damaging behaviour, however, after we have changed the underlying attitudes that cause that behaviour. Those attitudes are fundamentally affected by the culture and society in which children grow up. We share the concern of many parents that children are now being exposed to sexualised images and an increasingly sexualised culture from an early age, which is why we commissioned Reg Bailey, the chief executive of the Mothers’ Union, to lead an independent review of the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. He has listened to parents’ concerns about explicit music videos, outdoor adverts and the increasing amount of sexual content in family programming on television.
Reg Bailey’s recommendations call on businesses and broadcasters to play their part, and they include putting age restrictions on music videos, covering up explicit images on the front pages of magazines and newspapers and restricting outdoor adverts near schools, nurseries and playgrounds. He also recommends that retailers sign up to a code of practice that checks and challenges the design, display and marketing of clothes, products and services for children. There has been a great deal of goodwill from the broadcast, retail and advertising industries throughout this review. They know that family-friendly practices make good business sense, and the Government will now look to work with business to implement the review’s proposals.
As well as helping women in this country, we are doing more than ever before to help women overseas. We are putting women at the heart of our international development policies, because in development there are few better options than investing in women. In Ivory Coast, for example, an increase of just $10 in women’s income achieves the same nutritional and health outcomes for children as an increase of $110 in men’s income. On international women’s day, the Department for International Development published its new strategic vision for girls and women. It sets out that, by 2015, our international development work will have saved the lives of at least 50,000 women in pregnancy and childbirth and 250,000 newborn babies; will have allowed at least 10 million women to access modern methods of family planning; will have supported more than 9 million children in primary education, of whom at least half will be girls, and 700,000 girls in secondary education; and will have helped 2.3 million women to access jobs and 18 million women to access financial services.
Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)
The majority of part-time students studying for first degrees are women. Ten years ago I graduated as a mature part-time student—and I was pleased to note then that the majority of students were women. However, will my right hon. Friend confirm the Government’s decision to extend loan support to part-time students, which will give women the opportunity to advance their careers through further education?
Mrs May
I commend my hon. Friend on his experience and how he got his qualification—I am choosing my words carefully, given what he said about the number of females on the course. However, it is important that we support part-time study, because it is an option that people are increasingly considering. The extra support that we have provided and the way we have dealt with the issue are important steps forward. As he said, such support will have a particularly significant impact on women, given that many part-time students are women.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
On students, women in my constituency often tell me about the need for good English language schools. The Home Secretary will know that the co-financing proposals for speakers of other languages will affect women disproportionately— 74% of those affected by the proposals will be women. What conversations has she had with the relevant Minister about that issue?
Mrs May
I have had a number of conversations over time with the relevant Minister on the issue of English language schools and colleges.
I wish to finish the point about tackling violence against women and girls overseas. My hon. Friend the Minister for Equalities has also been appointed as our overseas champion for tackling violence against women and girls. We have a moral duty to act to support women around the world.
The Opposition’s record on women speaks for itself. They left government with 1 million women unemployed and 200,000 more women unemployed than when they came to power—and that is without even mentioning the deficit. We are sorting out their mess and protecting the most vulnerable, even as we deal with Labour’s deficit, and we are giving women the opportunities they need to be successful: flexible parental leave; more women on boards; careers advice for all; flexible working extended; NHS spending protected; resources for violence against women defended; international development spending centred on women; low-paid people taken out of income tax; pay rises for low-paid public sector workers; child tax credits higher than under Labour; a triple guarantee on pensions; and the minimum wage up. Which of these policies do the Opposition disagree with? Where is their plan to deal with the deficit, to sort out the public finances, and to get Britain back up off its knees? They have no policies that would benefit women, no positive ideas, nothing to say to protect the most vulnerable, and therefore no credibility. All they offer is empty opposition, and that is why their motion deserves to fail.
Emma Reynolds (Wolverhampton North East) (Lab)
I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will agree that discrimination and prejudice have blighted women’s lives for many decades and centuries, and we will all have stories of how our own families have been affected by it. In the 1950s, my grandmother, who was a midwife, was nearly forced out of work purely because she got married and started having children. In the 1970s, when my mother was pregnant with me, she was sacked because she was pregnant. She took the case to court, but was unsuccessful. Furthermore, it was only 20 years ago that marital rape was criminalised. It is incredible and horrific to think that until 1991 a man could rape his wife without her having any recourse to justice.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) said, much progress has been made in recent decades. However, it has been hard-fought, and I worry that it is fragile. Much more remains to be done. Girls do better at school and university than boys, but that is not filtering through into the labour market. Women earn less than men, and women own less than men. Men dominate the FTSE 100 companies, and one in four women at some point in their life will experience domestic violence. I also have to say that for every five men in this Parliament there is only one woman.
The case for gender equality is often expressed in the language of fairness and social justice, but there is also a powerful economic case for gender equality. It simply does not make sense to under-utilise the potential of half the population. A gender-equal society is not just fairer; it will be stronger, too. My worry is that the Government are complacent about the progress that has been made and that their policies might set us back years, or perhaps decades. The devastating economic impact of the Government’s policies on women is particularly distressing. Let us face it, the Government did not get off to a great start. This time last year, they failed to do an equalities impact assessment of their emergency Budget.
As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford set out, the deficit reduction measures are going to hit women much harder than men. Just as I am worried that the midlands and the north will be less able to cope with the economic gamble of this Government’s deep cuts, with the private sector less likely to take up the slack in those areas than in the south, I am also deeply concerned that women’s employment and pay will be disproportionately hit by the Government’s policies. Of the 500,000 jobs estimated to be lost in the public sector, an estimated 65% to 80% will be women’s jobs. It is not clear that the loss of jobs held by women in the public sector will be offset by an increase in the private sector. Therefore, the employment gap between men and women is likely to widen. Moreover, the gender pay gap is also likely to widen, as the private sector has a much higher pay gap than the public sector, with men earning over 20% more than women.
Dame Anne Begg
I have to give my hon. Friend the bad news that in some areas the gender pay gap is even wider. In my constituency the gender pay gap is 30%, partly because a lot of the men have high-paid jobs in the oil industry, whereas the women generally work in the service industry.
Emma Reynolds
The gender pay gap has been a problem for decades. Even though we legislated in this country in the 1970s, there has not been enough movement to narrow the pay gap.
Let me turn to the commitment in the coalition programme to
“promote equal pay and take a range of measures to end discrimination in the workplace.”
When the Minister winds up, I would like her to explain exactly how the actions that I have described will further that commitment. I fear that we will go backwards, not forwards.
The benefit cuts and changes also have a disproportionate effect on women. I support the eventual equalisation of the pension age for men and women, but again, we have seen the Government’s total disregard for the 500,000 women aged between 56 and 57 who, at very short notice, will have to wait two years longer before receiving their pensions. Also, cuts to child benefits and the working family tax credit, which involve help for child care costs, will make it harder for women to combine parenthood and work. For women with children, those benefits do not create dependence, but give them independence and a real choice of whether to stay at home or work part time or full time. Now that choice will only get harder.
Nicky Morgan
My constituents have told me that one of the problems with the current system of tax credits—and the reason why the universal credit is needed—is that a number of women in receipt of tax credits found that if they worked even one or two hours extra, they immediately started to lose more benefits than they were gaining. The point is that we want to encourage women’s independence, as the hon. Lady says, which means the ability to be flexible and take on more work if it is available, yet the current tax credits system seems somehow to stop that.
Emma Reynolds
I share the hon. Lady’s sentiments, but I do not agree with her conclusions. The child care element of the working tax credit is particularly important, especially for parents on middle incomes, yet it is being cut quite substantially. Those cuts in particular will reduce parents’ opportunities to work if they want to. I want both parents to have the choice of working, if they so desire, as well as balancing family commitments. Indeed, a civilised society should provide that framework, so that both parents can, if they want to, combine work with parenthood. Again, this is not just about fairness; it also makes economic sense.
However, this Government are guilty not just of attacking women’s economic empowerment, but in their work on tackling violence against women. We have seen many ill-thought-through policies that seem to be targeted at women. For example, this time last year, when considering anonymity for defendants, the Government chose to introduce it for rape cases. I know that they have dropped the idea since, but why choose rape, a crime predominantly committed against women? We also had an interesting debate about whether the Government should increase the plea bargaining discount, and again, the crime chosen to illustrate this was rape. Again, why choose a crime that affects more women than men?
I also have deep concerns about the Government’s reluctance to do anything concrete about the modern slave trade. Although I am pleased that they have finally seen the light and signed up to the EU human trafficking directive, I fear that it took them so long that they are now behind, rather than leading from the front, blinded by a degree of Euroscepticism. I also want to know what the Government are preparing to do ahead of the Olympic games next year. Unfortunately, international sporting events are magnets for pimps and traffickers. I would like to know what specific measures the Government are putting in place to stem the probable increase in trafficking due to the Olympic games. There is also much evidence that the national referral mechanism used to identify victims of trafficking is not fit for purpose. The UK Border Agency is in control of the mechanism, often treating women as illegal immigrants instead of victims—that seems to be the assumption made even before the women involved are interviewed.
In opening, I talked about the discrimination that my grandmother and mother suffered, and the progress made since. I sincerely hope that this Government will start to take seriously the risk that their policies will make women’s life chances worse, not better, for the next generation.
Mrs Louise Mensch (Corby) (Con)
I am very glad to be called to speak in this important debate. Let me start by saying how much I agreed with part of the concluding sentiments of the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), when she said that this debate is not just about women, but about everybody. That, of course, is where all the Opposition’s arguments fall down, because they fail to perceive—she said this was ideological; I agree with her: it is ideological—that by returning the country to prosperity, we will be returning women to prosperity. She fails to perceive or acknowledge what the former Prime Minister and Member for Sedgefield, Tony Blair, has acknowledged—along with James Purnell and her right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field)—which is that her Government failed to reform the welfare system, and in doing so, failed so many of the women and children in this country, who suffered from being below the poverty line.
What a shocking indictment to hear from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State that the right hon. Lady’s Government left office with 1 million women unemployed. We heard a list in the right hon. Lady’s opening arguments of all the ways in which women had fallen behind men in equality. I would say to her and other Opposition Members that Labour had 13 years in power to do something about the inequalities that women suffered, about the welfare system or about children below the poverty line, yet they signally failed to do so, just as they signally failed to tackle our structural deficit. Again and again, we heard her right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) talk about taking tough decisions for the long term, yet he never took any of them. It has taken the two parties on the Government side of the House to fix the mess that the one party on the other side left behind.
How astonishing that the Labour party actually dared to call for an Opposition day debate on women’s issues. When I look at my research brief from the Government I see measure after measure designed to protect children and families. I see a relentless focus on women, children and the most disadvantaged among the dispossessed. This Government must try to perform the incredibly difficult balancing act of fixing the deficit while protecting the most vulnerable, and we are coming up with creative and flexible solutions to a problem that was left to us entirely by the Labour party.
Labour Members talk of Sure Start provision. It is a fact that under Labour 50% of Sure Start centres were failing to reach out to the most disadvantaged children. It is a fact that Sure Start provision had moved away from its original purpose, and was failing to reach the most needy and the most vulnerable. Our proposals for Sure Start provision will include payment by results, and rewards for incredibly effective Sure Start centres such as the Pen Green centre in my town of Corby in east Northamptonshire, which has just received a massive amount of investment for research from the Department for Education. We will see extra health visitors, and we will see a relentless focus on children.
I find it amazing that, yet again, what we are hearing from Labour Members is naked opportunism. My right hon. Friend made a point that has been made many times on the Government Benches and has always gone unanswered: Labour’s spending plans involved cuts of £7 in every £8. When asked for specifics, Labour Members always respond with platitudes. They get to their feet and say, “We agree that the deficit needs to be tackled”, but when Government Members ask them precisely how they would tackle it, they reply, “We would not make your cuts.”
The women of this country are not stupid. They know that a blank piece of paper is no answer, and they know that we are fighting at every level for women. They see that there are to be new rape crisis centres in Hereford, Devon, Trafford and Dorset. They see stable funding for rape crisis centres: £10 million a year for the next three years. The Government are dealing with the important issue of violence against women, and they are taking action against rape. We are seeing deeds rather than words from this Government.
Heidi Alexander
The hon. Lady talks about fighting for women. What assessment has she made of cuts in legal aid that will have a hugely disproportionate effect on women once family law cases become ineligible for funding? Does that constitute fighting for women?
Mrs Mensch
I believe that the proposal to reduce legal aid funding was in the hon. Lady’s party’s manifesto. She will know, or she should know, that the legal aid system is incredibly inefficient and incredibly costly. Once again, we hear from Labour Members objections to a particular cut; once again, it is a particular cut that Labour also proposed in its manifesto; and once again, Labour Members have no specific proposals whatsoever to offer the women of this country on how they would implement their policy.
As my right hon. Friend pointed out, universal credit is an attempt to tackle not the symptoms but the root causes of women’s poverty. According to statistics from the Department for Work and Pensions, it will take an estimated 350,000 children and 1 million people out of poverty. That is genuine progress. We know that women and children suffer in workless households, and we are finally grasping the nettle and tackling the problems that Labour refused to tackle.
As I look through my statistics, I see programme after programme directed at women. We have talked about the massive investments in existing rape crisis centres and the new ones that are being built. We have talked about the increase in the minimum wage—and so many of the 890,000 people affected by the increase to £6.08 will be women. Under Labour, it was perfectly legal for Jobcentre Plus offices to display advertisements for sex workers. It is absolutely appalling that Labour allowed that to continue, but this Government have stopped it.
What about the extra investment in the national health service? Labour is very quiet about the fact that it would cut funding for a service on which women increasingly rely. How bizarre to sit here—
Helen Goodman
Before the hon. Lady gets too high on her horse, may I point out to her that all the ground work and all the legal advice for changing the rules about which jobs could be advertised in jobcentres were produced under the last Government?
Mrs Mensch
May I please tell the hon. Lady that ground work is simply not good enough? For 13 years under a Labour Government, you allowed sex worker jobs to be advertised in Jobcentre Plus. The hon. Lady is embarrassed about that, and so she should be. It is an indictment of her Government that it was ever allowed.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I assure the hon. Lady that I was not responsible for sex workers. I should be very grateful if she would put that right.
Mrs Mensch
I apologise profusely for ever having suggested such a thing, Mr Deputy Speaker. I shall try to mind my language in future, as my mother taught me to.
It is this Government who are looking at ways of challenging inequalities in the workplace—
Mrs Mensch
I shall be happy to do so after I have made a little more progress.
Fiona Mactaggart
First, at no point were what the hon. Lady describes as “sex worker jobs” advertised in jobcentres. Secondly, the advertisements were not displayed for the entire term of the last Government. There had been a court decision that jobs in the broader sex industry ought to be advertised in jobcentres, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and I pressed for it to be changed. I think that the hon. Lady’s claim that that was an achievement by the present Government is fundamentally dishonest, and that it was equally wrong for her to say that the advertisements continued for 13 years. [Interruption.] I am sure that it was done by accident.
Mrs Mensch
I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention, but I must tell her that I reject her assessment. In the Welfare Reform Bill, the Government have introduced legislation to close the loophole. If the Labour Government did not like the direction in which the courts were moving, it was always open to them to introduce legislation and to do so quickly. They would have been supported by my right hon. and hon. Friends, but they chose to sit on their hands.
I commend the hon. Lady for having done some of the work, but I condemn her party’s Government for not having done it quickly enough. Labour Members cannot escape the fact that it is this Government who have put right that shocking affront to women’s dignity. It is also this Government who are introducing flexible parental leave between parents, and this Government who are working with businesses to bring about transparency in pay so that the massive gap between men’s and women’s wages—which was 16.4% under Labour—can be reduced.
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds) made an opportunistic reference to plea bargaining and shorter sentences for rape. It may be an idea that will not go very far, but the present Government are at least trying to introduce measures to tackle the appalling rates of rape conviction that we saw under the hon. Lady’s party. We saw zero ideas from that Government, and zero action to tackle those conviction rates.
Emma Reynolds
Does the hon. Lady think that the policy that the present Government have just abandoned of increasing the discount from 33% to 50% would have had an effect on the number of defendants pleading guilty? The Sentencing Council did not.
Mrs Mensch
I believe that it might have had an effect, but I also believe that the root cause is the fact that sentences overall for violence against women, rape and sexual offences are far too low, and that if necessary the House should direct the Sentencing Council to increase those overall sentences. In that wider context, the proposal might have made more sense. Let me point out to the hon. Lady that the entire left-wing press, including The Guardian, roundly condemned her right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition for his naked opportunism over the issue of sentencing and rape. As with rape crisis centres, it is this Government who are trying to do something about it.
Since December the number of mixed-sex wards has fallen by some 77%, and many women are no longer having to suffer that indignity. There is more investment in the NHS. Sure Start centres are protected under law from arbitrary closure by local authorities, which now have great flexibility to spend their budgets as they wish. Extra intervention means that there will be new health workers to help mothers to breastfeed, and to help the most vulnerable families. Sure Start is being targeted at the women who need it most.
When we look at the overall reforms of the economy, universal credit, the lifting of women out of poverty and the creation of opportunities, we see a Government who are not anti-women but, in fact, relentlessly pro-women, and who are doing all the things that the Labour party failed to do during its 13 years in office. Let me say to Labour Members that if they are not satisfied with the position of women in our society today, they have only themselves to blame.
