House of Commons
Prayers
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Message to attend Her Majesty
Speaker’s Statement
Mr Speaker
The House has agreed that the Speaker should make a statement at the beginning of each Session about the duties and responsibilities of hon. Members. May I begin by reminding Members of the House’s code of conduct, which we recently agreed to in a revised form? All Members are under a duty to observe it in letter and in spirit. Members are answerable for their conduct in this place, not just to the House but to the public.
Our ancient privileges allow us to conduct our debate without fear of outside interference. Parliamentary privilege underpins proper democratic debate and scrutiny. It will be under renewed scrutiny over the next few months, with the Government’s consultation on the subject. In particular, we enjoy freedom of speech in Committee proceedings and in debate. Freedom of speech in debate is at the very heart of what we do here for our constituents, and it allows us to conduct our business without fear of outside interference. But it is a freedom that we need to exercise responsibly in the public interest and taking into account the interests of others outside this House.
It is also important that our constituents feel free to come to us no matter what the circumstances, and that they suffer no disadvantage as a result. Each hon. Member is here to represent the views of his or her constituents and to participate in the process of parliamentary democracy. We should ensure that every Member is heard courteously, regardless of the views that he or she is expressing. I and my Deputies seek to ensure that as many Members as possible can participate in our proceedings. That ambition will be greatly aided by brevity in questions, speeches and interventions by all hon. Members.
Every member of the public has a right to expect that his or her Member of Parliament will behave with civility, in the best traditions of fairness, with the highest level of probity and with integrity. We are also under an obligation to try to explain to our constituents how Parliament works. In this mission we are ably assisted by the staff of the House. House staff, who are vital in supporting the work of this House and who do so with dedication and courtesy, are likewise entitled to be treated with dignity, courtesy and respect.
Finally, I should like also to remind all hon. Members that the security of this building and those who work and visit here depends upon all of us. Please be vigilant and tell the Serjeant at Arms about any concerns you have on the subject. Wear your photo identity pass while you are on the parliamentary estate—this is particularly important over the next 24 hours, as there will be a number of police officers on duty, covering for absent security officers, who cannot be expected to recognise Members. Remember that you are responsible for the behaviour of your visitors and for ensuring that they are escorted in non-public areas of the estate.
Before moving to the first business of the new Session, I would like to express my very best wishes to all hon. Members and staff for the 2012-13 Session of Parliament.
Outlawries Bill
A Bill for the more effectual preventing Clandestine Outlawries was read the First time, and ordered to be read a Second time.
Queen’s Speech
Mr Speaker
I have to acquaint the House that this House has this day attended Her Majesty in the House of Peers, and that Her Majesty was pleased to make a Most Gracious Speech from the Throne to both Houses of Parliament, of which I have, for greater accuracy, obtained a copy.
I shall direct that the terms of the Gracious Speech be printed in the Votes and Proceedings. Copies are available in the Vote Office.
The Gracious Speech was as follows:
My Government’s legislative programme will focus on economic growth, justice and constitutional reform.
My Ministers’ first priority will be to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability.
Legislation will be introduced to reduce burdens on business by repealing unnecessary legislation and to limit state inspection of businesses.
My Government will introduce legislation to reform competition law to promote enterprise and fair markets.
My Government will introduce legislation to establish a Green Investment Bank.
Measures will be brought forward to further strengthen regulation of the financial services sector and implement the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Banking.
My Government will introduce legislation to establish an independent adjudicator to ensure supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers.
A Bill will be introduced to reduce burdens on charities, enabling them to claim additional payments on small donations.
My Government will propose reform of the electricity market to deliver secure, clean and affordable electricity and ensure prices are fair.
A draft Bill will be published to reform the water industry in England and Wales.
My Government will bring forward measures to modernise the pension system and reform the state pension, creating a fair, simple and sustainable foundation for private saving.
Legislation will be introduced to reform public service pensions in line with the recommendations of the independent commission on public service pensions.
A draft Bill will be published setting out measures to close the Audit Commission and establish new arrangements for the audit of local public bodies.
My Government will strive to improve the lives of children and families.
My Government will propose measures to improve provision for disabled children and children with special educational needs. New arrangements will be proposed to support children involved in family law cases, reform court processes for children in care and strengthen the role of the Children's Commissioner.
Measures will be proposed to make parental leave more flexible so both parents may share parenting responsibilities and balance work and family commitments.
A draft Bill will be published to modernise adult care and support in England.
My Government will continue to work with the fifteen other Commonwealth Realms to take forward reform of the rules governing succession to the Crown.
Legislation will be brought forward which will introduce individual registration of electors and improve the administration of elections.
A Bill will be brought forward to reform the composition of the House of Lords.
My Government will continue to work constructively and cooperatively with the devolved institutions.
Members of the House of Commons
Estimates for the public services will be laid before you.
My Lords and Members of the House of Commons
My Government is committed to reducing and preventing crime. A Bill will be introduced to establish the National Crime Agency to tackle the most serious and organised crime and strengthen border security. The courts and tribunals service will be reformed to increase efficiency, transparency and judicial diversity.
Legislation will be introduced to protect freedom of speech and reform the law of defamation.
My Government will introduce legislation to strengthen oversight of the security and intelligence agencies. This will also allow courts, through the limited use of closed proceedings, to hear a greater range of evidence in national security cases.
My Government intends to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data under strict safeguards to protect the public, subject to scrutiny of draft clauses.
My Government will seek the approval of Parliament relating to the agreed financial stability mechanism within the euro area.
My Government will seek the approval of Parliament on the anticipated accession of Croatia to the European Union.
My Government will work to support a secure and stable Afghanistan, to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation, including in Iran, and to bring greater stability to the Horn of Africa.
In the Middle East and North Africa, my Government will support the extension of political and economic freedom in countries in transition.
My Government has set out firm plans to spend nought point seven per cent of gross national income as official development assistance from 2013. This will be the first time the United Kingdom has met this agreed international commitment.
My Government will build strategic partnerships with the emerging powers.
The United Kingdom will assume the Presidency of the G8 in 2013: my Government will use this opportunity to promote international security and prosperity.
In the year of the Diamond Jubilee, Prince Philip and I will continue to take part in celebrations across the United Kingdom. The Prince of Wales and other members of my family are travelling widely to take part in festivities throughout the Commonwealth. Prince Philip and I look forward to the London Olympic and Paralympic Games and to welcoming visitors from around the world to London and venues throughout the country.
Other measures will be laid before you.
My Lords and Members of the House of Commons
I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.
Debate on the Address
(12 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Speaker
Before I call the mover and seconder, I want to announce the proposed pattern of debate during the remaining days on the Loyal Address: Thursday 10 May—home affairs and justice; Monday 14 May—business and the economy; Tuesday 15 May—foreign affairs and international development; Wednesday 16 May —cost of living; Thursday 17 May—jobs and growth.
Nadhim Zahawi (Stratford-on-Avon) (Con)
I beg to move,
That an humble Address be presented to Her Majesty, as follows:
Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in Parliament assembled, beg leave to offer our humble thanks to Your Majesty for the Gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament.
In this year of the Queen’s diamond jubilee, I am deeply honoured to move the Loyal Address. For six decades, Her Majesty has provided us with a peerless example of duty, dignity and service to the nation. And it was the subject of “peerlessness” that was immediately on my mind when I was called into the Chief Whip’s office last week. I really thought that he wanted to have a full and frank discussion with me on the reform of the other place. I ran to No. 9 Downing street, in the pouring rain, clutching my folder of briefing notes, while continuously repeating, “More effective, but not elected. More effective, but not elected.” I can announce to this House that having a small glass of water, without the biscuits, with the Chief Whip has allowed us to reach agreement; as our manifesto demanded, a consensus on this thorny issue has been reached.
It was only later that I remembered something important: the accepted convention is that this Address is usually delivered by an hon. Member of this House just as their illustrious career is starting to approach its expiry date—perhaps my right. hon. Friend the Prime Minister was gently hinting that I had a great future behind me. Equally, the Loyal Address is usually seconded by a young, ambitious, thrusting Back Bencher who is hungry for promotion, and it is in that spirit that I warmly congratulate the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), who has that happy role today.
Although I have rarely seen the Chamber this full, this will probably not be my most watched speech. Not many Back-Bench MPs can boast more than 130,000 downloads on YouTube, for a few lines uttered during an Opposition day debate. To any colleagues in the House seeking a wider audience for their speeches, my advice is: spend less time thinking about what you are going to say and more time thinking about what you are going to wear. I recommend a loud tie—preferably one with a soundtrack.
The last person to move this motion was my right hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Mr Lilley), and I seem to recall that he informed this House that he was able to trace his lineage back to the village of Lilley, which has existed in his constituency since Anglo-Saxon times. With a name like mine, I was never going to convince the voters of Stratford-on-Avon that my ancestors fought the Normans at the battle of Hastings. In fact, Stratford-on-Avon is a constituency in the heart of England, in the county of Warwickshire, that is 90% white. If I may say so, Mr Speaker, this is not a kaleidoscope county. But it is testament to the values of that constituency, and of this country, that it chose me as its representative, and it is on its behalf that I deliver this address.
During the election, I canvassed every one of Stratford-on-Avon’s 79 villages and hamlets, as well as its four principal towns. It became clear to me that people were not interested in my ethnicity, or in where I had gone to school. What they wanted to know was: was I on their side, and was I up to the job? For us politicians, and for this Government, those are the questions that really matter. Our different backgrounds were certainly a point of curiosity, but what made the difference was our shared values, and in that the people of Stratford represent the very best of modern Britain.
Mr Speaker, my family arrived on these shores with only £50 in their pockets—immigrants from a land in the grip of a cruel and murderous regime. This great country offered us the priceless gifts of freedom and opportunity, and the ultimate proof of that opportunity is that I can stand before you today as a Member of this, the oldest and greatest of all Parliaments.
Today, the task before us all is to spread that opportunity further. To do so, we must strengthen enterprise and deliver a more affordable state. It will not be easy. As my hon. Friend, and co-author, the Member for West Suffolk (Matthew Hancock) well knows, over the past decade or more our banks have been managed not by the masters of the universe, but by the masters of nothing. I am therefore pleased that the Gracious Speech has announced measures to implement the Vickers recommendations on banking reform. We should not make the mistake of thinking that this is merely a technical issue, of no interest to the public. It matters to people, because they want a fairer and stronger financial system, not one of cosy cartels and taxpayer bail-outs.
What is happening right now in the eurozone will matter, too. In Greece, hardliners and extremists are threatening to take over the political mainstream, but it is comforting that there are early signs of a reverse trend here in the UK. In Britain, extremists and hardliners are rejoining the mainstream. Only yesterday my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary issued a clarion call for the repatriation of powers from Brussels. After such a far-sighted and decisive intervention, by such a senior member of the Government, no one can say that this coalition is not working. But there is a serious point here. People at home watching the political mayhem in Europe would be utterly dismayed if we failed to maintain a strong and focused Government to deal with this crisis.
There is a real opportunity beyond the crisis, and I therefore welcome the Government’s commitment to build strategic partnerships with the emerging powers. Over the next 10 years the global economy is forecast to grow by $9 trillion—and $6 trillion of that growth will come from one country: China. In fact, China is growing so quickly that it creates an economy the size of Greece every three months. On current trends, we might have to revise that upwards.