On the issue of women as on so many other issues, it is the two parties in the coalition Government who are taking action and making progress. When an Opposition Member gets to their feet and levels with the House and the country about where precisely they would make some cuts, they might begin to have some credibility.
Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)
It is only a tiny little budget, but it appears to be the only one that has not been cut at all: the grant for the Prime Minister’s second kitchen.
Mrs Mensch
I am very fond of the hon. Gentleman, as he knows, and we have great fun serving together on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, so I will go easy on him by saying that I will take that intervention in the light-hearted spirit in which it was intended, because the country is in a very serious state, and the state women are in is very serious too. The fact that we have to make these cuts is a serious matter, and it does affect women, yet all we hear from Opposition Members is excuses and all we see is blank paper; there is no admission that they would cut too, and no notion of where they would cut.
In conclusion, how unutterably strange it was to hear a good portion of the opening speech of the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and of the contribution of the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green)—who is no longer in her place—spent trying to defend the payment of child benefit to prosperous women such as me. If that is what they have got to say to the women of this country, it is frankly no wonder that they are sitting on the Opposition Benches rather than the Government Benches. It is this Government who are committed to women; it is this Government who are making progress for women; it is this Government who are committed to tackling the deficit and at the same time protecting women and the most vulnerable. The Opposition have nothing to say, and I am sure their motion will be defeated in the resounding manner that it deserves.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Before I call the next speaker, who will be Jonathan Ashworth, may I remind Members that his will be a maiden speech?
Jon Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a tremendous privilege, and perhaps a little daunting, to have this opportunity to speak in the Chamber for the first time, not least because this is a debate on women and Government policy, and I do hope that I do not turn out to be the token male in the debate—although as a father of a two-week-old baby girl, and as someone who has just returned from paternity leave, I feel slightly more confident about speaking in it than I might have done a fortnight ago.
As is the custom, I start by paying tribute to my immediate predecessor, Sir Peter Soulsby, who stood down from Parliament to contest the election for Leicester’s first directly elected mayor—which, indeed, he won. Sir Peter was much admired in the House for his independence and integrity, and although I make no criticism of those who remain in this House while seeking election to other bodies, it is testament to Peter’s devotion and commitment to the city of Leicester that he resigned his seat before seeking election as Leicester’s mayor, not after. I am sure that Members on both sides of the House will wish him well—and look on enviously at his 37,000 majority. I look forward to working closely with Sir Peter in the years ahead.
I also want to say a few words about Parmjit Gill and the late Jim Marshall. Parmjit Gill served briefly as Member of Parliament for Leicester South. He was also very briefly my opponent in the recent by-election. I and many others were sorry when he withdrew as a candidate, as he is respected across the constituency, but I know he has a young family and I wish him well for the future. I never knew Jim Marshall, but throughout the by-election campaign I met many who did. Jim served Leicester South for nearly 25 years in total, with an unfortunate four-year break thanks to the will of the electorate. Many still speak warmly of Jim’s compassion and commitment to social justice. He is hugely missed across Leicester South.
I am privileged to represent a constituency of huge diversity, vibrancy and tolerance, and while we must never be complacent, our communities generally live harmoniously together. We are part of a city renowned across the world for welcoming incomers. Families have come from across the globe to make their home in Leicester South, such as our Asian communities from Gujarat, Punjab, Pakistan, east Africa and Bangladesh, as well as our Caribbean community, our communities from Somalia and, most recently, those from elsewhere in Africa, the middle east and eastern Europe. Our diversity enriches our cultural, social and civic life, and contributes immensely to our economy, too.
For many of my constituents, faith is important. A sightseer on a tour through Leicester South would no doubt visit our cathedral and beautiful churches, numerous mosques, gurdwaras, Hindu temples, synagogues, and the Jain temple. We are all proud that all our faith groups promote mutual understanding and solidarity, focusing on what unites us, not on what divides us. There can be no greater example of this than what happened when the English Defence League came to Leicester last October in an attempt to stir up hatred and division. The people of Leicester—all faiths, all cultures and all backgrounds—united in rejecting the EDL and what it stands for. Our community leaders, our city council leadership, the police and, most importantly, the people of Leicester should be commended for what we have achieved in Leicester. Although my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) is not in his place, I also want to pay tribute to him for his outstanding contributions on these matters over many years. As the Member for Leicester South, I will play my part in celebrating our diversity and promoting mutual understanding in the years ahead as well.
Many people from across the world and the UK come to study at our two great universities—Leicester and De Montfort—both of which are situated in Leicester South. Our universities help to make Leicester the dynamic city it is today, while our student population is considered so significant that just over 12 months ago the Deputy Prime Minister visited the campus of De Montfort university to make a certain pledge on tuition fees, to much student acclaim. My by-election campaign was boosted by no less than three visits from the Deputy Prime Minister, but on each occasion he seemed somewhat reluctant to return to the campus he visited a year ago; I can’t think why.
My constituents rightly take the NHS very seriously. Many of them hope that the Prime Minister will drop his proposed changes to the NHS, and are deeply worried about his “top-down reorganisation”. Although Glenfield hospital is in Leicester West, many of my constituents have told me how strongly they feel that the children’s heart surgery unit at Glenfield should remain open, and I agree with them. My hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) has, along with the Leicester Mercury, been at the forefront of the campaign to keep the unit open, and today I want to make clear my support for that campaign and assure my constituents that, alongside my hon. Friend, I will do all I can, locally and nationally, to back efforts to maintain the children’s heart surgery unit at Glenfield.
My constituency boasts much cultural and sporting heritage. The ’60s playwright Joe Orton grew up on the Saffron Lane estate, and I believe that the singer Engelbert Humperdinck—the legend who made the song “Quando, quando, quando” so popular—grew up in Leicester South too. As a sports fan, I am lucky that my constituency contains the grounds of Leicester City football club, Leicestershire cricket club and Leicester Tigers rugby union club. I look forward to visiting them all regularly in the future—on constituency business of course—although I hope Tigers fans will not hold it against me that I was brought up a Salford rugby league fan; I know you will approve of that, Mr Deputy Speaker.
Although there is much to celebrate and we are proud of our achievements, many families are, as I heard in the by-election campaign, uncertain about the future. My constituents—and women in particular—are feeling the brunt of the coalition’s fiscal policies. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) so eloquently outlined in her opening remarks, many women are feeling the effects of the tax credit changes. In the by-election campaign I met a family living off Aylestone road who are feeling the squeeze thanks to a VAT increase, rising inflation and tax credit changes, and who are now worried about their jobs as well. They told me they were “doing just nicely” until this Conservative-Liberal Government came along.
We have many Sure Start centres in the constituency. Thankfully, because of our Labour council, they are being saved, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West outlined in an earlier contribution, the Government are cutting the early intervention grant. I heard many heart-breaking stories from younger people—many of them young women—from poorer backgrounds who are doing well at school but now think university is not for them. Many of my constituents hope that the Government will think again and introduce a fairer and more equitable way of funding higher education.
Our jobless rate is too high; it is the highest in Leicester. Traditionally, Leicester has had a good record in employing women, but with the public sector cuts set to hit us, many women in my constituency face a precarious future. Tackling our unemployment problem will require the Government to implement a strategy for growth, with investment in skills, training and work-readiness schemes. I especially hope the Government will reconsider the cuts in ESOL—English for speakers of other languages—which will have a detrimental effect on the ability of many of my constituents, particularly women, to move into work.
Pockets of my constituency too often show up in annual surveys of high deprivation. Poverty and lack of opportunity too often blight lives in St Matthew’s and parts of Highfields, Spinney, Saffron Lane and Eyres Monsell. Many of those will be women. It is a matter of great shame that in Leicester we have one of the highest levels of child poverty in the UK. With the changes to the tax and benefits system that have already been discussed, I fear things will get worse. Pushing for measures to tackle child poverty in Leicester will be a priority of mine, as I know it is for my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East and my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West, as well as our mayor, Peter Soulsby, and his able deputy Rory Palmer.
However, the people of Leicester South, whether living on those estates or living elsewhere—in Aylestone, Knighton, Stoneygate or Castle—are a proud people. We are at our strongest when we are united in supporting one another, and we are proud that we can boast of countless voluntary organisations that do just that—the Sharma women’s centre, the Pakistan Youth and Community Association and the Bangladesh Youth & Cultural Shomiti, to name just a few—or when we celebrate together, whether at a religious festival or a community event such as the one held this past weekend, celebrating national family week, at Eyres Monsell’s “picnic on the park”.
I come to this House from a modest background. My mother and father, when they had work, were employed in low-income jobs—they might be described as the modern working class—but I was lucky in life. I did well at my comprehensive school and I am the only one in my family ever to have made it to university. Before I was elected to this House I worked within it for a previous Prime Minister and for the current Leader of the Opposition. I also worked briefly for my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman)—which perhaps explains why I chose to speak in this debate.
I am honoured to have been elected as the Member for Leicester South. I will dedicate myself to representing all my constituents, to fighting for those across Leicester South whose voices too often go unheard, and to playing my part in articulating the concerns and aspirations of those in my constituency, many of them women, who know that there can be and must be a better way.
Claire Perry (Devizes) (Con)
May I start by saying what a pleasure it is to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth)? He demonstrates, as in so many cases, that often there is a lot more that joins us than divides us in this House. He spoke about his constituency, and defended it, with great passion—and I have heard almost every Member of this House do the same thing in terms of their own constituencies. The hon. Gentleman might also be interested to know that we share more than that. My family hails from 19 Narborough road south, my nephew is studying at De Montfort university, and I remember many a trip to Leicester market to buy vegetables—from Gary Lineker’s parents—and eat Eric’s ice creams. I therefore suspect that the hon. Gentleman and I will have a lot to talk about in the Members bars over the years to come.
I was enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech—until the point where it got rather political. We Government Members were sitting on our hands in order not to contravene the policy of not intervening on maiden speeches. But when I heard him say that his former employer was the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), all became clear, and I understood why he could not help himself. However, it is an absolute pleasure to follow the hon. Gentleman.
I want to ask the question: why are we here today? It seems from what we have heard from Labour Members that we are here to listen to a bandwagon. All we have heard from them so far is a desperate and disparate series of criticisms of individual policies, in an attempt to create a fictional narrative about this Government targeting women and those who need help most in society. It is a fictional construct that I reject entirely, as I think every Government Member does.
There is also a flagrant disregard for the mistakes and missteps that the Labour Government made in 13 years. We heard a tiny apology from the shadow Home Secretary for the 10p tax rate fiasco, which caused so many people on low incomes, particularly women, such incredible hardship.
Claire Perry
It was a disaster, and was recognised as such. However, we have not heard much about the hollowing out over the previous 13 years of the health visitor profession. The health visitor is often the only point of contact that a young mother, particularly one from a disadvantaged community, will have with the medical profession. Health visitors are the most trusted people involved with pregnant women’s and young children’s lives, yet that profession was hollowed out and almost entirely disregarded. Indeed, its professional status was completely downgraded by Labour.
We have not heard anything about the complex, byzantine welfare system that was built up over 13 years—a welfare system that now costs every family in this country £3,000 a year. Yet in my constituency, it appears to trap people on welfare—particularly single mothers who would love to get back into the work force—and trap them in poverty.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady not accept that it was in fact Labour’s policies that got 350,000 single parents back into employment? Yes, before that we had a very bad record compared with other European countries—I fully endorse that point—but it was Labour’s polices that made inroads into that.
Claire Perry
I agree with the hon. Lady, who I know has campaigned on this issue for years, that some progress was made, but it was not enough. The welfare system is incredibly complicated and provides huge disincentives to work. Yes, women were helped back into the work force, and the hon. Lady and I both completely support that. However, we hear time and again about women who do not know if it is even worth their while to work—who cannot work out, given the complexities of part-time and voluntary working, whether they should even look for child care for their daughter or son in order to go to work. It is simply an expensive mess that has not helped the women and men across this country in the way that it should.
Helen Goodman
Will the hon. Lady temper her rhetoric just a tiny bit and recall that every person who goes to a jobcentre gets a “better off in work” calculation to inform them by how much they will be better off, and what their other entitlements are?
Claire Perry
I would be interested to know whether the hon. Lady has actually gone through a “better off” job calculation, as I have. It is one of the most complicated, ridiculous pieces of analysis I have ever seen. In many cases, the jobcentre advisers simply say, “We actually don’t know.” It can take 45 minutes to make a “better off” calculation, and if someone’s circumstances change by one or two hours a week, they have to go back to the starting point. If the hon. Lady is suggesting that the “better off in work” calculation is something to be proud of after 13 years in government, may I suggest that she fundamentally misunderstands what we need to do to get men and women back into work? In fact, the work that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is doing will massively reform the system.
George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that the adoption of the universal credit and its 65% taper means that people can now be absolutely certain that they will be better off in taking on more work, particularly on the other side of the current 16-hour barrier, beyond which so many benefits drop away?
Claire Perry
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. As a mother of young children, I cannot emphasise enough how difficult it can often be for women to take those steps—to think about child care for their family if they are not sure that it makes sense financially. As he says, there will be far more certainty under the system that we are proposing.
We are here today, therefore, because of a mass outbreak of bandwagonism on the Labour Benches. We are also here because of a heavy dose of hypocrisy. As I think most Labour Members acknowledge, the Labour Government would have had to make £7 of spending cuts for every £8 of cuts that we are making this year. Are they telling us that they would somehow have ring-fenced those spending reductions, or made them in a different way?
Claire Perry
If they are, we are all ears. [Interruption.] Tell us! The only thing we have heard is that they would restore child benefit for families with a median income of £75,000 a year. I do not think that that is fair or progressive; nor do hard-pressed working women and women on benefits in my constituency. They think it is outrageous—and that is the only Opposition policy we have heard today that would deviate from what the present Government are doing.
I shall give way first to my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin), and then to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds).
Harriett Baldwin
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way. I was going to make exactly that point: we have heard today that for someone like me who is making £65,000 a year, it is Labour party policy to restore my child benefit after 2013.
Claire Perry
My hon. Friend is right. Moreover, despite the state of the public finances—for every £4 we spend, £1 is borrowed—Labour would like to borrow that money from other countries in order to restore my hon. Friend’s child benefit, thereby putting that debt round the necks of all of our children and grandchildren. How can that be a rational policy? It is sheer, rank hypocrisy—and on that point I will happily give way to the hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East.
Emma Reynolds
I thank the hon. Lady for such a kind introduction. The Government plan to fund the deficit reduction through a proportion of 20% tax rises and 80% spending cuts, whereas our plans are for 60% to come from tax rises and 40% from spending cuts. Does she accept that because women earn less and own less, the spending cuts being introduced by her Government hit women much harder than ours would have done?
Claire Perry
It would be helpful if we understood a little more about what the hon. Lady’s spending reductions would be. Only the shadow Chancellor and the shadow Chancellor’s wife think that Labour’s economic policies are correct. Everyone else, including the International Monetary Fund, the CBI and the OECD, thinks that what the Government are doing is the way to restore the health and credibility of the British economy.
Claire Perry
I wish to make a little more progress, and then I will be happy to give way.
We are hearing a lot of hypocrisy about spending cuts and about pension ages. Let us not forget that the Labour party commissioned the Turner review, which recommended a rise in the state pension age for men and women, and pointed out that the disproportionate longevity figures for men and women meant that the age for women had to rise more quickly. We must ask whether there is an alternative proposal. Does something need to happen about state pensions? We would love to hear Labour’s plans, but we never do.
The Labour party also missed more than 50% of its own equality targets. We know that the Labour party loves targets, but we do not hear very much about the fact that it missed 50% of its targets in this important area. We have also not heard much from Labour Members about Sure Start. I love Sure Start, and I am incredibly proud of the three Sure Start centres in my constituency. They are doing incredibly good work, particularly in places such as Tidworth, an area to which dozens of soldiers and soldiers’ wives come. The centre provides a real lifeline there. We have just opened the Sure Start centre in Pewsey, and thanks to the financial management skills of Wiltshire council it will remain open and funded.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Can the hon. Lady, or any of her colleagues who wish to contribute, tell us why previous Conservative Governments never introduced anything like Sure Start? Sure Start is an amazing achievement of the Labour Government, and she should bear that in mind.
Claire Perry
One might just take the hon. Lady’s intervention back a little. Sure Start was invented in the United States in the early 1990s, where it was targeted, as she knows, at the children who needed it most, and it was a great success. If I had been in Parliament when Sure Start was introduced I would have supported it in its early incarnation. It is a very sound idea, but of course it had to grow from something that was very useful when targeted to something that became a universal political point.
Let us hear what happened. In 2010 the National Audit Office found that
“there was no reduction in inequality between child development achieved in the 30% most disadvantaged communities and in the rest of England, against a target to reduce the gap by four percentage points”.
We must remind ourselves that Sure Start was introduced to intervene in the lives of the most vulnerable and needy children and families, and that that target was completely missed. Did any discussion take place about how to target Sure Start better? Was there any acknowledgement that one of the huge issues related to the lack of trust going out and reaching in to the most disadvantaged communities? We know that more than half of the Sure Start centres were failing to reach out to vulnerable families. What should people do in those circumstances? Should they think about how to change that, or should they keep spending and criticise a Government who want to target the money better? The 4,700 extra health visitors jobs—almost 5,000 of them, which will largely be filled by women—represent the way to get from the Sure Start centre out into the community and really help the most disadvantaged children, who absolutely need that intervention. That is what we are planning to do, but we hear no support for it. Again, that is because of the rank hypocrisy that we are hearing from Labour Members today.
The other thing we are hearing today is that the Government have no policies in the area of equality. This is a House of very intelligent people—I keep saying that so it has to be true. There are Members in all parts of the House who work on a cross-party basis on unbelievably important issues, be it child protection or trying to stop the pernicious influence of pornography on the lives of our families. We should be working together on how to make Sure Start centres more effective —on what we can actually do to make a difference—instead of getting involved in this bandwagonism. I find it incredibly demeaning for the House to be participating in that.
We are dealing here with unbelievable hypocrisy, given that it is coming from a party that maxed out on the nation’s credit card. Its approach means that we are spending 39 times the annual operating budget of Sure Start on servicing Labour’s debts. That is the legacy that we are having to deal with. Do we hear any innovative or sensible suggestions about how to deal with it? No, we do not.
We have a benefits system has been created to trap many women in the sorts of poverty from which we would all want them to get out. We know that the benefits system is costing everyone £3,000 a year, but do we get any positive recognition and support for our welfare reform policies and the universal credit that we are proposing? I do not think so. Let us put aside this bandwagonism and hypocrisy, and let us talk about what this coalition Government are actually doing.
First—this is obviously the elephant in the room—the Government are taking action to pay off the previous Government’s crippling debts, which did not pop up overnight as a result of the credit crunch. The Labour Government spent more than they took in taxes every year from 2002, wishfully thinking that post-endogenous growth theory—I went to Nailsea comprehensive school and do not have a clue what that means—would somehow bring us out of the mess. Well, guess what: it does not. A Government have to live within their means if they are not to burden our children with debts, as the profligacy of the Labour Government did. This Government will live within their means. We are making the spending reductions that the Labour party left us with in a way that focuses the scarce resources on those who need them most.
We are facing a public sector pay freeze, and that is tough. Some 35% of the employment based in my constituency is in the public sector, so Members should not think that I do not get a lot of letters about that. However, I also hear from the women, many of whom work part time, who are grateful to be excluded from the pay freeze because they are low earners. They recognise that in these scarce times things have to change, but they think that it is important that the pay freeze excluded the lowest paid, and so do I. The Government have also taken 880,000 people out of taxation completely and definitively with a one-off move—it was not the fiasco of the 10p tax rate—and that benefits lower-income women and families in this country hugely.
We have heard a lot from Labour Members about child tax credits—I am confused, because I thought that the Government were raising child tax credits in absolute terms and ahead of indexation for the most disadvantaged families, who need them the most. I believe that that benefits 4 million of this country’s poorest families. We are examining Sure Start centres, ring-fencing the funding and investing in 5,000 additional health visitors, who can stop Sure Start centres being a nice thing thrown on the wall and make them work.
Glenda Jackson (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)
Can the hon. Lady tell me which Sure Start centres have their finances ring-fenced?
Claire Perry
As the hon. Lady knows, it is for the local authority to decide what it does. I do not know what her local authority is doing, but in Wiltshire not one Sure Start centre is closing and funding is being maintained completely. I might submit that political machinations further down the system are leading to these changes, but the funding and the additional investment is certainly there. If her local Sure Start centres would like to operate better and have some additional health visitor investment, that money is also there.
We have also heard about a Government who are protecting NHS spending. We know that in general women consume more NHS resources, and that money is being protected. International development spending, which I particularly support and about which we heard so eloquently from those on both sides of the House during the international women’s day debate, is also being ring-fenced. It is my belief that investing in schools for women in Pakistan is a sensible thing to do locally and it will increase overall economic security and prosperity. Having a women-focused aid policy, as we have, is the right thing to do.
We have heard about the universal credit, which will bring 1 million people, including 350,000 children, out of poverty. We have also heard about the sustainable funding for the rape crisis centres. I have been involved in some of the discussions that have taken place on rape, sentencing and tariffs and the policy person from the head of the UK rape crisis centres says, “This is the first time we have had sustainable funding for our centres for as long as we can remember, and we absolutely support this.”
Dr Sarah Wollaston (Totnes) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend welcome the fact that over the next three years nearly £250,000 will be put into developing a rape crisis centre in Exeter, serving the women of Devon, who have been disgracefully under-resourced over the past 10 years?
Claire Perry
My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. Of course, under the previous Government nine out of 10 local authorities did not have a rape crisis centre. At a time of significant fiscal constraint, we are managing to find new money to invest in that incredibly important area and I thank her for her intervention.
Finally, as regards an area on which many of us in this House have campaigned together, the Government are taking active steps to deal with the oncoming tide of sexualisation and the commercialisation of childhood, whether by getting retailers to act in a responsible way or by getting internet service companies to consider a system that allows us not to have pornography piped into our homes and makes getting it a choice. Work is happening under this Government that I applaud.
This is a bit of a depressing debate to be involved in. Many Members share many of the same aspirations and campaign on important issues, but all we have is the bandwagonism and hypocrisy of the Labour party. What I have enjoyed most in this debate has been listening to Ministers who have told how we are focusing scarce money on those who need it now while taking steps so that the profligacy of the previous Labour Government does not leave our children and our grandchildren with debts to pay off.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Before I call the next speaker, let me tell hon. Members that we have six speakers to come and the winding up will speeches start at 3.55 pm. Can Members bear that in mind?
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
I pay tribute to the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth). He was passionate about his constituency and warm in his praise of his predecessors and colleagues in the city. May I thank him for his support for Salford Reds? Among the many football and rugby clubs in his constituency that he could have talked about, he still remembered Salford Reds. I hope that he will enjoy visiting the clubs he mentioned in his own constituency and he will always be welcome in my constituency, where the new Salford Reds stadium is fast taking shape. Each week when I go back there is more of it. He is very welcome to come back to Salford.
On a more serious point, let me refer to a letter from a constituent affected by the pension age change. My constituent wrote:
“Recently I applied for a pension forecast and found that I will not receive any pension payment until I am 64. I am worried and appalled. I have worked full time since leaving school, progressed my nursing career so I could remain employable and reared 2 children. I do not drink or smoke and I have paid for our children’s university fees so that they could enter ‘the big society’ with something to offer, ensuring their employability. I have not been given any time to plan for receiving my pension at 64. Successive governments have encouraged people to save for their retirement which I have done with the view of retiring at 60. I cannot stress strongly enough how I feel let down by people who are supposedly managing our country. I will certainly join in a campaign opposing this”.
She also said:
“How can I stop this happening? It is unfair and penalises all those people who are loyal and hard working.”
Women such as my constituent are worried and appalled and it is time that Ministers listened to them.
Harriett Baldwin
Is the hon. Lady talking about a constituent whose retirement age is rising to 64? Is that not a policy that her Government brought in?
Barbara Keeley
I did not intend to touch on that, but wanted to take the opportunity to read out my constituent’s comments so that Ministers understand the worry and concern.
I want to focus more on women and jobs and social care. I share the concerns expressed by many organisations and individuals about the disproportionate and unfair impact of the Government’s policies on women. As we know, women make up 60% of the public sector work force. Nationally, 40% of women’s jobs are in the public sector compared with 15% of men’s jobs. In my constituency, women’s jobs in the public sector are in local government and the NHS—in the primary care trust and in local hospitals. Local councils are now having to manage the swingeing front-loaded budget cuts made by this Government and thousands of jobs are being lost. Salford council, my old council, will have to cut 500 jobs this year. Wigan council will lose more than 800 jobs and Manchester council 2,000. All the interventions made by Government Members have not made much mention of those swingeing front-loaded cuts to council budgets, but they are very important and they are affecting things.
George Hollingbery
Will the hon. Lady illuminate the House with how many of the job cuts to the various councils she identified are redundancies or post eliminations rather than straightforward compulsory redundancies? Can she tell us about the profile of those people? Are they at the top, middle or bottom level of the organisations?
Barbara Keeley
It hardly matters, I think. We are talking about three or four years of cuts and this year’s cuts will be followed by similar cuts next year and the year after. I am surprised that Government Members can look with such equanimity at something such as the 2,000 job cuts that are happening in Manchester.
The hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) talked about protecting the NHS, but in reality hundreds of jobs are being lost in the NHS, as they are in local councils. Jobs are being lost through the abolition of our primary care trust in Salford and that change is also causing turmoil to local services and decision making. At Salford Royal hospital, 720 jobs are being cut, including those of 146 nurses. The Christie, our regional county hospital, is to reduce its staffing by 213—one in 10 of the current work force—including 40 nurse-grade jobs and 50 health care support or assistant jobs. I am sure that none of us would look with equanimity at that level of job loss.
Jane Ellison (Battersea) (Con)
Does the hon. Lady not accept that her own party did not campaign on the basis of ring-fencing or protecting the health budget? Does she not accept that it is highly likely that the situation would be far worse had her party been elected?
Barbara Keeley
No, I do not accept that. The turmoil that has been caused by the unnecessary top-down reorganisation, as well as the £3 billion cost of that reorganisation, is not helping.
Finally, and close to home in my constituency, Royal Bolton hospital is losing 60 posts, including 32 nurses, with 92 jobs going next year and 95 the year after. At Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh hospital, 533 jobs are going—a 13% reduction. These are the jobs and careers of my constituents, and women’s jobs are disproportionately affected because all those organisations employ significantly more women than men.
In recent months, there has been quite a focus on women’s jobs that are being lost, but the cuts also mean the loss of services that women use more than men. Women, as we know, are more likely to use libraries and health services and they need support from social care for family members and themselves as carers. Women will carry a disproportionate burden of the spending cuts that are affecting social care services as 58% of carers are women, and of those carers who combine caring with part-time work, 89% are women.
Next week is carers’ week, which has great support across the House, and the theme will be the true face of carers. Carers are being asked to talk about the reality of their lives as carers—how hard they can find it to be a carer and what could really make a difference to their lives. A report by the Care and Support Alliance in March showed that levels of unmet need were increasing even before the cuts to local council budgets. That is a great cause for concern. In the alliance’s survey of 1,000 people, nearly seven out of 10 respondents felt that they needed more support, more than two in 10 said that services had been cut back even though needs might have been increasing, and more than two in 10 said that the person cared for needed support but was not receiving any services.
That is not surprising, given that councils have been cutting their eligibility criteria for social care for some time, increasing charges for services and removing caps on charges. I am proud of the fact that, despite the swingeing 27% cuts to council budgets at Labour-run Salford city council, it has managed to retain eligibility criteria for social care at a level to help people with moderate needs as well as those with substantial or critical needs. Salford is now one of only 15% of councils that provide that level of care. That is in great contrast to councils such as coalition-run Birmingham city council, which recently tried to set its eligibility criteria to a new level of “personal critical”. More than 10,000 people would have seen their care packages downgraded and more than 4,000 people would have had no care services or support whatever.
My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey) reported the distress of constituents who came to him for assistance: people who were extremely vulnerable themselves or caring for someone who was elderly, ill or disabled. Women carers were disproportionately included. The Care and Support Alliance survey revealed that changes to services that happened even before the cuts had led to
“a negative impact to the person with care and support needs.”
The report quotes one female carer talking about the impact on her life. She said:
“I am unable to go out with my husband because one of us needs to remain at home with my mother. Unable to go out with my sister (also disabled) because if I go out she needs to stay home to support my husband in caring for our mother. Unable to visit friends, have a weekend away or take a holiday. Feel abandoned by the state—Carer’s Allowance withdrawn when I reached 60 last year, Carer’s grant reduced by Local Authority from £400 pa to £100 pa this year, top-up fees now payable for the 3 hour respite per week, no extra help available.”
Of course, such extra stresses also put further pressure on the health of many women who care. Another female carer is quoted in the Care and Support Alliance report as saying:
“I care for two and I am disabled myself. Although they have increased the care for my father, he still needs extra care from me. I get no help with my husband, who is also becoming more demanding and no help for myself. So my life gets harder and harder and my health is deteriorating as a consequence.”
Women who are carers are also worried about the Government’s plans to cut £1 billion from disability living allowance over five years by reducing the number of people who are eligible. Tightening the eligibility criteria for DLA will mean that many carers will not be eligible for carer’s allowance, which will be available only for those who look after someone who is in receipt of the middle or higher level of DLA. As three quarters of the recipients of carer’s allowance are women, that is yet another area in which women will bear the brunt of the cuts.
Carers UK has estimated that seven out of 10 women will be carers in their lifetime. We know that social care services for older people are underfunded and that the number of over-80s is increasing, so the pressure on family carers, who are mainly women, is bound to increase. Once again, women will be disproportionately affected.
Women are more reliant on the services that the public sector provides and therefore stand to lose more from cuts to services and from the loss of jobs that I have talked about. That affects my constituents and women who are carers. I have campaigned since I have been in the House to improve services and support for carers, six out 10 of whom are women. More could always be done, but Labour gave primary care trusts extra budgets to fund respite care, introduced the carers grant and provided £770 million in new funding for disabled children.
Claire Perry
Let me pay tribute to the hon. Lady’s work in this area, which many of us recognise. Surely she will welcome the £800 million commitment that the Government announced last year to provide really important respite care for parents with disabled children.
Barbara Keeley
Of course, every move to provide extra respite care to help carers is beneficial, and all those moves were started by the previous Government in support of the Every Disabled Child Matters campaign. As I said earlier, there has been very little mention of the fact that the swingeing cuts to council budgets cancel out everything else being done. Perhaps that is not the case in places such as Wiltshire, but it certainly is the case in the north of England.
Finally, let me mention some things that were going to happen but will not now happen.
Barbara Keeley
I am just about to finish.
The Government have abolished the measures in the Personal Care at Home Act 2010, which would have helped 400,000 of the people in the greatest need, and they have cut the budgets to local councils, as I have mentioned, which will potentially have a great impact. Those changes come at a time when we know that more services are needed given the horrendous cases we have heard about in recent months. It is time to develop unanimity across the House. I know that many hon. Members on the Government side are concerned about social care, but the impact of the changes that I have mentioned will cause a loss of quality of life for carers, as I have outlined.
Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)
Let me begin by adding to those of others my congratulations to the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth). I can see that he is no token man, as I know that he has a two-week old baby and I can see the shadows under his eyes from here. I welcome his comments celebrating the cultural diversity of his constituency. Clearly, he is going to be a great advocate for Leicester South.
I think that the previous Labour Government and this coalition Government have a lot in common. We both want to redress the imbalances between men and women through public policy. It is fair to say that Labour did many things that benefited women, such as increasing the maximum age for children at which parents could apply for flexible working. That change followed a very similar private Member’s Bill that I had introduced the year before, which would have extended the right of request to the parents of children up to the age of 18. My Bill was unceremoniously voted down by Labour, which then reintroduced the measures in a form that applied to the parents of children up to the age of 16. I do not mind the previous Government’s doing that: they saw a good idea and grabbed it. Indeed, I think we should all work together more to pool our best ideas, particularly in the current, grave economic circumstances. That might be too radical a notion for this debate and this Parliament given the way things have been going so far but it is an aspiration of mine. I am very glad that this Government are consulting on extending the right to request for all employees. That will remove the stigma when some staff have a right that is denied to others. It will also acknowledge the fact that employees are more loyal and productive when there is an acknowledgement that they should be able to have a reasonable work-life balance.
Another thing that Labour did that particularly benefited women was allowing any years they spent caring for others to count towards pension entitlements in future. Why the Labour Government never restored the earnings link during their 13 years is beyond me. Why would they not have done that if they believed that the economy was strong, not knowing that the so-called growth was based on a house of cards and unsustainable debt? How much more difficult has it been for us, while we are trying to deal with the biggest deficit in peacetime history, to redress some of those injustices at the same time? We put our actions where our mouth was and immediately committed to restoring the earnings link with the triple guarantee. A much fairer and better pensions system that will raise the level of a single person’s pension to £140 in today’s money will be introduced by the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), who has responsibility for pensions. That system will help the poorest pensioners more than anything that was introduced by the previous Government. Of course, the poorest pensioners are mostly women. Two thirds of people on pension credit are women and the average woman receives £40 less per week in her state pension compared with men. Even with the changes brought in by Labour, it would have been 2050 before pensions were equalised between the sexes.
Something else that will greatly help is the move to the universal credit system of benefits, which has been mentioned by several hon. Members, rather than the complex system that we currently use. That change will mean that work always pays and will encourage people to return to work rather than stay at home on benefits because that is more financially beneficial.
Sheila Gilmore
But surely even in the Government’s projections and the impact assessments of the Welfare Reform Bill, it would be an exaggeration to say that work will always pay, particularly for those people who have child care costs.
Lorely Burt
The Government are investing more than £3 billion in this, but every single factor cannot be taken into account in determining whether the outcome will be better or not. The Government are looking into what we can do about child care costs. The hon. Lady raises an important issue, which I know is being taken very seriously by my hon. Friends on the Front Bench.