In my own constituency, I see even small businesses grabbing hold of the opportunities that those huge numbers represent. Reforms that unleash the creative power of our small and medium-sized businesses are the best growth strategy that this country could possibly have.
In business, we soon learn that the world owes us nothing; historic ties, patient diplomacy, shared values and even shared language will not get us that contract unless we can also beat our rivals on quality, service and price. That is a lesson that we ignore at our peril. Yet there is one area in which the world does owe Britain—one field in which we remain both a net creditor and a leading exporter. It is more stable than finance and more enduring than oil. I am describing our extraordinary cultural industries. Indeed, as the Member for Stratford-on-Avon, I cannot proceed any further without a mention of William Shakespeare, my most famous former constituent.
Members of the House will doubtless be familiar with Shakespeare’s warning in Act I of “Hamlet”:
“Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion’d thought his act”—
valuable advice indeed for those of us who use Twitter, Mr Speaker.
The House will be aware of not only Shakespeare the playwright and poet, but Shakespeare the industry—another area in which our fame resounds across the world. When the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, visited Britain for two days last summer, one day was reserved for high-level strategic talks in Whitehall, but the other—at his own request—was spent with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford. The thought of one of the world’s most powerful men wearing special white gloves, so that he could handle a Shakespeare first edition with reverence, is a striking reminder of just how far our cultural reach extends. And the traffic is not just one-way; for the many Chinese visitors to Stratford, a park bench where Premier Wen took a short rest has become a major tourist attraction.
In summing up, I should say that it is Shakespeare the man who resonates with me the most. As well as creating great art, Shakespeare built a great business. Uniquely among Elizabethan playwrights, he owned a share in the theatre company for which he wrote. Like all good business owners, he invested in his company. In 1608, he helped to finance a second theatre in Blackfriars, just across the river from the more famous Globe. Lacking family connections, but possessed of a great grammar school education, his achievement is all the more remarkable.
As well as being the greatest writer in our language—in any language, I would say—there is no better embodiment of British values than this self-taught, self-made, and indeed self-created, man. He was a man who worked his utmost to put on earth and in our hearts a source of wealth that endures to this day. In fact, more than that, I would go as far as to say that the great bard was in his soul and actions a natural Tory. I commend the motion to the House.
Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD)
I am very privileged to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi); the House will be glad that he left his loud tie and accompanying soundtrack behind. But he did manage to make a powerful and entertaining speech. I remind him, however, that he and I would be considerably disadvantaged in our task today had we not been elected to this House. Law-makers should be held accountable to law-obeyers.
It is an honour to be asked to second the Loyal Address and a great surprise to be doing so. I realise I am the old guard following the young blood, but I hope that the kinder Members of the House might see a little wisdom tempering youthful exuberance. A great deal has changed in the 29 years since I entered the House, but some things do not change. I made my maiden speech in a Queen’s Speech debate on the health service. The Health Minister who replied was the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke), who has proved himself a survivor in Government, even if he is now more rounded and more mellow—even if we are talking only about his shoes and his figure.
I represent part of the north-east of Scotland, which is characterised by a dry, understated sense of humour. For the past 30 years, we have been entertained by a talented trio known as Scotland the What? and they invented a number of kooky characters, one of whom was the Member of Parliament for Aucherturra wi’ Clatt, which is a name that resonates across Gordon, if nowhere else; indeed, I think that you are looking at that hon. Member. Less salubrious was Councillor Swick, which means “swindle” in the local dialect. In one sketch, he plays a justice of the peace, and he instructs the procurator fiscal to bring in the first criminal. When he is told that the accused is innocent until proved guilty, he demands of the procurator fiscal, “Whose side are you on?” At the end of his presiding over the court, he concluded, “In my court, justice has not only to be done but has to be seen to be believed.”
The constituency of Gordon has changed a great deal. For a start, it has experienced four boundary changes. Nevertheless, the voters of Gordon have done me the honour of electing me seven times. Currently, one third of the population lives in the northern part of the city of Aberdeen, which includes the airport— the fastest-growing airport in the UK. That airport is crucial to our dynamic economy. We have two renowned universities and food and agricultural research centres of world repute, while Rowett research institute has produced no fewer than three Nobel laureates, and of course there is the global energy industry. Like most people in Gordon, I did not support the oil tax changes in last year’s Budget, but I appreciate the engagement with the industry by all relevant Ministers and Departments, which led to further tax measures in this year’s Budget that have gone a long way towards restoring confidence.
The other two thirds of the population of Gordon live in central Aberdeenshire—a productive farming and food producing region notable for prime beef promoted by ANM Group, Scotch Premier Meat, and innovative mail order pioneer Donald Russell. We also have quality ice cream makers Mackie, who also produce a range of crisps, and Rizza’s of Huntly, which is also the home of Dean’s, makers of melt-in-the-mouth shortbread and biscuits. [Interruption.] They did not pay me to say that, I promise. Many of those food producers, and our mixed livestock and arable farmers, will welcome the Bill to establish a groceries code adjudicator.
People often ask me where Gordon is. The trouble is that the constituency derives its name not from a place but from the Gordon family. Lady Aberdeen, June Gordon, who died in 2009 at the age of 95, was well beloved as a great patron of the arts at Haddo house. At an event shortly after my re-election in 1997, she told me that she was delighted that I had been re-elected given my small majority in 1983. “I was so concerned that you might not get back”, she said, “that I nearly voted for you.” The Gordon family have also produced one Prime Minister, the fourth Earl of Aberdeen, who led a Liberal-Conservative Government and included Palmerston and Gladstone in his Cabinet.
Of course, we are also famous for fine malt whisky. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] That is going down well at the back. One commentator described me as the Member for Gordon, the home of malt gin; and in fact it is the same Gordon family who were responsible for that most English of drinks—gin. We have some fine distilleries, including Glendronach, Ardmore and Glen Garioch, which won an award for the best Highland single malt this March—so go out and get it!
Scotland’s First Minister has stated that he will not wear a kilt in Scotland until independence has been achieved. Of all the economic, historical, legal, cultural and social arguments for rejecting independence, surely the most overwhelming must be to protect the people of Scotland from the sight of Alex Salmond in a kilt.
No Member on the Government Benches needs telling that this is a difficult time to be in government. We inherited an unsustainable level of public debt and a recession across developed economies. The coalition agreement took as its mantra “freedom, fairness and responsibility” and we must work harder on that.
In the two years since the first Queen’s Speech of this Parliament, a great deal of heavy lifting has been carried out. When there is no money left, it is impossible not to make painful decisions to turn around a huge debt and lay the foundations of a more sustainable future. However, I believe that we have strived hard to be fair. Raising the tax threshold to £9,205 a year by the end of this Session and increasing pensions and most benefits with inflation at a time of no growth is, I believe, an extraordinary achievement.
On the core agenda, the coalition has still much to do. This is not a time to be distracted by unproductive arguments between left and right or to deepen our divisions with the rest of Europe, whose problems profoundly affect us. There is more than enough that unites us.
Our reform agenda, far from being some right-wing conspiracy to destroy our welfare system and public services, is aimed at ensuring that we can maintain in the long term the viable, fair and inclusive welfare system on which our civilised society depends. For that to happen, we need to secure growth in the private sector. I therefore welcome the Government’s commitment to banking and financial services reform. Apart from restoring confidence in retail banking and preventing casino banking from bringing down our financial system again, we must find more ways to stimulate investment and bank lending to get the economy moving. I also welcome the commitment to electricity market reform and to getting the green investment bank and the green deal fully invested.
I have long argued that Governments tend to produce too much legislation, often to placate the “something must be done” school or cultivate the tabloids, and we know where that has led us. I therefore strongly welcome the repeal of statute law that will get rid of more than 200 unnecessary laws. However, I do not accept the argument that the economic crisis means we should set aside our commitment to political reform in the shape of the recall of MPs or the democratisation of our second Chamber, which has been deferred for nearly 100 years.
Twenty years ago, the Loyal Address was seconded by the current Secretary of State for International Development. I suppose that encouragingly demonstrates that seconding it can lead to greatness, but as the current Chair of the Select Committee on International Development, an honour I very much cherish, I am disappointed at the omission of legislation to enact the UK’s commitment to 0.7% of gross domestic product being provided for overseas development assistance. However, I recognise that legislation is not required for us to meet that commitment next year, and I very much welcome the fact that it was reinforced in the Queen’s Speech.
As chair of the all-party group on deafness, may I pay tribute to Jack Ashley following his passing? He was a great support and encouragement to me, and he was always courteous, charming and humorous. He will be missed by many, but especially by the deaf community.
It is 50 years ago this year that I joined the Liberal party and almost 29 years since I entered the House, so for all but the last two years I have been in opposition. The Leader of the Opposition is about to make his first reply to the debate on the Loyal Address. I know from experience that it is often easier to oppose, but the left in Europe is about to be tested on whether it has coherent and credible alternative policies. We need deficit reduction and growth. We are living through perhaps the most challenging times in living memory, but I came into politics to make a positive difference, to promote reform and to achieve a fairer, more liberal society. That remains my objective, and I commend the Loyal Address to the House.
Edward Miliband (Doncaster North) (Lab)
I am sure the whole House will wish to join me in paying tribute to those who have died in Afghanistan since we last met: Guardsman Michael Roland of 1st Battalion the Grenadier Guards, and Corporal Andrew Roberts and Private Ratu Silibaravi of 23 Pioneer Regiment, the Royal Logistics Corps. They all showed the utmost bravery, and our thoughts are with their family and friends. Let me also say from this House that we support our mission in Afghanistan and will also support the Prime Minister in the important efforts that he is making to secure a political settlement there for when our troops have left.
As is customary, I would also like to pay tribute to those Members who have died since the last Queen’s Speech. First, Alan Keen was hugely popular with Members of all parties. A football scout turned MP, he had faith in the power of sport and politics to change lives. He is missed sorely by his wife, Ann, and his family and friends.
I also pay tribute to David Cairns, who was able to enter the House only because the law was changed to allow a former Catholic priest to sit in Parliament. He was funny, warm and principled, and his death one year ago today was a tragedy particularly for his partner, Dermot, and his many, many friends.
In her diamond jubilee year, I would also like to pay tribute to Her Majesty the Queen. We are reminded yet again today of her tireless service to the people of this country, and we are all looking forward to the national celebrations later this year.
My understanding is that, by tradition, the Loyal Address is proposed by a rising star of the governing party, who is thrusting his way forward on to the rungs of the ministerial ladder. Hon. Members of all parties can therefore agree that there could be no better choice than the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi). He spoke eloquently, movingly and with confidence, and I congratulate him on his remarks.
I believe that the hon. Gentleman is the first Member of the House to have been born in Iraqi Kurdistan. He spoke about the people of Stratford-on-Avon and said that his background was not the issue. However, he said in an interview that I read:
“What Britain gave my family was freedom and opportunity…to my family they weren’t just words, they changed our whole life.”
He brings to the House a perspective that enriches us all.
The hon. Gentleman also has the distinction of being the founder of the polling company YouGov. Let me say that I have spent much of the past 18 months thinking that he has a lot to answer for. No doubt, after recent weeks, the Prime Minister feels the same.