Under the proposed system, 31% of women who are entitled to benefits will be better off than they are at the moment. In addition, women returning to work after having children will be able to build up their hours gradually without being unfairly penalised by the system. It will also help take-up. In 2008-09 only 80% of people took up child tax credits. There has been much discussion about that today. I hope that changing to a simpler system will ensure that those who need the money get it.
However, I agree with the sentiments expressed in the motion about the disproportionate effect of the planned increase in the pension age on women born between December 1953 and October 1954. I am delighted to see that the Minister of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate, has come into the Chamber. I declare an interest: I am one of those women. Although I expect still to be going like a train at the age of 70, I entirely understand where those women are coming from and the unfairness of imposing change too late for many to do anything about it. I therefore ask my hon. Friend the Pensions Minister to do all he can to ensure that the proposal is reconsidered and a measure introduced that will be a little fairer to that tranche of women.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
I am glad the hon. Lady has made that plea to her party colleague, the Pensions Minister. I am sure that many other colleagues will make the same point. Does she agree that women who are upset and worried about the change need a decision soon? It is causing many of them great anxiety and stress, and they cannot be expected to go on for months wondering whether there is to be a change or whether they will have to put up with the unfair increase in their pension age.
Lorely Burt
I agree, and I am sure my hon. Friend the Pensions Minister listened to every word that the hon. Gentleman and I have said.
Let me move on to Sure Start centres. I am amazed that the Opposition have the temerity to accuse us of closing centres, when the centres that have been closed were predominantly in Labour-run council areas. The Government are not cutting Sure Start centres and have made sure that there is enough funding in the early intervention grant to retain a network of Sure Start centres. Not a single Liberal Democrat council has closed a Sure Start centre, and in my own patch, in Solihull, we have extended their remit from the narrow strictures prescribed by Labour.
Barbara Keeley
Does the hon. Lady think there might be a connection with the fact that many Labour councils, particularly in the north, had seen cuts of something like £100 million in their budgets? It is hard to protect any services in that situation, and no services can be left out.
Lorely Burt
Perhaps it is a matter of priorities. Economic inequalities still abound in this country. Despite the good old Equal Opportunities Act now reaching its fifth decade, women working full time still earn, on average, 15.5% less than men. That is not good enough. Raising the tax threshold has helped women, who made up 60% of the 900,000 people lifted out of tax altogether. In the spending review we ensured that the lowest paid public sector workers, 65.5% of whom were women, were protected from the public sector pay freeze, as the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) mentioned.
The world of work is therefore one area of public policy that we can use to try and level the playing field between men and women, but let us also consider self-employment and women-owned companies. We know that a third more women-owned start-ups fail in the UK than in the US; we know that 20 years ago the US took affirmative action on procurement; and we know that today there are proportionately twice as many women-owned businesses in the US as in the UK. One area where the Government have taken action is in the field of procurement, with reference to small businesses. We aspire to achieve 25% of goods and services procurement for Government Departments from small businesses.
But women-owned businesses are not even on the Government’s radar. If we are spending taxpayers’ money, should we not know who we are procuring from? If we are measuring how many small businesses we are procuring from, how much more difficult would it be to measure how many women-owned businesses we are procuring from? It makes good business sense to procure from companies run by people who look like those being supplied to. It makes good business sense for boards of directors to have a critical mass of people who think with the left side of their brains, as well as those who think with the right side—I caricature.
We have had the Davies report on women on boards, and I wait with bated breath to see whether companies will respond. The Home Secretary said that the early indicators are positive, but companies had better shape up, otherwise I will be pressing the Government to get tough with boards that think that certain people have a monopoly on innovation, creativity and plain old common sense.
I have already mentioned flexible working. I want to commend the Government for their work on flexible parental leave, for facilitating better solutions for parents and companies in how that leave is taken and for modifications to the working time directive affecting the interaction of annual leave, sick leave and family-friendly leave. It is good news that the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 100,000 more women started work, compared with 18,000 men, so it is not all doom and gloom.
There is probably no single aspect of Government policy that does not affect women in some way. We are short of time so I will refer to only one more point: the suggestion in the media today that we are to rethink the proposal to reduce sentences by half for those who plead guilty to rape charges. I worry about that policy. Of course it is good to have a confession that avoids the added trauma for rape victims of having to testify and be cross-examined, but halving a rapist’s sentence just for confessing sticks in my craw. We must consider why only 6% of rape reports result in a conviction. There is no glory for any Government in this respect. We must do better and there has to be some kind of cultural change.
We all want the same thing: a more even playing field for women. The Government are striving to maintain and increase fairness in the most difficult and trying circumstances. I certainly do not think that we have everything right, but with a little good will on all sides we can work together to do this. I will be lobbying my hon. Friends to do the right thing.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
The winding-up speeches will begin at five minutes to 4 and four Members wish to speak, so they each have a shade under five minutes in which to do so.
Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth), who is no longer in his place, for making his maiden speech. I will keep my remarks short and so will not take interventions.
Some people may wonder why we are having this debate and considering the impact of the Government’s policies on the needs and issues facing women, rather than any other group, and they have a point. When we develop policies, we should consider the differential distribution of their effects on a range of different population groups, not just women, but obviously including them. Importantly, we should look at whether those policies improve the circumstances for those groups and how that might happen, whether by improving their educational and job opportunities, through access to minimum income standards or through opportunities to achieve a healthy life expectancy and so on.
Most importantly, we should look at ensuring that those policies reduce rather than exacerbate the inequalities that persist between different population groups in our society. It is about ensuring that those policies are fair and that our society is fair. On that basis, it is appropriate for us to debate the issues that women increasingly and disproportionately face as a result of the Government’s policies. That is the crux of the debate. It is about how the policies are affecting women now. We should not be harking back to the past. The policies are unfortunately affecting women in an unfair, unjust and even discriminatory way and we must be mindful of that.
We have already heard that, more than 40 years after the Equal Pay Act 1970, women are still more likely to be paid less than men for the same work and to live in low-income households. Although Labour did much to address income inequalities in recent years—there is evidence to prove it—the pay gap between men and women remains, at around 16.4%. We have heard different figures today for the pay gap, but it is even worse for women in high-paid jobs. Women are also more likely to work part-time, and half of all part-time workers, both men and women, are paid less than £8 an hour. One in five women, compared with one in 10 men, earns less than £7 an hour, but whichever low-pay threshold we use, we find that the number of low-paid women is approximately double that of men.
On top of that, Equality and Human Rights Commission research shows that approximately 30,000 women a year lose their jobs as a result of pregnancy. Those income and other inequalities persist for women throughout their lives. Lone mothers and single female pensioners are more likely to be in low-income households than their male equivalents, although the evidence indicates that that situation improved under Labour.
This is an unsatisfactory state of affairs, but unfortunately it has been exacerbated by the policies that this Government have introduced. Despite earning less and owning less, women are set to lose an average of £8.80 a week, compared with £4.20 for men, because of the Government’s deficit reduction programme. Reductions in tax credits, benefits, pensions and attendance allowance will all hit women harder, and, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows, last year’s regressive spending review saw families most detrimentally affected, with lone parents worst affected of all.
This year’s Budget did nothing to compensate part-time working mothers, and women pensioners got nothing from the increase in tax allowance. The threat to universal, affordable quality child care, including the removal of ring-fenced funding for Sure Start, is a major hit to women as well as to their children. Child care is probably the biggest issue for women juggling work and family, and similarly the provision to exempt some organisations from the requirement to provide maternity and paternity leave is a retrograde step.
The measure in the Welfare Reform Bill to incentivise separated parents who currently use the Child Support Agency to make private arrangements in the future for child maintenance, and to place financial penalties on them if they do not, is another example whereby support for women is being eroded. Ultimately, support is needed to address the latent discrimination that women face.
Pensions are another crucial area where this Government have penalised women. In the past few weeks, hundreds of women in my constituency have contacted me about the Government’s decision last September to accelerate the equalisation of the state pension age for women to 65 years old in 2016 instead of 2020.
The Government also announced an increase in the state pension age for men and women to 66 years old by 2020 instead of 2024. The Library estimates that in my constituency the changes will affect 4,300 women, compared with 3,800 men, with a notional loss of income from state pensions of up to £10,700 for approximately 200 women.
We all agree that women are living longer, and that we need to change the state pension age, but the issue is about the time being taken to do so.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
The hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth) is no longer in his place, but I too pay tribute to him for a very assured and interesting maiden speech. It was a privilege to be in the Chamber to hear it.
I had not planned to speak today until I saw this patronising and paternalistic motion on the Order Paper—this drivel that we have had to debate all afternoon. I am absolutely incensed by it, because the way in which we address the fact, which we all acknowledge, that women earn and own less on average is not by ensuring that they continue to receive a stream of benefits throughout their lives or only state-sponsored child care options.
From some interesting points that Opposition Members made, we learned that at the next general election the right hon. Members for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) will stand on a platform of restoring their household’s child benefit, which is worth £2,400 a year tax-free, despite their combined income being well into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. That will be a difficult message for them to sell on the doorstep, but it was certainly a fascinating insight into planet deficit-denial on the Opposition Benches.
I also thought that I was living on a different planet when we heard no acknowledgement of the fact that over the past 12 months more than 530,000 jobs in the private sector have been created, with 400,000 more, net of the necessary reductions, in public sector employment. How is it good for families and women to be paying £120 million a day in interest? How is it good for families and women if Opposition Members put their heads in the sand and refuse to identify a single cut or alteration that they support? This Government are introducing welfare reform that will incentivise the economic choices of women in recognising that at the end of the day only additional work will help them to address the earnings gap and the asset gap.
As someone who has fought all my life for greater equality for women in the workplace, I feel somewhat differently about pensions. I think that we should welcome the fact that men and women will be retiring at equal ages and that women and men will be treated equally as regards pensions.
Naomi Long (Belfast East) (Alliance)
I agree that the equalisation of pension rights and ages is an important and necessary thing that we should all support. Does the hon. Lady accept, however, that the real crux of the issue for Opposition Members is the amount of time that certain women will have to prepare for the change because the goalposts have been moved so quickly?
Harriett Baldwin
We should bear in mind what these women are preparing for. An average 55-year-old woman today will live to 88, on average, and many more women will live to see their 100th birthday. Having the extra year to prepare for saving for that very old age is not at all a bad thing. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt), I have absolutely no intention of retiring in my early 60s, and I welcome the fact that men and women will be treated equally regarding pension age.
Harriett Baldwin
I am sorry—I do not have enough time to give way.
I acknowledge that equalising the pension age means that there is a group of women who are disproportionately affected, but I would like to hear proposals on how we could avoid that and still end up in what we all agree is the right place, where we have longer to prepare for a much longer old age.
Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)
Some newspapers have an item where they talk about the word of the day or word of the week. For the Government Whips Office, the word is presumably “bandwagon”, because expressing opposition is suddenly seen to be jumping on one. I do not think that the Government have necessarily gone about a deliberate policy of targeting women, because I do not believe in conspiracy theories, but some of their policies, when added together, are having precisely that effect. Perhaps people have not realised or noticed.
I want to take a slightly different tack. I will be very brief in the hope that I get other opportunities to amplify these issues, because they are important. What happens to women, in particular, when they separate from a partner in coming out of a relationship? There is a lot of research that says that women in that situation end up worse off anyway, but some things that are happening will exacerbate it. For example, legal aid is going to be taken away from family cases. In my experience as a family lawyer, it is not going to court and getting embroiled in some dramatic procedure, but good, solid legal advice that will get people the kind of financial settlement that enables them to get back on their feet more quickly. If that is not available, they will be financially worse off.
In addition, there are changes to child support that will require people to go through an obstacle race to get it. I urge the Government to remember why the child support system was introduced in the first place—precisely because people were not getting that form of support.
As well as not getting a good financial settlement and not getting easy access to child support, what else is going to go wrong? The big thing that people need when they are separating is housing, because two into one will not go, so what is happening on the housing front? People in the private rented sector who need housing benefit will get less of it. We are not even sure how mortgage costs will be covered under universal credit. The homelessness rules are changing so that more people will end up in the private rented sector. That costs more money, so it is not actually a cost-saving measure. It will also not give people the long-term security that they want. Women who separate from their partners will therefore find themselves in a more difficult position in terms of housing.
Finally, I turn to benefits. Women will have to re-enter the work force at a younger age because the age at which the youngest child will affect their benefit is being reduced to five. There are also changes to tax credits and to the amount of money to cover child care.
If one thinks about the journey that a woman makes from separating from her partner to re-establishing herself in her new life, I contend that the effect of those Government policies will make her much worse off. I am sorry that I do not have time to amplify those points, because I certainly could. I look forward to having another opportunity to do so.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I call Mary Macleod, to sit down at five minutes to 4.
Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth) on his excellent maiden speech. I commend him for choosing this debate in which to make it. By doing so, he will have kept half his constituents happy. That is a positive thing for any Member.
I will make a few brief points because there is not much time. First, I want to say how disappointed I was at the speech of the shadow Minister for Women and Equalities. All we heard was a rant of negativity about what was not being done, instead of a recognition of the positive things that the Government are doing for women. Labour Members kick-started the work that has been done for women, and I congratulate them on that. I thank the Minister for Women and Equalities, who is in her place, for her positive, inspiring and visionary speech about what the Government are doing to make things better for women, no matter who they are or where they come from.
The shadow Minister for Women and Equalities said that the Prime Minister had a blind spot when it came to women. That is a scandalous comment given that it was the Prime Minister who put his name on the line before the last election to get more women on to the Conservative Benches. The Prime Minister, the Minister for Women and Equalities, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, who helped to campaign in my seat, and other people all helped to increase the number of women on the Conservative Benches from 18 to 49, and I thank them for that.
I believe that the Government are working hard to support women and families, and to promote equality. We are focusing on giving what we can to the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Of course, the majority of those people are women. We have heard much today about financial support. The key area for me is that the Government are lifting 880,000 of the lowest-paid workers, the majority of whom are women, out of income tax. I look forward to the time when we increase that even further, because these are the people who most need our help.
We have discussed the welfare reforms and the way in which we are trying to incentivise and encourage people to get back into work. My hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) discussed that matter eloquently. The coalition agreement states that we will look at ways to encourage shared parenting such as flexible parental leave. That is real equality. I have worked for 20 years in business, and for people such as me, these policies are about bringing real equality into the workplace.
Having women in business is important. My hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) spoke about Lord Davies’ important report. I was pleased to hear from the Minister for Women and Equalities that progress has been made on that. I will be one of the people who follows this matter closely to ensure that more is done. My hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) spoke about the new flat pension rate, which will come into effect in 2016. That will take account of the fact that women take career breaks and will ensure that doing so does not affect their pensions, which is very good. We also have to consider women in small businesses, of whom we want more. If we were setting up small businesses at the same rate as men, we would have 150,000 more businesses, so there is much more to be done.
There is a lot of great work on domestic violence, about which we have heard today.
In summary, I believe that the Government have demonstrated their full commitment to women through financial support for families, by helping women in business and by protecting vulnerable women. We have amazing women and fabulous female role models across the country, and the Government will build on what they are doing to create a much stronger, safer, fairer and more equal society for all of us.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I am grateful to the last four speakers, who ensured that everybody on the list got in.
Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)
This has been a lively and welcome debate, and a rare occasion on which women have outnumbered men in the Chamber. That said, it was a privilege to be here for the maiden speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth). He will be a tremendous asset to the House, and he is one of my longest-standing friends in politics. I congratulate him on his election, and also on the birth of his daughter. It will be a busy time ahead for him.
My hon. Friend feared that he would be the token male in today’s debate, and overall the debate has been sisterly, although when my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) was referred to by the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) as simply the shadow Chancellor’s wife, that was language that one would perhaps have expected more from the Justice Secretary. [Interruption.] Members are saying that that is cheap, but I think it was the hon. Lady’s comment that was cheap rather than mine.
One thing is clear: whether by ignorance or design, the Government are disproportionately hitting women with their cuts, their pensions policy and what is happening in the jobs market. Until now, every generation of women have enjoyed greater opportunity than their mothers or grandmothers. My great-grandmother was a cockle picker on the south coast of Wales, my grandmother worked in shoe factories and my mother is a primary school teacher. However, that expectation that women of the next generation will do better than those of the one before is now threatened, largely by the choices that the Government are making. They risk turning back the clock on women’s equality.
I wish to address some of the specific points that have been made today. My hon. Friends the Members for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams), for Newport East (Jessica Morden), for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) and for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) all mentioned the state pension age for women, as did the hon. Members for Solihull (Lorely Burt), for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) and for Belfast East (Naomi Long). Earlier today, the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke) and my hon. Friend the Member for Glenrothes (Lindsay Roy) challenged the Prime Minister about it.
The changes that the Government plan will mean that women have to wait up to two years longer for their state pension, whereas no man will have to wait more than a year longer. They will mean a loss of income of up to £15,000 for up to 33,000 women, yet the coalition agreement states that the parties agree to
“hold a review to set the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66, although it will not be sooner than…2020 for women.”
Yet under plans in the Pensions Bill, the state pension age for women will start to rise to 66 in 2018.
As the hon. Member for Belfast East said, MPs of all parties can show that they understand the fierce concerns and aspirations of women by opposing the Government’s proposals to increase the state pension age at such a pace. A petition with more than 10,000 signatures has been presented to the Prime Minister, and Age UK and Saga are calling on the Government to think again. I welcome the chance to hear what the Minister for Equalities has to say about that, and I welcome the fact that the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), is also in his place. I hope that they will listen to the concerns that women are raising.
As for incomes, either by accident or by design the Government’s policies on tax and welfare changes will, as my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth mentioned, have twice as much of an impact on women as on men. All incomes are being squeezed during these difficult economic times, but some are being squeezed more than others. That is particularly the case for women and children. Does the Minister for Women and Equalities really believe that it is fair that women are paying the highest price for budget deficit reduction? If not, will she look again at some of the Government’s policies?
My hon. Friends the Members for Leicester West (Liz Kendall) and for Worsley and Eccles South spoke passionately about Sure Start and its tremendous work in all our communities. Many mothers and children rely on the services that Sure Start and our children’s centres offer, and although the hon. Member for Corby (Mrs Mensch) thinks they are failing families, the women and children I talk to in Leeds West and across the country believe that they are making a massive difference. The Government say that that money is protected, but in reality, particularly in northern cities where there are cuts of up to 27% of total spending, it is not possible to ring-fence that money. I ask the Government to look again at ensuring that vital services such as children’s centres and the Sure Start offer are protected.
The latest job figures show that jobseeker’s allowance among women is at its highest level since 1996. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston said, 474,000 women are now claiming it. Those problems are only likely to get worse. Sixty-five per cent. of public sector workers are women, as are 75% of those working in local government. If the Office for Budget Responsibility’s predictions of 310,000 job losses in the public sector in this Parliament are correct, we can expect a large proportion of those to be among women, meaning that the highest unemployment among women since 1996 will get worse, not better, in the years ahead.
Jane Ellison
Given that the deficit is in the public finances, and given what the hon. Lady said about the proportion of women who work in the public sector, how would the Labour plan, which we have yet to hear, address that problem?
Rachel Reeves
There are three issues. First, the speed at which we cut the budget deficit; secondly, the timing of the cuts; and thirdly—this is critical to today’s debate—whether the cuts are made fairly. I do not believe that it is fair that two thirds of the cuts fall on women. All Members of the House believe that that is unfair. That is the key point.
The cuts to women’s pensions, Sure Start, child benefit and local services are not inevitable; they are choices that the Government have made. As hon. Members have reminded us this afternoon, they are unfair choices—they penalise women pensioners, mothers, women students, women carers and women in the labour market. By choosing to cut too far and too fast, the Government have embarked on a slash-and-burn approach to the services, protections and benefits that provide the most support—in good and bad times—to women up and down the country.
The Minister will have a chance to respond shortly, but surely the question is this: where was she when the Chancellor decided to slash child benefit? Where was she when the Secretary of State for Education decided to cut Sure Start?
Harriett Baldwin
Will the hon. Lady confirm that the restoration of tax-free child benefit of £2,400 for the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) and the right hon. Member for Morley and Outwood (Ed Balls) will be in the Labour manifesto?
Rachel Reeves
I will perhaps ask the hon. Lady—[Hon. Members: “Answer!”] I will answer the question, but does the hon. Lady believe it right that a family in which one person in work earns £45,000 should lose their child benefit, while a family in which two people earn a total of £80,000 still get their child benefit? If the Government’s plans for a fixed-term Parliament go ahead, the election is four years away, and as we do not know what the circumstances of that time will be, it would be inappropriate to write our manifesto now. The hon. Lady would not write hers now.
Where was the Minister when those choices were made? Given those policies, she was not campaigning and fighting for the women whom she ought to represent. If, as some have suggested, women’s equality is a blind spot for this Government, I hope that their eyes have been opened today. I hope not least that the Minister has had a chance today to hear the strength of feeling about the effect on women of the increase in the state pension age. Will she send a message of hope to the 500,000 women who face a delay of more than a year before they receive their state pension, with just five or so years to prepare? If the Government can U-turn on forests—and today they have U-turned on sentencing—surely they can listen and act to protect women approaching retirement with fear and trepidation.
Women must no longer be the shock absorbers for this Government’s cuts. I urge Ministers to move forward in a fairer way—in a way that does not turn the clock back on women’s equality, for which generations of women have fought and will continue to fight.
The Minister for Equalities (Lynne Featherstone)
We have had an interesting and lively debate, and I thank Members on both sides who made contributions, including the hon. Members for Wolverhampton North East (Emma Reynolds), for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley), for Oldham East and Saddleworth (Debbie Abrahams) and for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore), and my hon. Friends the Members for Corby (Mrs Mensch), for Devizes (Claire Perry), for Solihull (Lorely Burt), for West Worcestershire (Harriett Baldwin) and for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod). We also heard a maiden speech by the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jon Ashworth). I thank them all for their contributions and I will address as many points as I have time for, although I do not have that much time.
It is a bit sad that we have heard some inaccurate and empty speculation about the impact that Government policies will have on women. I welcome the opportunity to respond to this debate, and draw a line under the myths that are endlessly perpetuated by Opposition Members. As the Home Secretary made clear, this Government’s commitment to women is clear and unequivocal. From the moment the coalition was formed, we stated our determination to tear down the barriers to opportunity and build a fairer society for all. It is not just that we believe equality to be the right of every individual: we believe it goes to the very heart of our ambition to build a better society and a modern, prosperous economy of the future which genuinely draws on the talents and abilities of all. In fact, we are clear that unless we capitalise on the contributions that women can make, our chances of full economic recovery will be seriously hampered.
Of course, because of the mess we inherited—Labour Members hate us repeating that fact—we have been forced to make some difficult decisions. Let me be clear, for those who have not yet managed to get to grips with the state of our public finances, that the mess I refer to—as many of my hon. Friends have mentioned—is the biggest structural deficit in Europe and the biggest peacetime deficit we have seen in our history. But fairness will always be at the heart of all these decisions.
Yvette Cooper
Does the Minister think that public spending should have been cut in the middle of a recession—and if it had been, will she tell us whether she thinks that we would have had growth by the time of the election?
Lynne Featherstone
The point is that we are dealing with the structural deficit. If we do not get our house in order now we never will, and it will be future generations who suffer because of Labour’s failure to address it—[Interruption.] Chuntering away at me will not help the right hon. Lady.
Fairness is the reason why in April we lifted 880,000 of the lowest-paid workers out of income tax—and it does not stop there, because more will be added to their number every year of this Parliament. It is why we are protecting the lowest-paid public sector workers—the majority of whom are women—from the public sector pay freeze, and they will get pay rises. It is why we are increasing child tax credits for the poorest families by more than the level promised by the last Government. And it is precisely why we are getting to grips with the deficit so that we do not fritter away more and more on debt interest, and destroy the crucial public services that so many women need and depend on.
Cuts—and the impact that Opposition Members say they have—are not all that we care about for women. We care about being ambitious and about taking them out of poverty. We care about giving them the tools to lift themselves out, not just continuing what went on before. If fairness were simply a matter of benefits, taxes and snapshot comparisons of income, it would be easy to achieve—
Lynne Featherstone
No, I do not have time.
I echo the Home Secretary when I say that it is extremely patronising, and frankly absurd, to lump together 31 million women in this country as the prime victims of the deficit reduction. Women are not a homogenous group, but different individuals affected by different experiences and coming from different walks of life. So no matter how well intentioned, packaging out prescriptive solutions that fail to recognise that reality will not work. What do work are policies designed for all the roles that women play, tackling not just the symptoms of inequality but its causes. I shall try to address some of those points.
First, I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Leicester South, who made his maiden speech. I thank him for his kind words about Parmjit Singh Gill and congratulate him on being in the Chamber while he has a two-week-old baby. When shared parenting comes in, that could have been his wife, if she were able to walk. And as for Engelbert Humperdinck and “Quando, quando, quando”, I would have liked to say that I did not know what the hon. Gentleman was talking about, but sadly I did.
The hon. Member for Wolverhampton North East mentioned impact assessments. I have to say that Labour never published equality impact studies for its Budgets, and I do not think it did one on the 10p tax or the 70p pension rise. She also mentioned the gender pay gap. Yes, we are introducing voluntary pay reporting, but that was started under Labour in the Equality Act 2010. However, we will also impose mandatory pay audits on anyone found guilty of discrimination, if it is appropriate, and we have introduced the gagging clauses in the Equality Act. She also asked about trafficking and the Olympics. Work is being undertaken by the Metropolitan Police Service, which has a specialist unit that has received extra funding to prioritise activities to disrupt and monitor trafficking in the run-up to the Olympics.
Hon. Members asked about whether we were opting in to the European directive on trafficking. Well, we are opting into the directive, but we wanted to consider the matter and get it right to ensure that we could deliver on it. However, the coalition Government are going even further with our own human trafficking strategy, which will be announced shortly, and which will aim to disrupt activity in the country of origin, and then on our borders and in this country. As we have heard from many hon. Members, we are putting that support in place. We have also extended the Sojourner project
Lynne Featherstone
I am happy to give way to the hon. Lady—[Interruption]—as a special treat.
Margot James
Briefly, I would like to remind the hon. Lady that the Government are actually investing more money in the safeguarding of trafficking victims. That is a very good result in the current financial climate.
Lynne Featherstone
No. I forgot that I was not going to give way. I was seduced by the siren voices behind me.
An important point was made about the Government’s commitment to women. Extending the Sojourner project, and finding a long-term solution with the Department for Work and Pensions, mean that such women will not again be put in the position of not knowing where the support is coming from.
My hon. Friend the Member for Solihull said that we should work together. Well, I am very happy to work with her, and I am happy to work with Opposition Members too, because we need to get past these attacks about blind spots and what they say the coalition Government are and are not doing to women. We all care passionately about the position of women in this country. I find it difficult to accept Opposition Members’ criticisms, given how much we are doing. The Home Secretary laid that out quite clearly in her introductory remarks when she gave a long list of things that we are delivering for women.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Corby on what was a powerful speech, if not a tour de force, in which she pointed out Labour’s failure to reform the welfare system. She talked of our relentless focus on children’s well-being, and the fact that we are taking 1 million children out of poverty. My hon. Friend the Member for Devizes talked about health visitors and the importance of Sure Start, and my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull pointed out that not a single Liberal Democrat council has closed any children’s centres—[Interruption.] Sometimes it is quality, not quantity. Much as I would like to work with Opposition Members, I am afraid that it might not happen.
I wanted to respond to all the points that have been raised, but unfortunately I will not have time. The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South asked about support for carers. The Government have provided £400 million to the NHS for respite care over the next four years.
Mr Alan Campbell (Tynemouth) (Lab)
claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).
Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.
Question agreed to.
Main Question accordingly put.
Business without Debate
National Crime Agency
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
With permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement on the new National Crime Agency. Last year’s national security strategy recognised that organised crime is one of the greatest threats to our national security. The social and economic costs are estimated at between £20 billion and £40 billion per year, and its impact is seen on our streets and felt in our communities every single day. The drug dealing on street corners; the burglary and muggings by addicts; the trafficking of vulnerable young women into prostitution; the card cloning and credit card fraud that robs so many—all are fundamentally driven by organised criminals.
Our law enforcement agencies assess that there are some 38,000 individuals engaged in organised crime, involving 6,000 criminal groups; and yet, Sir Paul Stephenson, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, said last year that law enforcement is impacting in a meaningful way on only 11% of those 6,000 organised crime groups. We must do better.
For too long, central Government micro-managed and interfered in local policing, but at the same time national and international crime was neglected and our borders became porous. There was no cross-government strategy to tackle organised crime, no national tasking and co-ordination, and no co-ordinated border policing. Different agencies had varying responsibilities for policy, prevention and investigation, and there was a tendency to operate in silos. The overall effect was a fragmented and patchy law enforcement response, and we are putting that right.
By introducing police and crime commissioners, we can get central Government out of the way of local policing. We are putting the Government’s focus where it should have been all along: on securing our borders, and tackling national and international serious and organised crime. So we will shortly be publishing the first ever cross-government strategy on tackling organised crime and we will establish a powerful new operational body—the National Crime Agency.
The National Crime Agency will be a crime-fighting organisation. It will tackle organised crime, defend our borders, fight fraud and cybercrime, and protect children and young people. With a senior chief constable at its head, the NCA will harness intelligence, analytical capabilities and enforcement powers. Accountable to the Home Secretary, the NCA will be an integral part of our law enforcement community, with strong links to local police forces, police and crime commissioners, the UK Border Agency and other agencies.
The NCA will comprise a number of distinct operational commands. Building on the work of the Serious Organised Crime Agency—SOCA—the organised crime command will tackle organised crime groups, whether they operate locally, across the country or across our international borders. Fulfilling a key pledge in the coalition agreement, the border policing command will strengthen our borders, and help to prevent terrorism, drug smuggling, people trafficking, illegal immigration and other serious crimes. It will ensure that all law enforcement agencies operating in and around the border work to clear, mutually agreed priorities. The economic crime command will make a major difference to the current fragmented response to economic crime. Working to a new unified intelligence picture, the economic crime command will drive better co-ordination of cases, and better tasking of resources, across agencies such as the Financial Services Authority, the Office of Fair Trading and the Serious Fraud Office. That will mean that a greater volume and complexity of economic crime cases can be tackled. In due course, we will review the relationship between the economic crime command and the other agencies.
Building on the significant contribution that the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre—CEOP—already makes within SOCA, CEOP will, as a key part of the NCA, be able to draw on wider resources and support to help protect even more children and young people. The NCA will also house the national cybercrime unit, which will have its own investigative capacity and help local police forces to develop their own response to the online threat. Each command will be led by a senior and experienced individual, and will manage its own priorities and risks, but, crucially, capabilities, expertise, assets and intelligence will be shared across the entire agency and each command will operate as part of one single organisation.
Intelligence will be at the heart of what the NCA does. Learning from our experience of counter-terrorism, the NCA will house a significant multi-agency intelligence capability. It will collect and analyse its own and others’ intelligence, building and maintaining a comprehensive picture of serious and organised criminals in the UK: who they are and who they work with; where they live; where they operate; what crimes they are involved in; and what damage they cause. The NCA will then use that intelligence to co-ordinate, prioritise and target action against organised criminals, with information flowing to and from the police and other agencies in support of tactical operations. Using this intelligence picture, the NCA will have the ability and the authority to task and co-ordinate the police and other law enforcement agencies.
For the first time, there will be one agency with the power, remit and responsibility for ensuring that the right action is taken at the right time by the right people—that agency will be the NCA. All other agencies will work to the NCA’s threat assessment and prioritisation, and it will be the NCA’s intelligence picture that will drive the response on the ground. That will be underpinned by the new strategic policing requirement.
As well as having the ability to co-ordinate and task the response to national crime threats by the police and other agencies, the NCA will also have its own specialist operational and technological capabilities, including surveillance and means to deal with fraud and threat-to-life situations. This is a two-way street; the NCA will be able to provide its techniques and resources in support of the police and other agencies, just as it will task and co-ordinate the response to national-level crime.
NCA officers will be able to draw on a wide range of powers, including those of a police constable and immigration or customs powers. That will mean that NCA officers, unlike anybody else, will be able to deploy powers and techniques that go beyond the powers of a police officer.
The agency will be an integral part of the golden thread of policing that runs from the local to the national and beyond. At home, the NCA will work in partnership with police forces, chief constables, police and crime commissioners and agencies such as the UK Border Agency. Overseas, it will represent the UK’s interests, working with international law enforcement partners. It will also provide the central UK contact for European and international law enforcement.
The agency will come fully into being in 2013, with some key elements becoming operational sooner. The total cost of the organisation will not exceed the aggregate costs of its predecessors. The combination of a single intelligence picture, the tasking and co-ordination function, the specialist operational support and the operational commands will result in a dramatic improvement in our response to national and international crime.
Organised crime, border crime, economic crime, cybercrime and child exploitation are real problems for real people. All areas of the country suffer their effects—from the very poorest communities to the most affluent, from the smallest villages to the biggest cities—and it is often the most vulnerable in our society who suffer the greatest harm. We owe it to them to do more to tackle the scourge of drugs, better to defend our borders, to fight fraud and to protect our children and young people. The National Crime Agency will do all those things and more and I commend the statement to the House.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
I thank the Home Secretary for providing an advance copy of her statement. We have already had another day, another debate—now it is another day, another statement. Once again, to listen to the Home Secretary one would think this was year zero, that everything failed in the past and that everything will be nirvana in the future. Yesterday, she told us that the Labour Government’s Prevent strategy had failed and her new strategy would make no mistakes. Today, she claims that there was no cross-Government organised crime strategy and no effective work on organised crime before, but that for the future we will see a dramatic improvement in the fight against national and international crime just as a result of these changes. There is no end to this Home Secretary’s hostages to fortune.
The right hon. Lady also contradicts herself. She says that there was no cross-Government strategy on organised crime, but then she says the organised crime command will build on the work of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, which was set up by Labour in 2005 to take the fight to organised crime. It had a conviction rate of more than 90%. She says that the National Crime Agency will be a crime-fighting organisation with intelligence at the heart of what it does, with the combined powers of police, customs and immigration officers, but that is what SOCA is. Whereas yesterday we had control orders and son of control orders, today we have SOCA and SOCA plus. It is hardly year zero and hardly a new nirvana.