I am used to seeing the hon. Gentleman as an enthusiastic Back Bencher—if I can put it like that—braying at me with particular vigour from a sedentary position during Prime Minister’s questions, so I am very happy to give him the endorsement he no doubt craves and recommend unequivocally that the Prime Minister give him ministerial preferment whenever the reshuffle comes. It would be his gain and mine.
I also congratulate the seconder of the Loyal Address, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce). He brought his years of distinguished service and wisdom to the job. He brings great skill and experience to the House, including, as he said, as an assiduous and enthusiastic Chairman of the International Development Committee. In doing research on his background, I got extremely excited when someone in my office turned up a biography from the internet, which stated:
“Malcolm Bruce also worked early in his career with Ozzy Osbourne and recently performed a Jimi Hendrix Birthday tribute.”
Sadly for me and for him, it turned out to be a different Malcolm Bruce.
However, the right hon. Gentleman continues to serve the Liberal Democrats in important ways, not least as their president in Scotland—I am sure he is very proud of that just now. No doubt he will play a crucial role in the inquest into that local election result in Edinburgh, where the Liberal Democrat candidate was beaten by a penguin. [Laughter.] Tory Members should not laugh too much because there are more pandas than Tory MPs in Scotland. I gently say to the right hon. Gentleman that he will have to do better than the explanation offered locally in Edinburgh that
“it wasn’t a target ward”.
The right hon. Gentleman has had a long and distinguished parliamentary career, which, under normal circumstances, would end up with service in the House of Lords, if it was not for his leader’s determination to abolish it. However, I pay tribute to him for his excellent speech.
On the Gracious Speech, first, let me say that we will work with the Government on the green investment bank, the defamation Bill and flexible parental leave, all of which sound remarkably like Labour ideas—because they are Labour ideas.
This is the speech that was supposed to be the Government’s answer to the clear message from the electorate last week, but on today’s evidence, they still do not get it. For a young person looking for work, this speech offers nothing; for a family whose living standards are being squeezed, this speech offers nothing; for the millions of people who think the Government are not on their side, this speech offers nothing. “No change, no hope” is the real message of this Queen’s Speech.
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor appear to believe that people are turning against them because they have not understood the Government’s economic policy, but the truth is that people have turned against them because they have understood it only too well. What did the Government promise two years ago? The Chancellor could not have been clearer in his emergency Budget, when he said there would be
“a steady and sustained economic recovery, with low inflation and falling unemployment…a new model of economic growth”.—[Official Report, 22 June 2010; Vol. 512, c. 168.]
What has he delivered? He has delivered the worst unemployment in 16 years, 1 million young people out of work and the first double-dip recession for 37 years. They promised recovery, but they delivered recession—a recession made in Downing street. They have failed.
As if a failing plan was not bad enough, the Government added insult to injury in the Budget, by making millions pay more so that millionaires could pay less. There is no change on that in the Queen’s Speech either. I say to the Prime Minister that he should listen to people such as Linda Pailing, the deputy chair of Harlow Conservative party, who said of her constituents:
“They don’t like the fact that he didn’t keep the 50p tax…people feel here that he is not working for them, he is working for his friends”.
She said these elections are
“to do with what Cameron and his cronies are doing”.
It comes to something when even lifelong Tories do not believe that this Prime Minister is on their side. Last Thursday, the British people delivered a damning verdict on the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and their economic strategy. The Prime Minister says he gets it, but if he really does, the first thing—[Interruption.] Government Members say, “What about London?”, which is interesting. What did the Mayor of London say? He said he had “survived” the wind,
“the rain, the BBC, the Budget and the endorsement of David Cameron”—[Laughter.]
I think they walked into that one.
Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman talks about the 50p tax, but I am slightly confused as to why he did not vote against the change when he had the opportunity to do so.
Edward Miliband
We had a whole amendment on that. I wish the hon. Gentleman, having listened to his constituents, had joined us in the Division Lobby to vote against the 50p tax change.
The Prime Minister says he gets it. If he really did get it, the first thing he would have done in this Queen’s Speech would have been to drop his tax cut for millionaires, but he has not done so. They are carrying on with a Finance Bill to put the 45p tax rate into law. Why are they doing that? Because they really believe that their problems are not those of policy, but those of public relations.
What did the part-time Chancellor say at the weekend? He said:
“I know the way the Budget was presented meant this message wasn’t heard.”
The Deputy Prime Minister said:
“An impression has formed that this was a budget for the rich”.
It is insights like that which got him where he is today.
The Government just do not get it. The problem is not the presentation of a tax cut for millionaires; it is the reality: £40,000 for every millionaire in Britain. It is not the presentation of cuts in tax credits; it is the reality. On the granny tax, the churches tax, the charities tax and the whole Budget omnishambles, it is not the presentation; it is the reality.
Edward Miliband
I will give way later.
Yes, the Government have a communication problem, as the Prime Minister said this morning: the problem is that the electorate have spoken, and they are not listening. But to solve his communication problem, the Prime Minister has a new way of explaining his policy. To the policeman or woman being fired, to the young people looking for work, to the small business going under, what was his message yesterday? He said:
“You call it austerity, I call it efficiency.”
Here it is from the Prime Minister, Cameron Direct, to hundreds of thousands of people being made redundant: “The bad news is you’ve lost your job. The good news is you’re a key part of our efficiency drive.” In two years, he has gone from David Cameron to David Brent. That is the reality.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
If the right hon. Gentleman is on the side of hard-working people, why does he oppose the benefit cap equivalent to a salary of £35,000 a year?
Edward Miliband
This is very interesting. I will tell the hon. Gentleman why we wanted it done a different way—[Hon. Members: “Ah!”] I will tell him. It is because the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government said, in a letter to his colleagues, that the way in which the benefit cap was done would cost more money, put more people into temporary accommodation and fail to solve the problem. The Government did not listen to advice because they wanted to grab a political headline—typical of this Prime Minister.
If the Government did not have the courage to reverse their Budget, they should have put an economy that works for working people at the centre of this Queen’s Speech, but they have not. Utility bills, water bills and the cost of getting to work are worrying families up and down the country—
Edward Miliband
Opposition Members should calm down: I will give way later.
What have the Government got to say about those issues? Absolutely nothing. The energy Bill has nothing to help people struggling to make ends meet. No legislation this year on water or on train fares—nothing to relieve the squeeze on ordinary families.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
I, too, am concerned about utility bills—we are all concerned about utility bills—but let me remind the right hon. Gentleman that when he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change he proposed the renewable heating initiative that would have put £193 on people’s bills. Why was that not in his alternative Queen’s Speech?
Edward Miliband
I will tell the hon. Gentleman what we did in government: we introduced the winter fuel allowance and took action on prepayment meters—far more than this Government have ever done.
Let us talk about those at the top of society, executive pay and multi-million pound bonuses—[Interruption.] It is very interesting that Conservative Members are groaning about that, because a few months ago, the Prime Minister said that he was outraged about crony capitalism. He told us that he was grossly offended by it and that it was not what he believed in. Such was his strength of feeling that in the entire Queen’s Speech, the issue did not merit a single mention.
I have a suggestion for the Prime Minister. He should accept the recommendation of the High Pay Commission to put an ordinary worker on the remuneration committee of every company in Britain. I say, “If you can’t look one of your employees in the eye to justify that you’re worth it, then you shouldn’t be getting the salary.” Come to think of it, why not start with the Government? I have the ideal candidate to be the employee on the board judging the Cabinet. She stands ready to serve—the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries). Let us remind ourselves why she is so well qualified. She said:
“They are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to understand the lives of others.”
She is only saying what so many people are thinking: it is high time the shareholder spring came to the Conservative party.
On the economy, on living standards, and on executive pay—
Louise Mensch (Corby) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman is coming on to the economy, so, since the shadow Chancellor cannot enlighten us, will he tell the House how he is coming along with costing his economic programme?
Edward Miliband
I am glad that the hon. Lady intervened, because this is what she said about the election results:
“As Conservatives, we have to learn lessons…In the spirit of non-spin, my benchmark for Labour was 700 seats”.
I think we slightly outperformed her expectations.
Edward Miliband
I have been generous in giving way.
On all the major issues, the Government have shown that they are out of touch. If we need any further proof, let us consider what they have done on crime—taking police off the streets with 20% cuts and stripping back powers on antisocial behaviour.
Let me turn to one of the biggest omissions in the Queen’s Speech. There is no bigger challenge facing families up and down the country than care for elderly relatives, and there was no clearer promise from the Government than that they would legislate on it. [Interruption.] I know Government Members do not want to talk about what is happening in the Government, but in their foreword to the health White Paper, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister said that there would be
“legislation in the second session of this parliament to establish a sustainable legal and financial framework for adult social care”.
Instead, we have nothing. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister says there is a draft Bill, but he said he would legislate in this Session, and he has failed to do so. They have totally failed to do so. There was a clear promise. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister should calm down. They promised a Bill on social care, but they chose not to include one.
There is room in the Queen’s Speech for House of Lords reform, however. I am a supporter of House of Lords reform and a referendum, but I thought that a Queen’s Speech was supposed to define a Government’s priorities. So there is a mystery that the Prime Minister needs to explain in his reply. Over the weekend, the Chancellor said that House of Lords reform
“is certainly not my priority, it is not the priority of the Government.”
So it is not the Conservative party’s priority. But the mystery deepens, because the Deputy Prime Minister said yesterday that there were many, many other things he cared far more about. So apparently it is not his priority either. [Interruption.] Government Members ask if it is our priority. No, it is not. I am bound to ask, though: if it is not a priority, how on earth did it end up in the Queen’s Speech? I thought the Queen’s Speech was supposed to define the priorities for the Government’s legislative programme. Why is it in there? How did it get into the speech?
What about the things that did not make it into the Queen’s Speech? How about the manifesto promise—the Prime Minister’s detoxification promise—to enshrine in law spending 0.7% of national income on aid. [Interruption.] They are not putting it in law. [Interruption.] The Prime Minister keeps saying he is doing it, when all he is doing is publishing draft Bills. And what has happened to something that used to be a big priority for the Prime Minister? He said in 2010 that lobbying was
“the next big scandal waiting to happen.”
He was right. It did happen—to him: Adam Werritty, whose lobbying caused the downfall of the Defence Secretary; Peter Cruddas, Tory party treasurer, offering Downing street dinners to donors; and Fred Michel and the 163 pages of e-mails. Three lobbying scandals, but no Bill.
Last week, the Prime Minister applied to have prior access to the evidence of Leveson as a core participant. I have to say that he is one of the few people left who did not already think he was a core participant in the whole News Corporation scandal: he hired the editor, he sent the texts, he even rode the horse, and his Culture Secretary backed the bid. It does not get much more core than that. This is not just a Westminster story because it shows whose side the Prime Minister is on. What did he say to Rebekah Brooks after she was forced to resign following revelations that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked? We learn from the newspapers that he said:
“Sorry I couldn’t have been as loyal to you as you have been to me.”
That goes to the very heart of the problem with this Government and this Prime Minister: they stand up for the wrong people. Two years ago in the rose garden they promised change. Yesterday in the tractor factory all they could offer was more of the same. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister: two leaders out of touch with the country, out of touch even with their own parties, locked together not on principle or policy but in determination to hang on to office for another three years. So halfway through this Government and particularly after last Thursday, is it not time that the Government stopped governing for the few and started listening to the many?
The Prime Minister (Mr David Cameron)
Let me begin, as the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) did, by paying tribute to those servicemen who have tragically lost their lives in Afghanistan: Guardsman Michael Roland of 1st Battalion the Grenadier Guards, and Corporal Andrew Roberts and Private Ratu Silibaravi of 23 Pioneer Regiment, the Royal Logistic Corps. They acted heroically and died serving their country, and we must always honour their memory.
We have just finished the longest Session of Parliament for more than 100 years, and I am proud to say that in that Session we brought down the deficit, capped welfare, scrapped ID cards, introduced free schools, accelerated academies, brought in the pupil premium, binned the jobs tax, raised the personal allowance and froze the council tax. That was just the start of clearing up the mess left by the Labour party and demonstrating that this will be a Government on the side of people who work hard and do the right thing.
Let me say something that I hope will unite hon. Members on both sides of the House. The last Session of Parliament also made an impact not just at home but around the world. We fed more than 2.5 million people facing famine and starvation, we supported over 5.5 million children to go to school in the poorest countries of our world and we immunised a child against diseases every 2.5 seconds of the last parliamentary Session. And, yes, it was in the last Session that Parliament stood up to Colonel Gaddafi, backed the action that stopped him slaughtering his own people and showed once again that when it comes to the cause of democracy, all sides of this Parliament can unite in defence of freedom.
As the Leader of the Opposition said, during the last parliamentary Session we also lost two much-respected and hard-working Members of the House. David Cairns gave up his first vocation as a Catholic priest for his second, which was to serve his constituents and sit on these Benches. He was an exceptionally kind man whose quick wit enlivened our debates, and I know that he is widely missed. Alan Keen served in this House for almost two decades and made many firm friendships on all sides of the House. He was passionate about the way in which sport can change young people’s lives, and his leadership of the all-party parliamentary football group is remembered with much affection. I am sure that he will be looking down at the incredible months of sport that lie ahead over the next few months. Both Members represented the very best of this House.
I also think that the Leader of the Opposition was right to pay tribute in his remarks to Her Majesty the Queen. It is one of the greatest privileges of this job to see Her Majesty every week to discuss what has happened here and across the world. In terms of service and dedication to our nation, she quite simply has no equal.
Let me turn now to the proposer of the Gracious Speech. When the Chief Whip phoned me and told me his suggestion for the role, it came as a bit of a shock. It was a slightly bad line, and I thought that he had said, “I’ve asked Nadine to do it.” Although I am always ready to take it on the chin, there was a slight sense of relief when he explained that he was talking about my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) rather than my hon. and close Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries).
In the past, there has been a tradition that the proposer should be a shy and retiring type—the type who keeps their head down, gets on with the job and loathes the limelight. I am pleased to say that, on this occasion, that tradition has been well and truly broken. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon told us, he has a remarkable story. In the 1970s, his family fled Iraq and the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, arriving at Heathrow with literally only the bags they carried and the clothes on their backs. But they picked themselves up and made an incredible future in this country. My hon. Friend put himself through university, built a business from scratch and in just one generation has made it here to Parliament. There is such a thing as the British dream, and he embodies it.
My hon. Friend’s name has, at times, caused confusion. As a new Member of Parliament, he was invited to a dinner in honour of a delegation from Iraq, and was seated next to my predecessor but one in Witney, the former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. During the main course, Lord Hurd turned to him and asked, “So, Mr Zahawi, what do you do?” My hon. Friend replied, “I’m a Member of Parliament,” to which Lord Hurd inquired, “And which constituency in Iraq do you represent?” Not surprisingly, my hon. Friend replied, “Stratford-on-Avon.” His speech was in the finest traditions of the House—witty, wise, entertaining and erudite. I praise him for what he said.
Let me turn to the seconder of the Gracious Speech. Again, when I was told the name, I was not too sure. The first things I heard were “Scottish MP” and “Gordon”—I see some nervous looks on the Opposition Front Bench, too. I refer to one of the House’s most distinguished Members, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) who, as a Liberal Democrat, takes very seriously the motto inspired by his namesake Robert the Bruce: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”—although as he told us in his case he has tried and succeeded in no fewer than seven general elections. He lives in a charming constituency dotted with the finest whisky distilleries. I want to be absolutely clear that when he was shadow Treasury spokesman and frequently advocated extraordinary cuts in whisky duty at each and every Budget, he was speaking wholly in the national interest.
From my researches, I can tell the Whips something else, which I hope they realise: my right hon. Friend does not always respond well when people do him a favour. He asked—and the request was granted—the right hon. Member for Ross, Skye and Lochaber (Mr Kennedy) to be best man at his wedding in 1998, and a year later he stood against him for leadership of the Liberal Democrat party. As the Leader of the Opposition can testify, things can get worse—you could, of course, be brothers. My right hon. Friend has been forthright in his views: he has been a powerful voice for the disabled and a passionate advocate of foreign aid. I hear absolutely what he says about a Bill for 0.7% of GDP on aid, but what I would say is that what matters most of all is that we reach the target in terms of the money spent.
Both speeches were in the very best traditions of this House, and I pay tribute to the people who gave them.
The Gracious Speech sets out our foreign policy priorities, and the first of these is, of course, Afghanistan. Let me be clear: our troops will no longer be in a combat role beyond the end of 2014. That is our deadline and I will not waver from it.
Mr Denis MacShane (Rotherham) (Lab)
The Prime Minister generously rolled out the red carpet for Mr Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the candidate of his sister party in Poland who was badly defeated. In February, the Prime Minister endorsed Mr Sarkozy, who was defeated on Sunday. Will the Prime Minister, from this Dispatch Box, endorse Governor Mitt Romney—and thus ensure that the curse of Cameron gets President Obama re-elected?
The Prime Minister
If the right hon. Gentleman is not careful, I might endorse him. When the Conservatives take Rotherham, modernisation will be complete.
Let me tell the House that by the middle of next year British forces will have shifted their focus from combat to support in all three of the districts of Helmand for which we are responsible: Lashkar Gah, Nad Ali and Nahri Sarraj. So the Afghans will have lead responsibility for security a full year before our troops leave their combat role. When we came to that country, there was no one to hand over to—no proper army, no proper police force. Today we have built up the Afghan national security forces and we are on track and on target for them to take over full security responsibility.
From the outset, our approach has been hard-headed and strategic, overseen in detail by the new National Security Council I established on my first day in office. The role of that council is to ask which areas of the world pose the greatest threat to Britain. Just last week, we were advised that the most immediate international terrorist threat to our country now comes not from Afghanistan, but from Yemen—and that is clearly confirmed by the news from the US yesterday.
Andrew Selous
Does the Prime Minister agree that, given the details of the Yemen plane bomb plot, we need to expand the range of measures available to us to combat terrorism, while also protecting our historic freedoms?
The Prime Minister
I do agree with my hon. Friend about that. Perhaps we will come on to discuss what is difficult and contentious legislation on data communications; I know this will be debated and there will be draft clauses. The point I make to the House is that what we are trying to do here is not to look at the content of people’s telephone calls, but to update the necessary measures for finding out who called whom and when, because it is that information that has solved almost every serious crime and certainly almost every serious terrorist offence.
I say to people, let us of course look at the detail, let us of course consult, but I do not want to be the Prime Minister standing at this Dispatch Box saying “I could have done more to prevent terrorist acts, but we did not have the courage to take difficult steps”. Imagine, for a minute, what would have happened if, when mobile phones came along, the House had simply said “No, we will stick to data communications on fixed-line phones; we will not touch mobile phones”. If we had done that, there would be many, many unsolved cases in comparison with what we have experienced.
The Prime Minister
I am happy to give way to my right hon. Friend. [Interruption.]
Keith Vaz
I am most grateful to the Prime Minister for giving way, and I am glad that he has kept the focus on Yemen. In the context of what has happened this week, will he confirm that both London and Washington will be supporting the new Government of Yemen? The front line against terrorism is not our country, but Sana’a and Aden, and without that practical support we cannot defeat al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.
The Prime Minister
The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right, and we are supporting the new Government in Yemen. We are helping them with their transition, we are helping to build up the Yemeni security forces, and we are supporting the development of more effective state institutions. That is absolutely vital work. We will also remain focused on the challenges in Iran and Syria. These are the critical months during which the world must deal with the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. While we take nothing off the table, we have specifically said to Israel, both publicly and privately, that the option of further pressure and further sanctions on the regime is the right way forward. We have led the imposition of an EU oil embargo, which many believed would not be possible, and we are ready to negotiate in good faith.
I know that everyone in the House is appalled by the violence that is taking place in Syria and frustrated that we cannot do more to stop it, but I believe that the Annan plan of getting more observers in to stop the killing is the right answer. Today there are just 60 observers in a country more than 70,000 square miles in size. We are working with our allies, including the Turks and the Arab League, to get hundreds more into that country to stop the bloodshed.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
The Prime Minister talks of threats to our national security. In that context, can he explain why, given the urgency of the climate crisis that faces us, the Queen’s Speech contains nothing to deal with it except provision for a green investment bank that will still not be able to borrow, and a Bill that is likely to lock us into high-cost, high-carbon gas production? Is it because he does not want to show climate leadership, or because he has been overruled by his Chancellor?
The Prime Minister
I am a bit disappointed by what the hon. Lady has said, because the green investment bank has £3 billion to spend on green investments. This is the sort of proposal that has been included in Labour manifestos, Conservative manifestos and Liberal Democrat manifestos for years. Now we are delivering it on the ground, and that will make a difference.
We should always, in this country, stand on the side of freedom, and we should remember that it is 30 years since our taskforce landed on the Falkland Islands to defend the islanders’ right to remain British. I am sure that the House will join me in paying tribute to the 255 British servicemen who gave their lives in the defence of freedom. Three decades have not dimmed our memories of their bravery, nor have they dimmed this country’s resolve. Make no mistake: for as long as the people of the Falkland Islands wish to remain British, that is exactly how it will be.
Let me say exactly what this Queen’s Speech is about. It is about a Government making the tough, long-term decisions to restore our country to strength—dealing with the deficit, rebalancing the economy, and building a society that rewards people who work hard and do the right thing.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
The Prime Minister will be aware that the Minister for Immigration said last week, in the wake of the election results, that the Government must start to demonstrate more competence. Was the Prime Minister disappointed to discover yesterday that the Deputy Prime Minister does not understand the difference between the debt and the deficit?
The Prime Minister
What the Deputy Prime Minister said yesterday, and what I said yesterday, is that we inherited a deficit that was bigger than the deficits of Greece, Spain or Portugal. What we have had to do is deal with that deficit, deal with the debt, and get our country moving again. We are recovering from the mess that the hon. Gentleman’s party left.
We are reforming welfare so that it pays to have a job, but we want to do more to reward responsibility. We are lifting 2 million people out of tax, but we want to go further to help Britain’s strivers. We have introduced free schools and created more than 1,000 academies, but we want to do more to spread opportunity. That is what this Queen’s Speech is about.
Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)
I am sure that the Prime Minister listened as carefully as I did to the speech of the Leader of the Opposition. Did he detect anything resembling a solution to the problems that the country faces?
The Prime Minister
I listened very carefully. There was almost nothing in terms of a costed, credible alternative. The Opposition have now had two years to work out what their alternative is, and we heard absolutely nothing apart from a string of press releases put together, which we have all read over the last few weeks.