We think we should build on SOCA. Sometimes, it became focused too purely on intelligence and it makes sense to do more to reform national policing. There are considerable benefits that can flow in this area, but reforms also need to be handled effectively or they can go badly awry—and they have already gone awry. Child protection experts have resigned, counter-terrorism plans have been publicly slapped down by the Met and the Serious Fraud Office has been put in a state of suspended animation. That has all happened at a time when 12,000 police officers are being cut across the country and the Government are pushing ahead with American-style plans for police and crime commissioners whom nobody wants. The truth is that these plans have been dogged by chaos and confusion. From her statement, there is no sign that the Home Secretary has a grip. Let us consider the individual points that she has made.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency had good results this year, but Jim Gamble, its successful head, resigned from the agency after seeing the Government’s plans to merge CEOP with the NCA. He said today:
“I don’t believe that the rebranding or the submerging of CEOP within a far greater entity will allow the critical child protection focus that we need.”
He made the point that CEOP will also suffer a 10% reduction in its budget by 2014 and said that he hoped the Government would release the submissions to the consultation on the merger, because they were overwhelmingly against it. We hope too that the Home Secretary will release them, because she has clearly not persuaded the experts on those plans.
On financial crime, the grandly titled economic crime command is a far cry from the Home Secretary's plans to merge the Serious Fraud Office and parts of the Financial Services Authority. Instead, do we have a co-ordinating committee? Or is this just another agency to work with the many already in the field? Does this risk limbo for the SFO, whose director has already said:
“This is a distraction and it is important that a clear direction is made as soon as possible so that the SFO is focused on delivering results for the public.”
The Home Secretary has clearly not persuaded the experts or the Chancellor of her plans.
On the border command, the Home Secretary says: “Fulfilling a key pledge in the coalition agreement, the border policing command will strengthen our borders, and help prevent terrorism”, but the coalition pledge was for a border police force, not just a command. In the Conservatives’ manifesto, it was more boots on the ground. They were talking about 10,000 people a few years ago. Has that been replaced simply by a board to oversee better cross-agency working?
Plans to move counter-terrorism from the Met have been ditched after the commissioner said that national security is “too important” and
“must be based on more than mere structural convenience”.
Can the Home Secretary confirm that she does not plan to destabilise matters by revisiting this issue during the important period in the run-up to the Olympics?
On the National Policing Improvement Agency the Home Secretary has said nothing at all, but she is disbanding it in 2012—a year before the NCA starts. We still do not know what is happening to the DNA database or to a whole series of other functions. The chief constable of Derbyshire has said:
“We face an issue that there are absolutely critical services provided by the NPIA that, at the moment, have a date that is going to drop off, with nowhere to go.”
What will happen to them? The Home Secretary has not explained how tasking will work, what will happen if chief constables disagree and who will make the final decision when resources become overstretched.
On resources, the Home Secretary says that the total cost of the organisation will not exceed the aggregate costs of its predecessors, but she has not commented on set-up costs. Peter Neyroud has estimated that this top-down reorganisation will cost between £15 million and £20 million. When that is added to the cost of police and crime commissioners we have £120 million being spent on top-down reorganisations while 12,000 police officer posts are being cut, putting the fight against crime at risk across the country. There is a risk that chaos and confusion will make it harder for the police to cope given the drop in resources that they are experiencing.
For this renamed crime agency to be successful, it needs steady leadership, clarity and the resources to deliver. In the end, reorganisation is no substitute for police officers on the ground doing the job on national and local crime and going the extra mile to catch criminals and keep communities safe. That means we need an end to the confusion and a bit more realism both about the past and about the detail of the reform. We need to start closing the gap between the rhetoric and the reality on the ground.
Mrs May
Yes, another day, another Home Office statement and, sadly, yet another similar response from the shadow Home Secretary. Indeed, she repeated many of the phrases that she used in her response to yesterday’s Prevent statement. She really needs to go away and think very carefully about what we mean by a cross-government organised crime strategy. She said that the previous Government had such a strategy because it set up SOCA and because SOCA existed, but we are talking about bringing together all the strands of law enforcement, including law enforcement agencies and police forces, that deal with organised crime. We are developing a comprehensive, coherent cross-government approach to dealing with organised crime. That is an organised crime strategy, which is not what the previous Government had.
I accept that SOCA has been doing good work and we want to build on that as part of the organised crime command within the new National Crime Agency, but there are other areas of crime that we need greater focus on. Yes, we need to look more closely at what is happening on our borders and to enhance our ability to bring together various agencies that have responsibility for and operate on the borders. We need to do that in conjunction with organisations such as the organised crime command and CEOP to ensure that we have the advantage of using not only the intelligence capability that will be at the centre of the NCA but the synergies that will be available when those agencies work properly together.
We will also be setting up a new economic crime command. There is a need in this country to look much more closely at economic crime. There is a whole swathe of what could be called middle-level economic crime that we have not dealt with appropriately and properly in the past, and the economic crime command will enable us to put a clear focus on that. It will enable us to ensure that the various agencies dealing with economic crime are working together, are co-ordinated and are working to the same priorities. It will also enable us to ensure that resources are being put in the right place, at the right time, where they are needed. This is a new development and a very important one in enhancing our work on economic crime. Indeed, it will not wait until the NCA is set up. Within the next few months we will establish a co-ordinating board on economic crime which will already start that important work. This is a powerful new crime-fighting body which I believe will make a real difference to our ability to deal with organised crime.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
I welcome the focus that the NCA will place on tackling organised crime, and the creation of the border command. We need the NCA to be set up seamlessly. Can the Home Secretary set out how the Government will minimise the disruption caused by the structural change and maximise the speed with which the NCA becomes fully operational and effective?
Mrs May
I thank my hon. Friend for an important question. The establishment of the NCA will require legislation. We aim for that legislation to be in place so that the NCA can be fully operational in 2013, but we believe that this is an important area and that we need to start working before then. The transition to the NCA can be eased by work such as developing the organised crime strategy, starting to develop the co-ordination capability on organised crime within the Home Office, which we are doing and, as I have just indicated, starting to develop the co-ordination capacity in relation to economic crime. These are the precursors for a more seamless transition to the NCA.
As we develop the agency, we intend to establish a position for an individual who will head the work. An individual at chief constable level will be appointed fairly soon—within the next few months—and will be able to work within the Home Office over the period before the NCA is set up. At that point there will be a transition for a permanent individual to be established as the head of the NCA.
We want to learn lessons—for example, from the setting up of SOCA, where there were some difficulties in terms of personnel and their move over to SOCA. We will be looking at the lessons to be learned from that.
Mr David Blunkett (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
I congratulate the Home Secretary on the prettiest little speech rewriting history that the House has heard for some time. I plead guilty to having been responsible for launching the Serious Organised Crime Agency. I had hoped for a 50% remission, but I will have to settle for a third instead.
The truth of the matter is that SOCA has had enormous successes but was bedevilled by the over-emphasis on intelligence rather than on enforcement, yet this afternoon the Home Secretary once again placed intelligence at the centre. In the new economic crime directorate, the new border directorate and the relationship with Customs and Excise, who will be responsible for the emphasis on economic and, by its very nature, cybercrime—the Treasury directing the policy or the Home Office laying it down? We had problems with that, and I did not hear any explanation of how the present Home Secretary intends to get round that difficulty.
Mrs May
I am sorry about the approach that the right hon. Gentleman took in his comments. If he had listened carefully both to my statement and to the response I gave to his right hon. Friend the shadow Home Secretary, he would have heard me make it clear that I think SOCA has done good work over the past few years, but I believe, and I think those involved in SOCA would agree, that we can do more. We can build on the experience that it has built up. By making SOCA the organised crime command within the National Crime Agency and being able to take advantage of the synergies across the law enforcement agencies and police forces, we will be able to do a more effective job in the future.
On the intelligence issue, yes, there will be an intelligence capability at the NCA. That is important, but the difference is that the NCA will clearly be a crime-fighting body and the commands within it will be crime-fighting commands.
In relation to cybercrime, which the right hon. Gentleman referred to, there will be a cybercrime unit at the NCA which will cross all the commands, because cybercrime is both a crime in itself and a tool for the execution of other crimes.
Nicola Blackwood (Oxford West and Abingdon) (Con)
I thank the Home Secretary for her statement. On the role of the NCA with regard to human trafficking, it is estimated that more than 2,500 trafficked women were victims of sexual exploitation in 2009 alone. Can my right hon. Friend explain to the House how the border policing command will go further to clamp down on this unacceptable practice?
Mrs May
I thank my hon. Friend for her question. I know that this is an area in which she takes a particular interest. We recognise that a lot has been done in relation to trafficking in recent years, but more can be done. The great advantage of the border command is that it will be able to bring together resources and task resources within both agencies and local police forces. It will work with other command organisations within the National Crime Agency, such as the serious organised crime command, in a way that has not happened until now. One of the problems we have had until now is that the Government have too often approached this with silo thinking, but criminals do not think in silos. The human trafficking gang probably also deals in drugs and might be involved in other things, such as child exploitation, so we need to look across the whole swathe when dealing with criminals.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
The Home Secretary has said that the aggregate budget will not be more than the budget for the organisations comprising the new agency. Could she indicate what it will be, and if it is less will she guarantee that key functions now undertaken by the National Policing Improvement Agency, such as the Missing Persons Bureau or the DNA database, will not slip off the edge during the reorganisation?
Mrs May
It will not cost more than its predecessors. It is possible that some of the current functions of the NPIA, such as witness protection and threat to life issues, could move into the NCA, but if they do so they will move as funded functions so that the funding already available will be used for the operations of the NCA. The NPIA will cease to exist, as we have set out very clearly. We are looking at the functions that it is right to bring into the NCA, but, given that it is an operational crime-fighting body, it is not right that all the NPIA functions should come into it.
Rehman Chishti (Gillingham and Rainham) (Con)
With regard to law and order and tackling crime, does the Home Secretary agree with Phil Collins, who said that Labour do not have a particularly strong position on crime of any kind? [Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. I have made this point several times before: statements are about questioning the policy of the Government, not that of the Opposition. I call Mr Stewart Jackson.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I welcome the Home Secretary’s statement. I am sure that she, like me, would congratulate Cambridgeshire constabulary on the work it is doing to combat people trafficking through initiatives such as Operation Sodium. On a specific point about people trafficking, how does she see the priority for the NCA in respect of the sharing of criminal records data across the European Union, an area that, regrettably, was ignored by the previous Government?
Mrs May
I thank my hon. Friend for his question and am happy to join him in congratulating Cambridgeshire constabulary on its work and the operations it has undertaken on human trafficking. In relation to all those issues, the National Crime Agency will be looking to operate across international borders as well as across police force borders in the UK. The sharing of information within the European Union, and indeed the sharing of information in other ways, as he knows, has been and is a matter of discussion within the European Union. The NCA will be the key point of contact for both European and wider international co-operation.
Ann Coffey (Stockport) (Lab)
The Missing Persons Bureau provides a single database of all missing adults and children, a valuable national and international resource. In addition, it continues to provide advice and support to some families of missing children, although some services have gone to CEOP. Will the Home Secretary give some more information on where the Missing Persons Bureau will sit operationally, particularly in relation to CEOP, in 2013 and between now and then?
Mrs May
The hon. Lady raises an important issue. As she says, we have already announced that the missing children aspect will be going to CEOP. We are now looking at the wider work on missing persons to see where it is appropriate for that to sit. It might be that it is appropriate for that to be within the National Crime Agency. We will ensure that decisions are taken so that there is no opportunity for this to slip between two stools, because it is an important area of work.
Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con)
I welcome the Secretary of State’s admission that the agency will pull together a lot of strands that had a silo mentality within the previous Government. On illegal immigration, given that under the previous Government many illegal immigrants came into the country, disappeared and could not be found, could it be that through this new overarching structure we will now have a greater way of informing intelligence, so that anybody with local information on the ground will be able to help and feed in information to the correct place?
Mrs May
Yes, indeed. We will be looking to create a situation with the border police command in which it will be possible to use greater intelligence in relation to the issue that my hon. Friend raises—in due course, of course. Through our borders work, we are in the process of further developing our understanding of individuals who are in the United Kingdom, but of course those who come to the UK to work do have to have a biometric residence permit.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
What discussions did the Home Secretary have with the devolved Administrations when she was setting up the agency, and what relationship will it have with devolved police services?
Mrs May
We have had a number of discussions on the matter with the devolved Administrations, and the National Crime Agency will deal with some aspects of crime which are reserved matters, but we are very conscious of working with the devolved agencies. In relation to Scotland, we expect the NCA to work with, for example, the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and the Scottish police forces—or force, should there be a single police force in future. In working with the devolved Administrations, we will respect the primacy of law enforcement agencies in the devolved nations.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
I represent a large port in a county with a long coastline. Can the Home Secretary confirm that the border police command will ensure that all agencies responsible for the nation’s coastline and ports work together to prevent illegal immigration, drug and people trafficking and tax evasion?
Mrs May
I am happy to give that confirmation to my hon. Friend. Given her constituency, I realise that the issue will be of particular interest to her. Crucially, the border police command will be able, not only by itself but working with other commands in the National Crime Agency, to provide much better co-ordination of all the forces and law enforcement agencies that need to be brought to bear in order to deal with the issues that she raises.
Mrs Jenny Chapman (Darlington) (Lab)
Online crime against children and the exploitation of children are growing in prevalence, and I know that the Home Secretary is concerned about that and wants to do something about it. CEOP is a very successful organisation, with many admirers throughout the world and, from what I can tell, very few critics. Given that it does not just detect crimes but assesses whether a crime has taken place, how will the Home Secretary assess whether her decision to merge it is the right one?
Mrs May
CEOP will continue to do the work that it has been doing, but it will be able to be even more effective because it will be part of that wider agency. The CEOP brand will continue to exist, and we have made it absolutely clear—we have talked to CEOP and to Peter Davies about this—that CEOP will continue to operate as it does at the moment, because an important part of its work is its links with the private sector. It will be able to continue to do that work within the National Crime Agency, but on top of that it will have the advantage of access to intelligence capability, of access to that prioritisation of work and of working with those other commands.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I congratulate the Home Secretary on her statement. I am comfortable that the National Crime Agency will be able to deal well with serious and organised crime, but what about serious but not organised crime? What about serial killings, rapes and issues like that, which the NPIA currently deals with? It still seems unclear where its injuries database and all its other services in relation to serious but not organised crime will sit. What will happen to all that?
Mrs May
Of course, one of the difficulties in all such issues relates to the definitions that one uses for those types of crime, but serious crime that is not undertaken by organised crime groups is predominantly dealt with by individual police forces. As a result of the National Crime Agency being set up, however, I believe that it will be possible to share intelligence on serious crimes of that sort. It will encourage greater regional co-operation among police forces, so it will be possible to deal better and more effectively with serious crime that is not related to organised crime groups.
Angela Smith (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Lab)
The Home Secretary bravely claimed that the new initiative will result in a dramatic improvement in our response to national and international crime. May I therefore ask her how the performance of the NCA will be measured and how it will be reported to the House?
Mrs May
As I have made clear, the National Crime Agency will be accountable to the Home Secretary. We will look at the procedures that we can put in place to ensure that there are appropriate timed reports to the House on this matter—although, as I observed to somebody who asked me that question earlier today, I have every confidence that the Home Affairs Committee, apart from anything else, will show an interest in it. The measurement of success is one of the issues that has dogged SOCA, because SOCA’s role is not only about finding and prosecuting criminals and seizing assets but preventing crime from taking place. Indeed, the success of such agencies often lies as much in what they prevent as in the number of criminals that they catch. We will be looking very carefully at the measurements that can be used because, as I say, SOCA has suffered from the sort of measurements that have been applied to it.
Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)
This is an extremely positive move. Criminal gangs do not operate in the context of 43 forces, and for too long we have lacked a proper link between the forces in terms of intelligence and operations. Will the Home Secretary be looking for a similar model to that of the counter-terrorism hubs whereby local forces can collaborate and link into a national network?
Mrs May
Counter-terrorism is a good example of where there is a national organisation that deals with a matter at national level. When the National Crime Agency is in place, it will want to look at how it chooses to operate with the different commands that are under its remit.
My hon. Friend’s question reminds me that I did not respond to one of the points that the shadow Home Secretary made about counter-terrorism. I will do that now, if I may, because it is an important issue. We have never said that counter-terrorism would come under the remit of the National Crime Agency. We have made it clear that we will not do anything to disrupt the current counter-terrorism arrangements before the Olympics, and we will not do anything to disrupt those arrangements before the National Crime Agency is up and running. There will be a point at which it will be appropriate, in the new landscape, to look to ensure that counter-terrorism is still being dealt with in the most effective way possible.
Naomi Long (Belfast East) (Alliance)
The UK’s only land border is with the Republic of Ireland in Northern Ireland. Given the particular and specific challenges that that border raises, what discussions has the Home Secretary had with my colleague, the Minister of Justice in Northern Ireland, about how to implement this in the Northern Ireland context and how to ensure that the NCA benefits from the very positive working relationships between the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Garda Siochana?
Mrs May
We have been talking to all the devolved Administrations, including in Northern Ireland, about the establishment and operation of the NCA. We are very conscious of the particular issues in relation to Northern Ireland, particularly given the existence of the common travel area in relation to border issues. We are also conscious of the very good relationships between the PSNI and the Garda in dealing with a number of issues that affect both sides of the border. Obviously, we respect the relationships that have been established and will continue to work with and talk to the devolved Administrations about how the operation of the NCA will affect them and how we can all work together.
Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
From speaking to police, head teachers and other community workers in my constituency, it is clear, without question, that the biggest cause of crime, poverty and deprivation is drugs. With the best will in the world, having more police on the streets will not tackle the root cause of that problem—it is about tackling the dealers, the traffickers and the low-lifes who most benefit from the proliferation of drugs on our streets. Can the Home Secretary expand a little more on how the NCA will effectively tackle that?
Mrs May
Yes, indeed. We need to tackle the drugs threat at all levels. In relation to those who are drug addicts, we have already issued our new drugs strategy. My hon. Friend is absolutely right that we need to look at the organised crime groups that are plying this trade and bringing drugs into the country. We will be putting a focus on the disruption of activity upstream. SOCA has had some success on this in relation to a number of countries, including Colombia. We will want to build on that to ensure that we can cut off the supply before it reaches our streets.
Catherine McKinnell (Newcastle upon Tyne North) (Lab)
Many Members and development non-governmental organisations are extremely alarmed by the Home Secretary’s apparent decision to put the Serious Fraud Office on 12 months’ notice. The uncertainty about the SFO’s future has led to key staff leaving in recent months, which has undermined the fight against crime and corruption. Will the Home Secretary explain what is the point of prolonging the damaging uncertainty and instability in this organisation?
Mrs May
I gently suggest to the hon. Lady that she should not believe everything she reads in the newspapers. There is no suggestion that the SFO has been put “on 12 months’ notice”. What we have said has been absolutely clear. The SFO is continuing to exist and to operate as it has done. We will set up an economic crime command in the NCA. In the interim—very soon, within the next few months—we will set up a co-ordinating board, initially chaired by SOCA, which will bring together those involved in dealing with economic crime, including the SFO and other agencies, to see how we can develop better co-ordination among the agencies to improve the way in which we deal with such crime. In due course, we will consider what is the appropriate relationship between the NCA, the SFO and other agencies that deal with economic crime.
Mr Rob Wilson (Reading East) (Con)
It is often said that an organisation is only as good as its leadership. It is therefore important that the new head that is appointed is of sufficient quality. Has my right hon. Friend appointed a new head? If so, perhaps she can share with the House who that person is and what their experience is.
Mrs May
No, I have not appointed a new head, but an advertisement for the post has been published today. As I indicated in my response to my hon. Friend the Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), we intend that the head of the NCA will be a senior chief constable who is at the top tier in terms of salary and rank. It is important that they have crime fighting experience so that they can drive the NCA as a crime fighting body.
Mr Tom Watson (West Bromwich East) (Lab)
The convicted private investigator, Jonathan Rees, who was contracted to News International, targeted the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for covert surveillance, as well as at least one former Home Secretary. It is likely that witness testimonies have been available to the Metropolitan police for a number of years. Given the seriousness of this case, is it the sort of case that the Home Secretary would take from the Metropolitan police and give to the new National Crime Agency?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman tempts me to comment on an ongoing investigation, but it is not appropriate for me to do so. As he knows, because he asked this question at Prime Minister’s questions today, an investigation is being carried out by the Metropolitan police. We have made it absolutely clear that they should follow the evidence wherever it goes.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
I welcome the statement. Cyber-security is a growing concern. It is fair to say that Britain has been slow to recognise this threat. Every day, there are more attacks on Government Departments. Will my right hon. Friend outline how the NCA will co-ordinate the response to this growing threat?
Mrs May
There is a cyber-security office in the Cabinet Office that looks at cyber-security from a national security point of view. The NCA will focus on cybercrime. It will have a specific cybercrime unit that will develop our capability to deal with such issues. The mistake is often made of talking about cybercrime as if it is something completely new. Sometimes cybercrimes are new forms of crime, but sometimes it is simply that cyber-techniques and technology, rather than physical means, are used as tools to commit normal crimes such as fraud or robbery. That capability will be developed in the NCA.
Stephen Mosley (City of Chester) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement, but I echo some of the concerns expressed by Opposition Members, including the shadow Home Secretary, in highlighting the success of CEOP. I ask for reassurance that CEOP’s excellent work, such as its leading global role in tackling international child abuse networks on the internet, will continue under the NCA.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend absolutely has my confirmation and reassurance on that point. We are very conscious of the excellent work of CEOP, and nothing that we are doing will upset it. CEOP will continue to work in the way that it has, but it will also be able to build on its work because of the links that it will have with other commands under the National Crime Agency. I suggest that if he has any further concerns—I hope he will not, following my reassurance—he look at the comments that the chief executive of CEOP made a couple of weeks ago on the “Today” programme. He was absolutely clear that moving to the NCA would in no way degrade or affect CEOP’s ability to carry on doing its work.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
May I thank the Home Secretary for coming to the House to make a statement yet again? It is a real improvement in parliamentary form. At this late hour, Members on both sides of the House have still been very interested in hearing what she has said.
Will the NCA effectively lose responsibility for human trafficking? The non-governmental organisations are very concerned that after the specific trafficking centre in Sheffield went into SOCA, it may now get lost. I know that the Government are keen to move forward on human trafficking, but that is a concern.
Mrs May
My hon. Friend obviously has a particular interest as chairman of the all-party group on human trafficking. I know that he is waiting, I hope with some interest and excitement, for the Government’s publication of our human trafficking strategy in a matter of weeks, when we will be able to set the matter in more context. The aim is that human trafficking will come within the National Crime Agency’s remit. Whether it is in a specific unit in the organised crime command or dealt with in another way will be a matter for the NCA when it is set up, but once we have an individual in place who is driving the creation of the NCA, I expect that to be exactly the sort of issue that they will want to examine.
Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend reassure me that the National Crime Agency will build on some of the good work of SOCA in tackling organised crime?
Mrs May
I can give my hon. Friend that reassurance. As I have said in response to a number of hon. Members this afternoon, SOCA has done good work, but we believe that more can be done. The organised crime command being within the NCA will enable greater synergies of operation both across law enforcement agencies and with police forces’ activities. I believe that we will be able to build on our work in dealing with organised crime. As I indicated in my statement, Sir Paul Stephenson has said that sadly, at the moment we are not doing enough in that area and need to do more.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Crime is often linked with terrorism. Will the National Crime Agency have primacy over other agencies when several agencies have an operational interest?
Mrs May
It will for those matters that are under its remit, but as I indicated in a response a few minutes ago, the counter-terrorism policing structure will not be changed—certainly not before the Olympics, and not before the National Crime Agency is set up. That is staying as it is. There will be links between the NCA and the Association of Chief Police Officers’ terrorism and allied matters committee in dealing with terrorism, and when there are links between organised crime and terrorism it is obviously important that those bodies work together to ensure that they deal with them effectively.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s determination to make the NCA a crime-fighting organisation, but can she say at this stage how many officers she expects will serve in it and what the balance of resources will be between the various commands?
Mrs May
By definition, we are bringing a number of existing agencies into the NCA, so it is expected that those who are in those agencies at the moment will come into it. The exact disposition of the numbers and those individuals among various commands is not yet set in stone. It will of course be considered in the transition period, once the individual who will head up the NCA in its transition is in place.
Petitions
Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)
This petition is from the residents of Nelson, Lancashire, and the surrounding area. It is signed by more than 500 residents.
The petition states:
The Petition of residents of Nelson, Lancashire, and others,
Declares that there is a need for a post box outside the main Post Office in Nelson.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to encourage Royal Mail to take all possible steps to ensure that a post box is provided outside the main Post Office in Nelson.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
[P000924]
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Last week, I had the great pleasure to attend a protest meeting in Little Harrowden about the No. 24 bus—or lack thereof. We nearly overflowed into the car park because there were so many people there. A petition has been given to me to present to the House to get Little Harrowden reconnected with Wellingborough. With your permission, Mr Speaker, I shall read the petition to the honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled.
The petition states:
The Humble Petition of residents of Little Harrowden, Northamptonshire and the surrounding areas,
Sheweth
That the decision by Stagecoach bus company to eliminate most of the bus services between Little Harrowden and Wellingborough due to cut backs in subsidy from Northamptonshire County Council has led to considerable hardship to the old, disabled, vulnerable and young in isolating the village from Wellingborough and necessitating a difficult and dangerous walk along a busy and partly unlit road.
Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your Honourable House urges the Secretary of State for Transport to liaise with Northamptonshire County Council and the Borough Council of Wellingborough to find a resolution that will lead to the Number 24 bus service being re-established between Little Harrowden and Wellingborough.
And your Petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray, &c.
[P000925]
Andrew George (St Ives) (LD)
I am proud to present a petition of more than 6,000 residents of west Cornwall, which was gathered by my constituents who have been, and remain, justifiably concerned about the Government’s Health and Social Care Bill. They have gathered support for their petition over the past few months, before and since the Government’s “pause and listen” process. They look forward to the formal outcome of that process and hope that the Government will have been encouraged to scrap the Bill and start again. I have also been given a disk copy of a similar petition undertaken by 38 Degrees. That amounts to a total of 300,000 signatures.
The petition states:
The Petition of residents of West Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and St Ives, and others,
Declares their opposition to the Health and Social Care Bill currently before Parliament as it will take away their single Cornwall National Health Service and replace it with consortia led by GPs. Further, the Bill will allow the increased involvement of profit-led companies in our health service.
The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons rejects the Health and Social Care Bill.
And the Petitioners remain, etc.
[P000926]
Greenock Coastguard Station
(13 years, 4 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)
I am very pleased to have secured this debate today on a topic of concern to many in my coastal constituency who rely on the service provided by the Clyde coastguard service at Greenock. Of course, the debate takes place in the context of the consultation on the future of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, which was announced to the House in a written ministerial statement on 16 December 2010. The consultation proposes the closure of more than half the current coastguard stations and the loss of approximately 248 jobs.
A number of my constituents work at Clyde coastguard station at Greenock, and many of the points that I shall put to the Minister today, and the questions that I will ask him, come directly from them. The House will be aware that coastguards have recently been prevented from giving evidence directly to the Select Committee on Transport. Operations room staff at the Clyde coastguard station have, however, authored a response to the consultation, which was submitted on 5 May. I hope that the Minister will look at that submission and ensure that it is considered constructively. It makes many detailed points in support of retaining a coastguard station at Greenock.
Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)
I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate. I am a member of the Transport Committee and, as she rightly says, we are conducting an inquiry into the future of coastguard stations. Although we were not able to take evidence formally from the staff at Greenock, we visited the station and met the staff informally as part of our inquiry. I pay tribute to the officers. The views they expressed were noted, and will be helpful in formulating the response to our inquiry.
Katy Clark
I am grateful for that intervention. I hope that the views expressed by coastguards at Greenock and other coastguard stations are listened to by the Government, and I strongly welcome the fact that coastguards were able to speak informally to the Committee. They have made many technical points which it is helpful for Members of Parliament to listen to.
Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)
I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend on securing this important debate on the future of Greenock. Does she know whether staff or former staff at Greenock were involved in drawing up the proposals that inform the consultation? That is a concern that has been raised with me by staff at the Crosby coastguard station, which is also under threat in this review.
Katy Clark
The constituents of mine who work at Greenock and other members of staff—I have spoken to them on several occasions over the years—were not involved in any way with the proposals, and that is one of the concerns that has been expressed up and down the country. The proposals do not seem to be based on the experiences of those who have been actively involved in providing the service.
If the proposed closure of the Clyde and Forth coastguard stations goes ahead, it will leave the central belt of Scotland without a coastguard station. Indeed, if the proposals go ahead as originally announced in December last year, there will be no coastguard stations south of Aberdeen or north of Bridlington in Yorkshire. My constituents are concerned that it is far from clear what criteria were used to develop these proposals, so it is not clear why Clyde has been proposed as one of the stations that will close. That is also far from clear to my constituents who rely on the service provided by Clyde coastguard station. I hope that in the reply to this debate we will get more information on that point, so that we can try to rebut some of the arguments.
Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does she agree that one of the characteristics of this debate in so far as it affects Greenock—and the constituents of mine who sometimes work out of the Clyde station and other coastguard stations—is that strong and reasoned arguments have been made against closure, but similar arguments have not been made by those who propose closure? That is why it is important that the whole process should be rethought.
Katy Clark
I agree with my hon. Friend, and I commend the work that he has undertaken in relation to the Forth coastguard station. In this debate I will be asking a number of questions specifically about why Clyde has been proposed for closure, but hon. Members on both sides of the House have questions about many of the other coastguard stations. As I look around the Chamber, I see the familiar faces of hon. Members who have been campaigning on behalf of their constituents and the coastguard stations on which they rely. I hope that answers will be forthcoming from the Minister. This debate concerns the Greenock site, and he might be unable to reply today to some of my points. If not, I would hope to get written responses later.
Clyde coastguard station is the busiest station in Scotland and, depending on how the figures are read, it is also one of the busiest in the United Kingdom. My figures have been provided by those who work at Clyde coastguard station. They have used their knowledge to provide those figures, although one of the problems is that it has not been easy to get much of the information. According to the figures I have been given, Clyde coastguard station seems to be the top coastguard station in Britain for urgency calls; second behind Falmouth for distress calls; third for search and rescue hours; and fifth for incident numbers in the United Kingdom. Whichever way we look at it, it seems to be one of the busier stations in the United Kingdom.
The station has the largest coastline to look after, because of the number of islands and the length of the sea lochs in the area for which it has responsibility. The station has 41 coastguard rescue teams under its control, and has more ferry routes—28, including four in my constituency—than any other district coastguard station. In many ways, the seas for which it is responsible are getting busier, despite a significant reduction in the number of fishing vessels owing to the seas in the part of the world in which I live having been fished out. There are more fish farm support vessels, and there will be an increasing number of vessels for offshore renewable projects as well as a considerable number of cruise vessels, Navy vessels, submarines, including nuclear submarines, and a significant increase in the number of small leisure craft.
We have heard a lot about local knowledge in the debate about the future of the coastguard service. I believe that Clyde, as one of the largest stations, must have developed a significant amount of local knowledge about the huge terrain for which it provides a service. I cannot see any sense in closing such a large station and losing staff with so much local knowledge, and having other stations take on the work. The economic reality is that Greenock staff are unlikely to be able to transfer from low-cost areas such as Inverclyde or north Ayrshire to high-cost areas such as Aberdeen and the south of England, which have comparatively expensive house prices. When stations such as Greenock close—if that is allowed to happen—such knowledge is lost. It will not move with them.
As I said, many aspects of this matter do not seem to have been given proper consideration. In particular, as far as we can tell, the costs involved in the different coastguard stations do not seem to have been given detailed consideration. The relevant figures, however, many of which are quoted in the response of the operational staff to which I referred the Minister, suggest that Clyde is a cheaper station, because it is situated in a low-cost area with cheaper property prices. The figures also show that there is a large number of applicants whenever posts are advertised there, because it is an area with high unemployment and few quality available jobs. Furthermore, when people get those jobs, they tend to stay, so the retention rate is far higher than in other stations. As I say, detailed work has been done on that—work to which I refer the Minister. However, I would also ask him to say whether that issue was taken into account before December, when the proposals were made.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend talked about whether staff would relocate. I have heard no indication in the comments made to me of a significant relocation package for staff. Does she have any information from staff who have approached her about whether that has been offered or mentioned, or does she know whether it is part of the consultation process?
Katy Clark
I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. The terms of the civil service relocation package do not necessarily make relocation an attractive option, particularly for those living in areas where accommodation is comparatively cheap and for whom the available options are probably not attractive.
Mark Lazarowicz
Given the age profile, will not many of those working in such stations have done so for many years and often have family commitments and other connections? They cannot simply uproot and move 200, 300, 400 or 500 miles away. They will not go, and that expertise will be lost and they will be unemployed.
Katy Clark
My hon. Friend is obviously correct that, often, not just one individual working in a household will be affected. Relationships will be complicated, and frankly, many people will simply not be in a position to move. Indeed, I suspect that that will probably more often be the case at coastguard stations with experienced long-term staff. We also need to be aware that coastguards are already on very low incomes.
The Minister will be aware that Inverclyde and North Ayrshire are areas of high unemployment and deprivation. Have the economic impacts of the proposals been considered, in particular on Clyde and the wider community? The decision to close Clyde, but keep open the other large coastguard station in Scotland at Aberdeen, seems to be based on current leasing arrangements rather than on operational reasons—or, indeed, on the ongoing running costs of each station. The lease for the Clyde station comes to an end in 2012, with the Aberdeen lease coming to an end in 2020. It has been put to me repeatedly that this seems to have been a major consideration in the proposal to close Clyde. Will the Minister confirm whether that was a factor in coming forward with the proposals, and if it was, will he say how large a factor it was? Has any work been done on the comparative costs of the various options of keeping one coastguard station open as opposed to another?
Mark Lazarowicz
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I assure her that this is my last intervention. On the question of having one or two coastguard stations, just to make it clear, I am sure that she does not mean to suggest that we want the Aberdeen station to close instead Greenock. The whole point is that we do not want the entire coastline of Scotland and parts of the north of England to be served by just one station, which is clearly not a practical solution.
Katy Clark
I agree with my hon. Friend. I am trying to get the Minister to provide more detail on the reasoning behind the proposals. I am strongly of the view that we need a geographical spread of coastguard stations and that we need more than one in Scotland. I have not necessarily looked at the detail of every coastguard station, but I suspect that some hon. Members in the Chamber have.
Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)
Perhaps the hon. Lady’s concern about stations on all parts of the coastline echoes her comments about the transferability of staff. Does she agree that local knowledge is critical to the successful operation of coastguard services?
Katy Clark
I agree with the hon. Lady. I am in no way trying to set one coastguard station against another; what I am trying to do is put points on behalf of the Clyde coastguard station that I do not believe will be put in any other forum. There is huge frustration about the fact that it has not been possible to make those points, and we know that very few reasons were given for the proposals.
In every debate about the issue that has taken place in the House, members of all political parties have strongly made the case for local knowledge. There is a considerable distance between the constituency of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) and mine. At present that local knowledge is held in the Clyde coastguard station, and if Aberdeen were to take on the work, the acquisition of such knowledge would take a number of years. That point has been made to the Minister a number of times.
Bill Esterson
My hon. Friend made the same point about local knowledge when speaking about the growth of shipping in the Clyde estuary. It is a crucial factor. While the technology on the larger ships will enable them to make the most of the new technology that the MCA is proposing to introduce, many smaller vessels—including fishing vessels and, in particular, pleasure craft—will not. It is particularly important to retain local knowledge in areas such as the Clyde, where there will be much more shipping than there is at present.
Katy Clark
I thank my hon. Friend for his helpful intervention. In my constituency, a number of marinas have opened in recent years. We have the largest marina in Scotland in Largs. There has been a huge increase in the use of our seas for pleasure activities and sailing of all types, but with that come many inexperienced users, with whom coastguard station staff will find it more difficult to deal.
Submissions put together by the Clyde staff, with the assistance of Inverclyde council, contain costings for a site at Greenock. The lease at Greenock will expire in 2012, and a number of other local options have been costed. I should be grateful if the Minister would confirm that they will be considered. The Driving Standards Agency recently decided not to close its Cardiff office after the Public and Commercial Services Union was able to make proposals for a cheaper site, and I wonder whether a similarly open-minded approach will be adopted in this instance. Will the Minister ensure that the submissions from Clyde staff and Inverclyde council are given proper and careful consideration?
As I have said, it is far from clear what criteria were used for the proposals that were announced on 16 December. I hope the Minister agrees that it is only fair for there to be a transparent process, and for proper responses to be provided to questions such as those that I have asked today. The Clyde coastguard station has provided an excellent service, and I hope that once the Government have an opportunity to consider the issues in detail, they will decide to reconsider the proposals and keep it open.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)
It is a pleasure to respond to the debate initiated by the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark). It is one of many debates on the subject in which we have engaged in the last few months, and that is right and proper, because the Government are making a very important decision.
May I take the first opportunity that I have had to pay tribute to David Cairns, whose Inverness constituency contains the Clyde maritime co-ordination centre? He was very active in the campaign as it is now, but long before these proposals were made he had engaged considerably with the Maritime and Coastguard Agency and had visited the station on many occasions, particularly when the Ministry of Defence indicated that it was likely to withdraw the lease and that, in this respect, we would be homeless in that part of the world. His attitude to his constituents was exemplary, as was the way in which he conducted himself during our debates. He will be sorely missed by the House, and whoever replaces him—I understand that the writ for the by-election was moved today—will have a very large pair of shoes to fill.
Although I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing the debate—and I also congratulate the hon. Members who are present for sticking around when they could have disappeared this afternoon—I should point out that the consultation process has ended, even though we extended it considerably, and all representations from all parts of the coastguard community as well as from the public and colleagues in this House will be carefully considered.
All the information will be looked at, as will all the concerns. Let us take the costings, for instance. It is difficult for a coastguard representative or member of the Public and Commercial Services Union to work out the modelling costs. That will be undertaken by the Department, and we will publish all the consultation documents on the website. There are a lot of them, and we will publish them online because we do not want to chop down too many trees. We will also reopen the consultation for a very short time to allow for the Transport Committee report to be taken into account when we draw our conclusions. Finally, the Secretary of State has announced that we will make our announcement before the summer recess.
We realise how emotive this subject is. I come from an emergency service background, so I know very well how emotive issues involving the emergency services in general are. I am enormously proud to be an ex-fireman, and it is a great honour and privilege to be the Minister responsible for Her Majesty’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency and everything to do with it. The MCA is world-renowned. If my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) was not being so nice, I am sure she would want to tell me about the fantastic international work done at Falmouth on behalf of the coastguard nationally in this country.
But we are talking about a co-ordination centre, and we are in the position we are in today because a set of station cuts and closures were made over a series of years. I do not think anybody in the Chamber or in the country would claim that the current structure has any logic at all. I have gone around the country visiting stations, and my chief executive, Sir Alan Massey, has been to every single coastguard station during this process, and we have had some robust discussions; I had such a discussion when I was up by Liverpool. Everybody knew that these sorts of changes were coming down the line, however. The previous Government had the current proposals on their desk, and they have been discussed with the PCS for almost two years; I have a record of the dates when those meetings took place, and I myself met and held discussions with PCS representatives before these announcements were made.
We knew in advance, therefore, that we needed a reconfiguration of the coastguard service, so that we have the resilience, training and communication systems that are required, as well as a pay structure that is fit for the 21st century. Anybody who has visited a coastguard station in this country will know that one of the first subjects the staff talk about is pay and career, because £13,500 a year as a basic salary in an emergency service is unacceptable. That is one of the reasons why we are looking at this reconfiguration and realignment of the way the service works. That is a fact; this topic was discussed with me because there was a dispute that I inherited when I first became the responsible Minister, and which had been going on for several years. It is unacceptable that such a dispute went on for such a long time.
We must also look at the geography—at where the co-ordination centres are located. We are talking specifically about the Clyde today. The Clyde station is twinned. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran might be aware that each of the coastguard stations, apart from the Western Isles and Shetland, is twinned with another station so that they have some resilience. The Clyde station is twinned with Bangor in Northern Ireland, so if the systems go down in the Clyde and the local knowledge—which I accept is there—disappears, Northern Ireland will look after that coastguard area. I have visited Bangor and put the following point to its staff: if local knowledge is so important—and I accept that it does have importance—why are there such huge geographical distances between twinned co-ordination centres? Interestingly, in other parts of the country twins are ridiculously close, such as Brixham and Falmouth. That makes it very difficult to have a national co-ordination facility, and we do not have it; there is no national resilience within the coastguard service in the UK today. We need to look at that.
The very first visit that I made—I know I am going to repeat myself, but some of these comments need repeating—was to Liverpool, on 13 January. A robust and free debate took place, and I do not think I held much back; nor did some of the coastguard representatives, who included volunteers as well as full-time staff. Interestingly, during that debate—the hon. Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) was there—one of the senior members of uniformed staff said to me, “But Minister, we’ve been talking about nine co-ordination centres for years.” I said, “Please put that in writing—be part of the consultation.” I also went to Bangor, where a very detailed report was put in.
Bill Esterson
I remember the exchange about the nine co-ordination centres extremely well. It was an informal proposal put forward by members of staff there some years ago. It is important to put it on the record that they had suggested it to the agency at an earlier date.
Mike Penning
That is exactly the point I am trying to make: this has not come out of the blue. The coastguard representatives there, in front of the hon. Gentleman, me and everybody else assembled there, said that they had previously suggested having nine centres around the country. If the hon. Gentleman remembers, I said to them, “I’m talking about eight, you’re talking about nine. We’re not that far apart, are we?”
On 9 March, I visited Bangor, in the Province, where a detailed presentation and submission was put to me suggesting having 10 centres around the country. As I have said before, three types of submission have been made in this lengthy consultation process. One suggests that we should leave things alone, and that everything is okay. Another says, “Leave us alone”, without making any real comment about anybody else. Then, there are the really detailed submissions, such as that from Falmouth, which I also visited. They say, “We know there needs to be change—standing still is not an option. We’ve said that since day one, when we started the consultation, but actually, we think the figure for the country as a whole should be about 10.” There have also been discussions about how many national co-ordination centres, or maritime operations centres, there should be. The suggestion arising from the consultation is two; others have suggested one. I do not think anybody is suggesting that there should be none—at least, not in the detailed submissions. There is no national co-ordination at the moment, and I think everybody accepts it is needed.
We are proud of our extended coastline, and we should perhaps look at how other countries are dealing with their co-ordination centres. I must stress that this issue is purely to do with co-ordination—the wonderful volunteers who carry out the rescues, and the RNLI and others, are not affected. In fact, we are going to enhance those services by providing them with more investment and more full-time staff. So, naturally, when I first looked at our proposal, I examined how other countries with an extended coastline structure their co-ordination centres. I looked at other English-speaking countries that might have replicated our approach, and Australia, for instance, has one centre. Spain, I believe, also has one; Norway has two; France has seven. It is not feasible for us to stand still and say that what we have today, in this ad hoc procedure, is suitable going forward.
The consultation was put out and there were discussions with the PCS. These proposals, in one shape or form, have been around for about four years. Evidence was given to the Select Committee, and a letter was published in The Guardian only the other day from the former chief executive of the MCA, saying that Ministers had fudged this issue for years and it had not been addressed. We are determined to bring the coastguard service and the MCA into the 21st century—to have a fully resilient service with a pay and career structure that is fit for the service and its dedicated staff.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) for securing this debate. I very much welcome, as I am sure coastguards all around the UK do, the fact that this was a genuine consultation exercise. You have repeatedly said that the current proposals are not a done deal and the Secretary of State underlined that only a few weeks ago. It would be of enormous help to coastguards in Falmouth and all around the UK if you could share with us what is going to happen once your response to the consultation is published—you promised this before the recess. Will alternative proposals be introduced? If so, will they be further consulted upon?
Mr Speaker
I cannot share anything and I cannot offer any response, but I have a feeling that the Minister might.
Mike Penning
Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am sure that we understand exactly what my hon. Friend is trying to say to the House.
It is very important that we understand exactly what the Government’s position has been from day one. Of course I am going to be accused of doing U-turns, cartwheels and so on, but I said, and the Secretary of State said, that these proposals were not set in stone and that the consultation is a proper one. We said that we wanted everybody to be fully involved in the future of the coastguard service. I said from day one that what comes out the other end of this consultation process will not be what we go in with, but that we cannot end up with the status quo. The service has to modernise, it has to have proper resilience and it must be fit for the 21st century.
Katy Clark
I asked a number of questions about the criteria that were used. The Minister might not be able to give a response today, but will a response be given at the end of this process outlining the basis on which decisions are being made? It is not at all clear to those working in the coastguard service why particular stations have been chosen and others have not, so will the criteria be made publicly available?
Mike Penning
Of course. I was still responding to the intervention made by my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth and when I have finished dealing with it, I will discuss the points that the hon. Lady has raised. In that intervention, I was asked specifically what will happen later in the process. We will announce our proposals once we have taken into consideration the Select Committee’s report. That means that I will have to reopen the consultation, but I stress that that will be just to allow that report to be taken into consideration. If I did not do so, I would be insulting the Select Committee and there is no way I intend to do that. The Government will announce their conclusions before the summer recess—as we have said all the way through, they are likely to be different—and then I will reopen the consultation. That is the right and proper way to proceed if we want to work with the public, with the service and with Members of this House. It is different from the way in which a lot of consultations have historically been carried out over the years, but I do not think this will be a one-off; I think that the Government will take this approach on a regular basis. I recall a consultation on my local general hospital in which 85% of respondents said they did not want the hospital to close, yet it was closed in any case. No consideration was given to people’s concerns. Does this approach mean that everybody is going to be happy? No, of course it does not. However, proper consultation will take place again once we put forward our proposals.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
I apologise for arriving so late to the debate and I am grateful to the Minister for giving way. It would be very helpful if he gave a commitment at the start of that consultation to avoid compulsory redundancies at every stage in the process from there on in.
Mike Penning
I hope that there would not be compulsory redundancies, but I cannot give that commitment and I am not going to stand at this Dispatch Box and mislead people. The PCS has known that all the way through. It is important to understand that there will be job losses if we reduce the number of co-ordination centres, although I hope that such job losses will not be compulsory. I have gone through redundancy, despite my union fighting to help me, so I understand where people are coming from. However, if I am going to increase salaries, training and career prospects, I have to find that money from somewhere and that money will come from the savings we are finding. There are quite significant costs up front, particularly for the resilience we want to put into the system. The Treasury has been generous and I have money, but I cannot carry that forward—I must make savings. To be fair, the union—
Mike Penning
I want to clarify the point that the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned in her intervention, because if I am not careful I will not finish one intervention before I take another. I know we have a few hours, but everybody will understand if we do not speak for the whole time.
It is really important that we do not get bogged down by the fact about the Select Committee because, as anyone who has been a Minister knows, a civil servant cannot go before a Select Committee and criticise Government policy. That is not the protocol; it is not what happens. The job of a civil servant, if they go before a Select Committee, is to support Government policy. That is why civil servants at the grade of those we are talking about do not go before Select Committees. I took advice from the Cabinet Office and I ensured that we were in absolutely the right position. I bent over backwards to ensure that the Select Committee could go to any station it wished and talk to any member of staff, but I could not have uniformed staff criticising Government policy. They are fully entitled to fight through their union representatives for what they think is right, but a Select Committee is not the right and proper place to do that. Anybody who has served as a Minister knows that. We can go back through Westland if we want, and see those differences.
Dr Whiteford
I agree with the Minister that it is very important that we have a coastguard service that is fit for the 21st century, but I would put it to him that all the other emergency services in Scotland are devolved and one way to protect smaller stations, such as Inverclyde, might be to amend the Scotland Bill to devolve the operation of the coastguard agency in Scotland. That would mean that the services could properly address our vast coastline, in line with people’s expectations in Scotland.
Mike Penning
I do not want to disappoint the hon. Lady, but the Scottish National party has absolutely no chance of my breaking up a national emergency service such as this one. That will not happen. If we go down the avenue of saying that we can break up the service and that it can be operated in a completely independent little station, we will move completely away from the needs of the service. The service needs national resilience. If we do not have that, we are not offering the service that our constituents—including the hon. Lady’s constituents—deserve. It cannot happen.
When I visited the Western Isles, I saw that when the power goes down—I understand that it does so on a fairly regular basis—volunteers go up to the wireless towers on the hills and operate them manually. That is the situation we are in in the 21st century. There was a lightning strike at Falmouth and they luckily managed to keep going, but there is no proper resilience to lock in the service. In our part of the world, the police love the VHF system we operate because they operate on Airwave and although we use some of it we have a very good radio system. However, what we need is networking.
I am sure that the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran is aware that at Clyde we have a hub that comes into the existing building, but we cannot stay in that building. That is one reason for the decision. We have talked about costs, and of course costs are involved—there is no illusion about the fact that costs are involved and there would be significant costs if we had another station in Clyde that was not in that building. Even if we stayed in that building, there would be considerable costs, and we cannot do so, as the Ministry of Defence has decided that it wants to be gone from that building in Clyde by 2013. We will have to move from that building. There are significant costs that we will publish and put out there, but I am in the middle of the consultation and I will not jeopardise that. Judicial review or something similar could be pushed against me if I broke into the consultation in the middle of it. I am trying to be as open as possible.
Bill Esterson
I assume that the Minister has finished with the previous interventions. Let me make a few points about learning lessons regarding future consultations and advice. First, there is grave concern among coastguard officers that at one point he advised them that they could give evidence in public to the Select Committee.
Bill Esterson
Well, he will get his chance in a moment to answer my points, but that has categorically been stated by a number of coastguard officers. I think there is a lesson to learn there about the advice given by Ministers.
The other point is that we should listen to front-line staff when drawing up proposals on such important issues as these emergency services and we should include their ideas. The Minister mentioned what happened at Crosby when he visited: the ideas of those staff were not put into the consultation document and were not part of the proposal, and that is of concern to staff there.
Mr Speaker
We are extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman. The Minister is winding up the debate on the future of Greenock coastguard station.
Mike Penning
May I just place it on the record that I openly said at Crosby and as I went around the country that I wanted coastguards and the public to engage? I am quite careful about my words, even though I regularly speak without notes, as I am doing now, and I did not say that those staff could give evidence to the Select Committee in oral session, but I did say that they could submit written evidence. I also said that to the Chair of the Select Committee when I went before it last week in what was also an interesting session.
I have just been informed, a few moments ago, that there will be another Adjournment debate on this issue—on a slightly different subject very close to this one—for an hour and a half next Tuesday morning. It is key to this issue that we make sure that things are done correctly and I am willing to take into consideration all the submissions, but keeping the status quo is not an option. Nearly every detailed submission has accepted that and it was accepted by the previous Administration before I became the responsible Minister. I have been very impressed by the time and effort that many of the stations have taken not just to say, “Look after me, guv,” or “Protect me,” but to suggest what the service needs to look at and look like in the 21st century, and I pay tribute to everyone who has submitted evidence to the consultation. It will reopen just to allow the Select Committee report to be considered, and the Government will make an oral statement to the House before the summer recess on the future of the MCA.
Question put and agreed to.