Mr Dave Watts (St Helens North) (Lab)
Can the Prime Minister explain to the nation why he is pursuing economic policies that have led to a double-dip recession and have frozen every inch of growth out of the economy?
The Prime Minister
As I have said, we have been dealing with an economy that had the biggest boom and bust in our banks, the biggest deficit in Europe and the longest and deepest recession in anyone’s memory. What we have to do is get our economy to rebalance, and I will explain exactly how the Queen’s Speech is going to help, because it is a Queen’s Speech for the doers, the strivers and those who work hard and play by the rules.
On cutting the Budget deficit, all across Europe the countries being hit are the ones that do not have proper plans in place. In the last Session, we cut the nation’s overdraft—the gap between what we receive in tax and what we spend—by £30 billion. With this Queen’s Speech we continue that work with, for instance, the vital public service pensions Bill. Not only does that offer guaranteed pensions that are still more generous than those in the private sector, but it saves tens of billions of pounds over the coming decades. Through this Queen’s Speech we are also making sure the UK is taken out of the eurozone bail-out fund. We are not in the euro, we are not joining the euro, so we should not be bailing out the euro.
The reason why we are doing these things on the deficit is simple: we want to keep interest rates down for hard-working families up and down the country. Let us be clear: higher interest rates would mean higher mortgages, lower employment and more of people’s money, which they have worked so hard to get, wasted by being spent on interest on our national debt. Two years ago, Britain had exactly the same interest rates as Spain; today, its interest rates were touching 6% and ours were below 2%. That is because we have a credible plan to get the country out of the mess it was left in by the last Government.
Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)
I am very appreciative of the Prime Minister’s words today. On the issue of Lords reform, the Government have made long and strenuous efforts, including through a draft Bill, a White Paper and a Joint Committee. Does the Prime Minister share my view that since a consensus has not proved to be available, Lords reform cannot be a priority now, and does he also share my view that any measures presented to this House should be put to the people in a referendum?
The Prime Minister
First, let me make this point, answering also the Leader of the Opposition: reforming the House of Lords is not the most important priority for the Government—that is dealing with the deficit, getting our economy moving, increasing the level of responsibility in our society and getting on the side of hard-working people. Those are the things that matter the most, but I think it is perfectly possible for Parliament to do more than two things at the same time. At the last election, all political parties put forward in their manifestos proposals for a partly, or mainly, elected House of Lords, but let me say this: this is only going to proceed if the political parties will agree to work together and take a responsible attitude towards this reform. I think it is possible, and it would be a good reform if we could achieve it; it would be better if we had a smaller House of Lords and if it had an elected element. So I ask people to work together across party lines to try to make that happen.
Sir Stuart Bell (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
The Prime Minister referred to the deficit in Europe, and he will recall that he declined to sign the fiscal compact entered into by 25 of the 27 EU member states. I presume he will go to the conference on 23 May with his fellow leaders in Europe, who will begin working on a growth compact. Will he be prepared to sign that?
The Prime Minister
I want to work with everyone in Europe to try to deliver better policies for growth. That is why we have been saying, “Let’s complete the single market in energy; let’s finish the single market in services; let’s complete the single market in digital.” Those are the things we are putting on the table. Britain is not in the euro, so we are not bound by the terms of the fiscal pact; I have made that very clear.
The Prime Minister
I will give way in a moment, but I want to make one point about the Leader of the Opposition’s response. They have had two years to work out what their answer is. What is their answer to too much borrowing, too much spending and too much debt? Their answer is more borrowing, more spending and more debt. Because the right hon. Gentleman did not mention his alternative Queen’s Speech, let me go straight to its centrepiece. The centrepiece of the alternative Queen’s Speech is, I believe, a bonus tax to pay for a jobs fund. Never mind that the last Chancellor in the Labour Government said that a bonus tax would not work; let us look at the detail. The deputy leader of the Labour party was asked in a big set-piece interview how much money that would raise, and this was her response:
“I haven’t got quite the, er, er, I know that we have worked out that figure. I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
She went on to say:
“I haven’t got that actual figure to hand but I can absolutely assure you that Ed Balls has”.
Ah—[Interruption.] The plot thickens. The shadow Chancellor was interviewed this weekend—I know, I need to get out more—and he said that he was sorry, but
“I have not costed the whole programme”.
So there we have it. We have a deputy leader who does not have a clue and a shadow Chancellor who does not have the figures, and I can tell the House why: they have spent their bonus tax 10 times over. They have used it to reverse the VAT increase, to reverse the child benefit change, to reverse the tax credits change, to boost the regional growth fund, to boost capital spending and even to turn empty shops into community centres. They have no idea whatsoever about how to deal with this deficit. They give in to every single interest group—it is the bank tax that likes to say yes from the Front Benchers who cannot say no.
Mr Jack Straw (Blackburn) (Lab)
May I take the Prime Minister back to what he said about reform of the House of Lords? As someone who spent four years working very co-operatively with his colleagues and the Liberal Democrats to find a solution, I say to him that it is palpable that each party is divided on the issue and work between the Front Benchers will not resolve it. It is right in principle that the British people should decide, and that would also avoid a train wreck in the business of this House. Will the Prime Minister look carefully and positively at the idea of having a pre-legislative referendum on reform of the Lords?
The Prime Minister
I very much respect the work—often painstaking, careful and difficult—that the right hon. Gentleman did in a range of different roles to try to move House of Lords reform on. He is absolutely right that all parties are divided on this matter—we should be frank about that—so we will only achieve reform if people work together. I do not believe that a pre-legislative referendum is a good move. On the whole, that is a weapon that has been used by slightly unsavoury regimes over the years. On the question of a referendum more generally, I will merely say that every political party went into the election with a pledge to reform the House of Lords so I do not personally see a referendum as having much to recommend it. The House of Commons can discuss this matter and the House of Commons must decide. If we are going to achieve reform, we will have to work together across the parties to try to deliver what I think will be progress for our constitution—a reformed and smaller House of Lords.
Mr Tom Clarke (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (Lab)
The Prime Minister might be aware that I was one of those who, since last July, served on the Joint Committee that considered the future of the House of Lords. We were not given any indication of the Government’s thinking on funding or costing. Can he tell us today what costing has taken place on the proposal in the Queen’s Speech and will he share that with the House?
The Prime Minister
Certainly, the cost of a stand-alone referendum would be significant and it is worth taking that into account.
Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)
Will the Prime Minister take it from me, after a lot of canvassing last week, that many people in this country are astounded that in the Queen’s Speech there is nothing about youth unemployment or providing jobs, no higher education Bill and nothing to address the large number of unemployed graduates we now have in this country?
The Prime Minister
The youth contract, which is going to do enormous amounts on youth unemployment, started last month. We achieved 450,000 apprenticeships last year. The Work programme is well under way now, helping half a million people, and it is the biggest back-to-work programme in this country since the 1930s.
Let me explain that there are a number of important measures in this Queen’s Speech to promote growth and jobs. As well as the Work programme and the youth contract, we have the national loan guarantee scheme, with £20 billion to get cheaper loans flowing to small businesses. The most important work of the Government is implementing all those schemes and programmes, but we must do more to rebalance our economy. It is clear what went wrong. The public sector grew too large, our economy became unbalanced between north and south and we ended up too dependent on financial services. So we know what we need to do as a country. We must revive the private sector, spread growth and jobs across the country and make sure that financial services truly serve the economy—not the other way around.
To expand the private sector we need to cut the burdens on business and make it easier for employers to take people on. That is in our enterprise Bill. To make the most of growth in the energy sector, including gas, nuclear and renewables, we need to reform the energy market, and that is what the energy Bill will do. To make the most of green investment, we need to legislate properly for the green investment bank, with £3 billion of money in its coffers. That will be done through the measures announced in the Queen’s Speech as well.
Another key issue is the need to clean up the financial system, and I have to say to the shadow Chancellor, who sat and did nothing while the financial sector melted down, that he ought to focus on this part of the Queen’s Speech. As the Governor of the Bank of England said last week, there are three vital steps to take, and we will be taking all of them: proper regulation at last by the Bank of England, the banks being made to hold enough capital to keep them safe, and a regime that means that if they do fail they can fail without the taxpayer picking up the bill. Those are all things that the shadow Chancellor never did when he was the City Minister.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
The right hon. Gentleman talks about supporting small and medium-sized businesses, but the loan guarantee scheme is a very small drop in the ocean, because the banks simply will not lend to small businesses in my constituency. If they will not lend at the current percentages, they will not lend at lower percentages. That is the problem. When will he wake up to the fact that Operation Merlin did not wave a magic wand and did not work?
The Prime Minister
I make two points to the hon. Lady. First, she may not believe that the national loan guarantee scheme is big enough, but it is £20 billion of lending. That is far bigger than anything contemplated by the previous Government. Secondly, the Merlin agreement did secure additional lending to big and small businesses; lending went up. As ever, the shadow Chancellor is wrong.
As well as introducing vital measures such as banking reform and the Financial Services Bill, the Government’s mission is to help families who work hard and do the right thing. We have cut fuel duty and frozen council tax and we are lifting 2 million people out of tax. In the coming months people will see more. There will be a benefit cap so that people cannot get more on benefits than the average family earns; there will be higher tax thresholds so that hard-working families keep more of their money; and our pensions Bill, announced in the Queen’s Speech, is set to deliver a £140 basic state pension that will massively reduce means-testing and reward those who work hard and save hard all their lives.
Brandon Lewis (Great Yarmouth) (Con)
Was the Prime Minister as disappointed as I was that the Leader of the Opposition again refused to support the benefits cap, which is already at a level above the average wage of people in Great Yarmouth who work hard? Will my right hon. Friend confirm that the Government will continue to make sure that it will always pay to work?
The Prime Minister
I have to say that this was about the only interesting point in the Leader of the Opposition’s speech. When he is asked very clearly whether he supports a benefit cap and whether he thinks it is right that people can get more than £26,000 a year on benefits, his answer is that it is just fine—carry on claiming. That is Labour’s message to the hard-working people of this country.
As the Leader of the Opposition covered so little of the detail, for the benefit of the House I want to run through some of the Bills in the Queen’s Speech and the steps we are taking. One thing we are doing is helping the most vulnerable of all in our society—children who do not have a family, who are stuck in the care system and who, in too many cases, have been left there for too long. That is why we are legislating on adoption, as set out in this Gracious Speech. We are going to publish detailed information on how councils perform, setting clear time limits for cases to get through the courts and making it illegal to turn down an adoptive family on the basis of race. We say it is time to end the patronising, politically correct prejudice that says that black parents cannot bring up white children and that white parents cannot bring up black children. It is time to make the system colour blind.
Mr Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)
Given the recent scandals that have engulfed the Government, why is a lobbying Bill not included in the Queen’s Speech?
The Prime Minister
The hon. Gentleman’s party had 13 years to produce a register of lobbyists. We have now published our proposals for a register of lobbyists and we will legislate for a register of lobbyists. [Interruption.] I hate to add to hon. Members’ misery, but we have a Queen’s Speech for the 2012-13 Session that is packed with great Bills and we will have one for the 2013-14 Session that is packed with great Bills. We will also have one for the 2014-15 Session that is packed with great Bills, and when we have beaten the rabble in opposition at the next election, we will have another one all over again.
Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)
Another group of vulnerable people are the 800,000 who struggle without care and the millions of over-burdened carers. They will be disappointed if not angry that there is no Bill in this Session, as promised, to legislate for a new financial framework, so they will have to struggle on. What does the Prime Minister say to those vulnerable people?
The Prime Minister
It is vital that we take action on social care. That is why there are proposals for a draft Bill in the Queen’s Speech. It is something that has been getting worse for decade. The previous Government had 13 years to deal with the issue and they did absolutely nothing. Within two years, we are producing proposals and a draft Bill, and taking action.
Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is essential that we have all-party support for this critically important issue? It is essential to have a draft Bill so that we do the hard work in this Parliament to make sure that we can legislate for carers in our country.
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Genuinely to crack the issue, which has dogged Governments for decades, we will need cross-party working to deliver the social care changes we need.
Let me turn to some of the crime measures, as they are extremely important. The police do a fantastic job, and we should pay tribute to their work, but we need to accept that there are some crimes that our existing police forces cannot deal with on their own: the cyber-attacks that threaten our national security, the organised gangs supplying drugs to children on the streets and the massive industry of human trafficking. Today, we have seen the horrific case in Rochdale of children being groomed for sex—modern-day slavery in our own country. That is why we need a national crime agency—a British FBI, if you like—and with this Queen’s Speech we will deliver it.
I want to see tough community sentences that are a real punishment, and we shall be legislating for them as well. Without such measures, we will never convince the police, the courts or the public that these sentences are proper alternatives to prison.
Steve Rotheram (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)
The Prime Minister has mentioned a couple of doubles today. He quite rightly referred to the mover and the seconder of the speech; there was also the double-dip recession.
In 1970, Lynn Anderson sang about promises in a rose garden:
“Smile for a while and let’s be jolly
Love shouldn’t be so melancholy
Come along and share the good times while we can.”
Given that the Prime Minister and his Deputy made promises of transparency in the rose garden, does he now regret not releasing the risk register for the NHS?
The Prime Minister
In terms of the money we spend and the decisions we make, this Government have been the most transparent in our country for the last 50 years. That is what matters.
Gavin Barwell (Croydon Central) (Con)
On behalf of my constituents Gary and Natasha Groves, whose daughter Lillian was killed outside her home by a driver who was under the influence of drugs, I thank the Prime Minister for meeting them at No. 10, listening to what they had to say and including in the Queen’s Speech measures to tackle the menace of drug driving. Will he join me in paying tribute to Gary and Natasha for responding to a personal tragedy by trying to make it less likely that other people endure the terrible loss they suffered?
The Prime Minister
My hon. Friend is entirely right to raise the case again. I pay tribute to his work. We will be legislating properly for drug-related driving. It is right that it is put on to the statute book in the same way as drink driving, and it would not be happening were it not for the very strong campaign he has fought.
The context for the Queen’s Speech is a world that is becoming ever more competitive. The countries that succeed will be those that know they have to deal with debts and deficit, and that in a competitive world they have to have competitive tax rates and the best climate for business investment. They have to back entrepreneurs. They need light regulation and lean government. They need to reform every part of government, from schools to the planning system, so that they get on the side of wealth creation, job creation and a growing economy. That is what we are doing.
This is a Government who confront the long-term challenges we face, and that is what our country needs—a Government who roll up their sleeves to deal with the deficit, not an Opposition who think they can borrow their way out of debt. We are a coalition Government determined to unleash the private sector, spread growth around our country and sort out our financial services, not a Labour one who bloated the public sector and sat back while an unregulated banking sector brought our country to its knees. This is a Government who are backing hard-working people, not an Opposition who say they are on their side but refuse to make work pay, refuse to cap welfare and want to heap debts on to our children. This is a Government taking the tough decisions to help families who work hard and do the right thing. We are acting for the long term and governing in the national interest. This is a Queen’s Speech to rebuild Britain, and I commend it to the House.
Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)
All hon. Members will have spent the past few weeks and months knocking on doors and will recognise that this Queen’s Speech is hugely important for many families across our country. Also, many in this House who are baby boomers—that does not include our current political leaders—and have benefited from free education, affordable housing and pretty good pensions will recognise that for those of younger generations, many of whom are currently unemployed, this is a critical Queen’s Speech. It is against that backdrop that I wish to make my comments.
I will start by welcoming the aspects of the Queen’s Speech that deal with family policy. It is absolutely right that we do something to support the many families in this country struggling with children with disabilities. Frankly, it is poor that successive Governments have not done enough, so I am pleased to welcome changes in that area of policy. Love is a key ingredient for any parent raising a child, and the hearts of all Members of the House must go out to young people who find themselves in circumstances in which they do not have parents. For that reason, it must be wrong that children from black and ethnic minority backgrounds languish in local authority queues waiting for adoptive parents. As the parent of two children from a mixed-race background, I know that such children fare particularly badly on those adoption lists. I welcome the changes that will make it easier for parents of any background to adopt young people in need of a loving home.
Mr Edward Timpson (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)
I join the right hon. Gentleman in welcoming wholeheartedly the measures to try to improve adoption in this country for children from all backgrounds. Does he agree that it is also important not to forget that there are children who are brought into the care systems who might have other permanency solutions to their upbringing that might involve long-term fostering or residential care and that we must also do more for those children to ensure that they do not miss out on the best possible childhood we can give them?
Mr Lammy
The hon. Gentleman makes an important point about foster care and the need to support the many people across this country who give up their homes and time and offer love to the many children who pass through their homes.
May I also say, as chair of the all-party group on fatherhood, that it is important that in this House, on a cross-party basis, we make a renewed commitment to the importance of fatherhood? I also welcome the changes to care proceedings. If it is right and in the interests of a child, we must make it easier for fathers to have contact with their children. It is now well understood that the outcomes for young people without fathers are not good enough. In parts of this country and in parts of constituencies such as mine there is the phenomenon of the “baby-father”, whereby it is acceptable to have children but not be a father to them, and I welcome any moves in legislation to deal with that issue.
Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
I pay tribute to the right hon. Gentleman’s courageous stance on many of those issues over the years. Does he echo my view that we should also pay tribute to the love, care and courage of grandparents and extended kin, and that we should remove the impediments that they have to caring for their flesh and blood, owing to various difficult circumstances involving their own children, including drug and alcohol abuse?
Mr Lammy
The hon. Gentleman has taken up those issues in his constituency, and I too underline my support for grandparents, particularly given the complexities within families of drug and alcohol addiction.
But in the end the critical issues for most people, in relation to this Queen’s Speech and over the coming years, will be the reality that we are in a double-dip recession, will be what we are doing to get to grips with growth in this country, to provide jobs and to support small businesses, and will be how we are supporting young people. I am afraid that there has just not been enough in this Queen’s Speech to address those issues.
I do not have to tell the Prime Minister what happened in my constituency, as we have spoken on many occasions, but I say to him that currently in Tottenham 6,500 people are unemployed and 28,000 are on out-of-work benefits. The figures have actually got worse since the riots, and, although I have heard him at the Dispatch Box speaking about the Work programme, the youth contract and apprenticeships, I find that in all three policies there are weaknesses and flaws.
The Work programme is straining at the edges, particularly with the third sector attempting without funds to provide placements, and in Tottenham 90% of those who are unemployed are not eligible for it. How can it be the biggest programme since the 1930s, when most people who are unemployed in Britain are not eligible to participate in it? While the right hon. Gentleman lauds the youth contract, I warn him of a previous era, when we saw the failed youth training scheme and, as a consequence, many young people who graduated with certificates but no jobs. People in my constituency have a long memory, and what they want are genuine jobs.
As a former skills Minister, I am pleased to see the growth in apprenticeships, but the right hon. Gentleman will know that the scheme, to reach the figure of 450,000, includes many that people would not recognise as an apprenticeship. An apprenticeship should surely be a programme that lasts for at least one year. Currently, apprenticeships last for a maximum of 16 weeks, and many young people do not want something that is, in fact, a very short opportunity in customer services dressed up as a genuine apprenticeship, so I ask the Prime Minister to look at what is behind such apprenticeships if we are genuinely to retain the trust of young people.
I and other Opposition Members will of course scrutinise the enterprise Bill in its entirety, but, when I think of those shopkeepers on Tottenham high road who saw their businesses destroyed, I recall, as will the Prime Minister, that they faced hardships even before the riots. There were hardships with business rates and with footfall on the high road, and they were concerned about issues such as regulation—2,900 of them in the Tottenham constituency, paying their VAT and employing 30,000 people.
The number of self-employed people in my constituency has fallen from 14% to 7% in the past year. It is going in the wrong direction. I warn him that his absolute dedication to slashing public services is having a major effect in adding to the dole queues in constituencies such as mine.
We are not seeing more businesses flourishing or coming in and taking up the slack from the public sector; we are seeing something much worse. Look underneath the figures. The whole House should have serious concerns about anyone—young people, particularly—who faces unemployment. However, when the unemployment rate is three times higher among young black men, we should be gravely concerned.
We should also be particularly concerned that many women—older women, often black—are now joining their sons on the unemployment queues, having been employed in the health service, local government or other areas. I say to the Prime Minister that some communities depend on those mothers being employed and I am worried about the emergence of a picture worse than some of the scenes that hon. Members will recognise from the United States of America.
That is why we needed a Queen’s Speech that would seriously address those issues—stimulate the economy in the way required; wrestle with the issue of growth; and move our economy from over-dependence on financial services and retail. When I heard the Business Secretary arguing the case for the Sunday trading Bill, it was again apparent that the Government would rely once more on retail, consumerism, shopping and spending to get us out of this mess. We will need far more than that in this economy if we are to respond to the problems in constituencies such as mine.
What about the gaps in the Queen’s Speech? Given the importance of higher education to the UK economy and all we have invested to support young people making their way to university, why have the Government decided that a higher education Bill is not appropriate? The issue has been kicked into the long grass. Vice-chancellors and young people face uncertainty because we have not seen any Bill in that area of policy at all. Why are we going to spend hours, in this House and the other place, debating House of Lords reform when every Member knows that no one raised that issue with any political party on the doorstep during the campaign of the past few weeks? Is House of Lords reform really where our priorities should be?
Mrs Eleanor Laing (Epping Forest) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the whole matter of House of Lords reform could be dealt with quickly in this House if, as the Prime Minister said a short while ago, the Government brought forward a Bill that simply brought the House of Lords into the 21st century without trying to create another House of Commons at the other end of the corridor?
Mr Lammy
I get where the hon. Lady is coming from, but I want to bring the Government into the 21st century. For that to happen, we need some real answers for the millennial generation who face decades of unemployment in this country. We have to say something about what we can expect for our graduates; we must not just talk the talk in terms of families, but recognise that the cost of living is going up, and we expect a Queen’s Speech that will address those issues.
Against that backdrop, this Queen’s Speech fails. I suspect that there are areas that the Opposition will be able to accept, but there are many holes in this Queen’s Speech. As the Prime Minister reflects and gets into the detail, I hope that the House can expect a bigger, more ambitious and more visionary legislative framework in the next Queen’s Speech.
Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy). While I may differ with his analysis, there is never any doubt that he holds his views passionately. He certainly supports his constituency and community passionately, and has done so in the past several years in which I have watched him in this House.
Let me say to the Prime Minister that it is also a pleasure to talk about the real Queen’s Speech as against the one that I and others proposed last week. This Queen’s Speech has enormous merits to it, particularly in the context of growth. I am particularly supportive, as he will be unsurprised to hear, of his proposals on bank reforms, competition law, and joint enterprise law reform, including labour law reform. He will be happy to hear me mention those, but I am afraid that it goes downhill from here on in. [Hon. Members: “That was less than a minute!”] Well, I will make up the whole minute by saying that the Government can be proud of most of their record in the past couple of years on the issues of liberty and justice, which the Prime Minister knows I hold very dear. Their actions on identity cards, on cutting down on the amount of detention without charge, and on the misuse of counter-terrorism stop-and-search powers are all matters of pride for them.
Beyond that, however, I have three concerns: one about a constitutional issue, one about state power, and one about justice. Let me start with the constitutional issue on which the right hon. Member for Tottenham finished—the House of Lords. One of my concerns about our whole approach to the House of Lords is that we are arguing about its composition without worrying enough about its purpose, which we have not done enough to consider. There is a great deal of talk about the House of Lords as a revising and reforming Chamber, but it has a much greater function than that. Historically, the House of Lords has been a serious check on excessive Executive power. It was a check on the Government of Margaret Thatcher when she had a very large majority, on the Government of Tony Blair, and on the Government of the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), and no doubt it will be a check on this Government as time goes on.
It is very important in Britain that we have this check, because we are different in one respect from most other democracies. Without any separation of Executive and legislature, the power of the Executive in this House means that this House is less good than it could be at defending the rights of individuals when the Executive impinge too much on them. We saw that very often with the previous Government. There were a great number of occasions when I am sure that many Labour Members did not want to support some of their Government’s more illiberal actions. That is why the House of Lords is incredibly important.
Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making a case from a Conservative point of view against reforming the make-up of the House of Lords. If the House of Lords has the distinguished record of preventing excessive use of Executive power that he is suggesting, why does he think that Margaret Thatcher’s first Lord Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, delivered a speech roughly 50 years ago in which he said that we did not have sufficient checks and balances in our constitution, which he characterised as an elective dictatorship?
Mr Davis
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, because he goes right to the central point. The House of Lords is not perfect, and there are many things that it has wrongly allowed to happen. I am in favour of reform of the House of Lords, but we must be very careful to get it right. If, in our reform, we do away with, or weaken or mitigate to any great extent, the check that it provides, that check will never be returned, because no Government will ever bring back a restraint on their own powers.
I think it was the Deputy Prime Minister who characterised his preferred state of the House of Lords as being one that more reflected the political composition of the House of Commons. That is precisely what I would not want it to do. A House of Lords that exactly reflected the political composition of the House of Commons would not be very much of a check on the Executive, and that would be a really serious problem. We must be very careful about what we do.
I do not believe that a referendum, of itself, will solve the problem, because it is a subtle and difficult matter and will be very hard to argue in public. However, it is very important.
Mrs Laing
I agree with my right hon. Friend that providing a check on the Government is Parliament’s most important role. Does he agree that having an elected House of Lords would undermine the position of the elected Members of the House of Commons and make them less likely to be able to hold the Government to account in this House, where the Prime Minister sits?
Mr Davis
I take my hon. Friend’s point, although I believe the greater problem would be legislative gridlock if too much legitimacy were given to the House of Lords. The simple fact is that over the course of the past century, these Houses have managed a pretty effective balance without crippling government. The position that we have arrived at still needs reform, but very careful reform.
Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)
I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that we have to consider two things hand in hand, the composition of the House of Lords and its function. Although I am passionately in favour of an elected second Chamber, one of my criticisms of the draft Bill is that clause 2 will not reinforce the primacy of this Chamber. Some kind of concordat would have to be agreed by both Houses and written into their Standing Orders. Does he accept, though, that the current situation is unsustainable? We already have far too many Members down the other end of the building, and if there is no reform, there will be another 200. There will be more than 1,000 Members, the vast majority of them appointed by party leaders on a party Whip. Surely that is unsustainable.
Mr Davis
I agree with the last point, but the hon. Gentleman should not let the best be the enemy of the good.
I will finish my points about the Lords, because I want to talk about two other significant issues of justice and freedom. For me, the test is to look back and see what would have happened in the past decade if we had introduced whatever new reform we will come up with. As the Deputy Prime Minister will be only too conscious, in the past decade the Lords have stopped the curbing of jury trials and a number of other measures, including the extension of detention without charge. That would not have happened if we had had too politically similar a House of Lords. When the House considers the matter in some detail, my test will be whether a reform will achieve the same check on the Government.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr Davis
I want to move on, but I will give way later if the hon. Gentleman still wishes to intervene.
The second issue that I want to mention is state power and what has become known colloquially as the snooper’s charter. The Queen’s Speech stated that the Government intended
“to bring forward measures to maintain the ability of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to access vital communications data under strict safeguards to protect the public, subject to scrutiny of draft clauses.”
I take the last part to mean that how it will happen is up for argument. That is a good thing, because I am afraid the proposal is very similar to what the Labour Government came up with. I will give way to the Deputy Prime Minister if he really wants to argue the point, but I do not recommend it, because the Government have already consulted heavily with internet service providers and producers and talked to them about what they want to do. They want to require companies to maintain large databases of contact information. If I have telephoned somebody, there will be information about who the call was to, when it was made and where from. That will lead to extremely large databases, which the state then wants to be able to access relatively freely.
Frankly, I am surprised that the Government have made the proposal, because both coalition parties opposed it in opposition, and as far as I can see, it goes against the thrust of the coalition agreement. It certainly goes against the thrust of a comment that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister made when we were in opposition. He said:
“Faced with any problem, any crisis—given any excuse—Labour grasp for more information, pulling more and more people into the clutches of state data capture…And the Government doesn’t want to stop with the basic information…Scare tactics to herd more disempowered citizens into the clutches of officialdom, as people surrender more and more information about their lives, giving the state more and more power over their lives. If we want to stop the state controlling us, we must confront this surveillance state.”
We opposed those measures in opposition, not just because they were illiberal or risked turning our country into a nation of suspects, but because we believed that they were ineffective. Nearly every measure that we opposed when I was my right hon. Friend’s shadow Home Secretary we opposed because we thought that it would not work against terrorism. That is also true of the measure that we are considering.
I took advice from experts. I asked them a simple question: “If you were a terrorist, how would you avoid this scrutiny?” I stopped them when they got to the fifth method. It is pretty straightforward: for terrorists, everything from proxy servers to one-off mobile phones means that such scrutiny is easy to avoid. For criminals, it is also easy and quite cheap to avoid. However, for ordinary citizens, that scrutiny is not easy and cheap to avoid. We will therefore create something, which some Ministers said will cost £2 billion—the London School of Economics suggests that it will cost £12 billion—that will not be effective against terrorism, but constitutes general-purpose surveillance of the entire nation.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Sometimes terrorists make a mistake. If we save lives through having the information, that balances my right hon. Friend’s argument.
Mr Davis
The simple truth is that when the House reacted understandably to the horrific events of 9/11 and the preceding terrorist events, such as the USS Cole and the east African embassy bombings, and introduced a couple of measures—the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 and the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001—it took away many previous protections. Before RIPA, the agencies would approach British Telecom or Cable & Wireless and ask for the data, which were sometimes—not always—handed over voluntarily. The companies exercised some responsibility. In about two thirds of cases, the agencies got warrants, and the information had to be handed over. The central, though not the only issue is whether the databases are available to the agencies of the state without a warrant. They are currently available without a warrant. If we want to make such practices acceptable in a civilised, liberal state, we should have warrants first.
Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)
As a Liberal Democrat, but also as the MP for Cheltenham, I ask the right hon. Gentleman whether he agrees that it should be possible to strike a perfectly good balance between the absolute need to protect civil liberties and traditional British freedoms and apply the principles behind the existing legislation that he mentioned to new and fast-developing technologies to prevent our security services from falling behind.
Mr Davis
Of course, but frankly, talk about falling behind is a bit of a red herring. The security services today can collect more data by several orders of magnitude than they could when I first became a Member of Parliament, simply because technology allows that. In 1987, one pretty much had to get a BT engineer to plug in a bug in the local exchange. People do not do that now—they could almost do it from my office through software. I could listen to all hon. Members at once—[Interruption.] Hon. Members’ conversations are too boring to bother with.
Of course, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) is right and there is a balance to strike. No one has ever been foolish enough to suggest that I favour helping terrorists, making it easier for them or harder for our agencies. However, we must act under judicial control and return to the prior warrant process that applied before RIPA for the systems to work.
Mr Davis
No, I am about to finish that part of my speech. The prior warrant process would ensure that we stop the great overuse of the new powers, which has happened dozens of times in the past decade. If we do not, the public reaction will be one of outrage, because the measure will affect not just a few people, but tens of millions of people, and they will not take it quietly.
My last point is on a justice measure, but it is not a measure like the snooper’s charter, which will create a tsunami of reaction as it goes through the House—I am confident of that, because we already have 137,000 signatures on the online petition. Secret courts affect only tens and perhaps hundreds of people, but they bring against those people a serious injustice. I take the view—a very unfashionable one in modern politics, with too many polls and focus groups—that an injustice against one is an injustice against all, and the secret court proposals undoubtedly propose an injustice.
I say that with complete confidence, but for a rather obscure reason. A secret court procedure is proposed, but we already have such procedures. They are called special immigration appeal courts—SIAC—and they have existed since 1997, when the Labour Government introduced them to deal with people they thought they could not deal with in open court. Of course, no hon. Member has ever been in one or seen one in operation. No hon. Member knows how they work, including all Ministers of this Government and the previous one.
One group alone understands how those courts work: special advocates. There are 69 special advocates, of whom 32 have had detailed exposure to the proposed closed material procedure. The procedure involves the Executive—a Minister—saying to a court: “This information can be heard only in very close camera.” It cannot be heard in court as a whole in secret: the judge and the Government advocate of the argument can hear the evidence, but only the special advocate—a lawyer who cannot talk to the defendant or litigant in the case—can challenge it.
Tony Baldry
We had a system of special advocates in courts in Northern Ireland for a very long time—a number of members of my chambers were special advocates in such circumstances—and I do not recall my right hon. Friend when we were in government ever complaining about those procedures, which we had to use in Northern Ireland given the particular circumstances there.
Mr Davis
I am sorry to correct my hon. Friend’s memory, but I did complain. I actually appeared in a Diplock court as a witness, so I know exactly how they work from that point of view.
The simple truth is not my view, but the view of the 32 special advocates who have had such experience. Virtually all of them signed a document that challenged the Government’s Green Paper, in quite robust terms. The special advocates said that closed material procedures
“represent a departure both from the principle of natural justice and from the principle of open justice. They may leave a litigant having little clear idea of the case deployed against him, and ultimately they may prevent some litigants from knowing why they have won or lost. Furthermore, and crucially, because the SA appointed on his behalf is unable to take instructions in relation to that case, they may leave the SA with little realistic opportunity of responding effectively to that case. They also systematically exclude public, press and Parliamentary scrutiny of parts of our justice system…Our experience as SAs involved in statutory and non-statutory closed material procedures leaves us in no doubt that CMPs are inherently unfair; they do not ‘work effectively’, nor do they deliver real procedural fairness. The fact that such procedures may be operated so as to meet the minimum standards required by Article 6 of the ECHR, with such modification as has been required by the courts so as to reduce that inherent unfairness, does not and cannot make them objectively fair.”
That is the view of the only people who understand this system.
The secret courts measure is being held up as a proposal to improve our security. It would undermine and corrode our justice system, and it would not improve our security, because the other point made by special advocates is that the public interest immunity system as it now stands—again this is not properly understood by Ministers—works perfectly well, and much better than what is proposed. Indeed, one special advocate has pointed out that this proposal is less good than that available to the terrorist suspects in Guantanamo Bay. That is how poor this procedure is. In fact, there are many other procedures abroad that would work better than this one. Sadly, this is not a measure that I will support in the coming months.
The Government came in with a grand, important and liberal—both small “l” and big “l”—tradition to uphold. That tradition supported both freedom and justice in this country. These two measures—putting the Lords to one side, as that is a matter for argument—would, if we are not very careful, undermine that tradition and our reputation, and do nothing to improve the protection of Britain against terrorism. Indeed, just the reverse—they would make it worse.
Mr Nigel Dodds (Belfast North) (DUP)
I am pleased to follow the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). He has eloquently set out the arguments on the balance between the need to protect national security and the need to protect individual freedoms. He mentioned internet surveillance and my party will look closely at the proposals and support whatever measures are necessary to protect national security, but we will also be conscious of the need to protect individual freedoms and privacies. That means not giving the Government any more powers than are absolutely and strictly necessary in the fight against terrorism, but if powers are thought to be absolutely necessary, we would be remiss if we did not proceed to implement them.
At the outset, I join others in paying tribute to Her Majesty the Queen in her diamond jubilee year. We in Northern Ireland look forward to her coming to the Province later this summer, and I have no doubt that she will be welcomed as warmly as she has been on previous visits.
I also wish to join the Prime Minister and other right hon. and hon. Members in paying tribute to the service in the two years of this Parliament of our brave servicemen and women in theatres of conflict abroad and in the work that they do to protect us all here in this country and in the fight against terrorism.
I welcome several measures in the Queen’s Speech. The briefing that went on before the Gracious Speech referred to a greater focus on family-friendly measures. My party welcomes measures to support and strengthen families and family life, such as speedier adoption and help for parents of children with disabilities to cut through red tape. We will support such measures, because strong families are important and supporting them is key. The Government have been slow so far to implement tax allowance changes for married couples, which were in the Conservative manifesto and the coalition agreement. We look forward to their coming forward with proposals in that area in due course.
We also welcome the banking reform Bill, which will split the retail and investment sides of businesses. That is overdue, it is good news for consumers and will help to protect them, and so will receive our support. There are issues with the speed of implementation—we would like the reforms to happen a little quicker—but we will come to that during the debate on the Bill.
Sammy Wilson (East Antrim) (DUP)
Banking reform is important for the United Kingdom as a whole but especially important for Northern Ireland. We have a dysfunctional banking system, because so many banks have been caught up with bad property loans and so on. Does my right hon. Friend agree with me and people in Northern Ireland that the Government need to focus more on how measures to ease banking will affect banks in Northern Ireland and ensure that we get our fair share of credit easing and so on?
Mr Dodds
As Minister for Finance and Personnel in the Northern Ireland Executive, my hon. Friend deals with such issues on a daily basis, and he and his colleagues, including Arlene Foster, the enterprise Minister, and others are working hard to deal with them. He points, rightly, to the particular issues in Northern Ireland. Two of our banks are based in the Irish Republic. The property collapse in the Irish Republic and its eurozone problems are impacting strongly on the Northern Ireland economy. He is right, therefore, that particular attention needs to be given to how credit easing plays through to Northern Ireland, where we have peculiar circumstances that do not affect other parts of the UK.
One reason we have been pushing strongly—we have received a reasonably warm response—on the need to reduce corporation tax in Northern Ireland is that we share a land frontier with the Irish Republic, which has a much lower rate of corporation tax. I look forward to an announcement on that and other issues in this Session and perhaps to legislation in the next Session.
We welcome the emphasis on cutting business regulation. The Business Secretary’s remarks yesterday about the need to roll back the EU regulatory burden were also most welcome. We also support moves on executive pay. The recent revolts by shareholders in companies such as Aviva and Barclays brought cheer to hard-working families, but more needs to be done to empower shareholders through binding votes on pay at the top level. Such measures matter to people out there in the country, and they want action taken on them. That is where the focus needs to be.
We welcome the fact that driving under the influence of drugs will become a specific offence with appropriate punishment. I have received communication on that issue, as other right hon. and hon. Members will have, and although this measure will be of little comfort to those who have already lost family members in tragic circumstances—we have heard some very brave people speaking in the media about this—it will, I hope, prevent more deaths and injuries on our roads in the future.
Likewise, I welcome the much-needed groceries code adjudicator Bill. It will be warmly welcomed by farmers and other suppliers in my part of the world—not necessarily in my constituency, because at last count only three farmers were living within its boundaries, but in Northern Ireland, which is largely a rural area, it will be warmly welcomed.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
I, too, much support the groceries code adjudicator Bill. If there is no problem with how our big buyers and supermarkets use their muscle, they will have nothing to fear from the adjudicator. It will be a check and balance.
Mr Dodds
Absolutely, but the adjudicator must have teeth. We look forward to hearing the details as they come forward. However, if that and other measures we have talked about are implemented, they will receive broad welcome.
Having said that, I want to come to several areas on which I disagree with the Government. Some relate to issues that were in the Queen’s Speech, but some relate to matters that were not. The verdict on the Gracious Speech must be that, although it contains useful measures that we will support, overall it lacks substance in heavy-weight measures to deal with the big issue confronting us. There is to be a measure on House of Lords reform. Many people call me or come to my constituency office, but few, if any, have ever raised that issue with me. Even in these days of e-mails, Twitter and Facebook, very little of our correspondence relates to the matter.
There are, however, many issues on which I get a large amount of e-mails and other correspondence. People are concerned about our net contribution to the European Union, for example. They are worried about the cost of implementing regulations from Brussels. They are angry about our inability to reject unwanted EU law, and they want Parliament to be able to decide on behalf of the people of the United Kingdom what our laws should be, who we should have in our country and who we should be able to deport. Those are the issues that people raise with Members of Parliament all the time. They might not be the issues that Members want to face up to, but unless we face up to the concerns that people raise on a daily basis, we shall become ever more disconnected from the people we are supposed to represent.
Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)
A couple of weeks ago, some small business owners from my constituency came down to see me. They talked about the difficulties relating to bank lending and to the high rate of VAT. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that they will take little comfort from what has been said in today’s Queen’s Speech?
Mr Dodds
I agree with the hon. Lady. I shall come to the issue of VAT shortly, as people have raised that with me. VAT and fuel costs are of real concern to them. The hon. Lady also mentioned banking. It is clear that a real problem for economic growth in this country is that many viable businesses that have a future and an order book and that can trade are having to deal with banks that are moving the goalposts on lending conditions and what they require businesses to pay. They often do that at short notice, having agreed on a programme of repayments and interest rates only a few months previously. Suddenly, the goalposts are moved and the businesses are bereft of any means of continuing. They are forced into liquidation and into laying people off. Much more needs to be done about the lack of bank lending to businesses, because that is strangling a great deal of the potential growth in our economy.
Meg Hillier
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the fact that banks have become so far removed from the communities that they serve is causing some of these challenges? There is agreement across the House on the need for reform of the banking system. Would he welcome more mutualisation in the banking sector, and does he share my regret that that does not appear in the Gracious Speech?
Mr Dodds
The hon. Lady puts forward an important issue for our consideration. Many of the banks are largely owned by the public at the moment. One leading business man in Northern Ireland told me recently that he regretted that we had not gone the whole way and taken complete control of the banks, to ensure that all the necessary lending could take place. Members of the public, taxpayers, ordinary hard-working families, individuals and businesses are pumping billions of pounds into the banking system, yet the banks are not doing what needs to be done to ease credit and lend in the way that they should.
I was talking about House of Lords reform, and other Members have rightly raised issues that are of real concern to the people and the communities that they represent. Before we get on to the reform of the House of Lords, I would like to see this House deal with an issue relating to the House of Commons. The Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said on record during the last Session that they believe that it is wrong that Members who do not take their seats in the House of Commons are still able to receive full expenses, allowances and representational moneys, which puts them in a much more advantageous position than those of us who do take our seats. Sinn Fein, for instance, gets the equivalent of parliamentary Short money—what is called representative money—and is free to spend it, not on parliamentary activities, of course, because it does not engage in any parliamentary activities, but on party political activities. Whereas we as right hon. and hon. Members would rightly be called to account by the authorities for any spending—even a penny’s worth—for party political purposes, a group of Members who do not take their seats are quite free to spend that money to the disadvantage of their political opponents. Let us be frank: it does not particularly affect our votes, but it affects those of others in the House who are not here today and no doubt can speak for themselves in due course. The fact is that Members who do not take their seats are given an enormous advantage.
We know that back in 2001, Betty Boothroyd, the former great Speaker of the House, resisted all this for a long time. Ultimately, the decision was taken to proceed with the concessions because the then Labour Government said—it was bitterly opposed by Conservative Members—that it was important to bring people into the peace process and the political process. Whatever the arguments at that time, the fact of the matter is that there is no longer any need for this special category of expenditure on the basis of encouraging people to be part of the peace process. It is clear that people are involved in the Executive and in the Assembly at Stormont. I welcome that, and think it enormously to the credit of parties in this House and in Northern Ireland that progress has been made, but it would not make the slightest difference to the political process—nobody believes that it would—if these special arrangements were withdrawn in line with what was promised before the election and in the last parliamentary Session.
Bob Stewart
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. I want entirely to endorse every single point he has made on the matter of Short money for people who do not take their seats in this House. Those days are over; let us get this sorted out.
Mr Dodds
I am grateful for the hon. Gentleman’s support. What I am proposing does not require legislation, so I did not necessarily expect it to be reflected in the Queen’s Speech today, but I look forward to steps being taken in this Session to tackle this long overdue issue.
I want to come to another issue on which we have not received many demands for legislation, but about which we have heard many complaints and expressions of concern. The issue has not been raised in the debate so far, but it received an enormous amount of coverage in the run-up to the Gracious Speech: so-called gay marriage. I have to say that I am pleased that no Bill on so-called gay marriage has been proposed for this Session, but I understand that it is the Government’s clear intention to introduce a Bill at some point. I hope that they will reconsider that in light of the fact that well over 500,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage’s petition against changing the definition of marriage. That is more people than have signed any petition on the Government’s own website. I hope that there will be a solemn and sincere reconsideration of any suggestion to bring forward such a measure.
Once again, this issue highlights the question of whether we are prepared to connect with the views of the vast majority of the people we purport to represent in this House or we remain disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people in the community. We have already legislated for civil partnerships, and this issue of gay marriage does not have the support of people out in the country. Rather than fixating on issues like that, if the Prime Minister were to come to my constituency—no doubt other hon. Members will hear the same thing in their constituencies—he would hear about the issues that matter, such as the high and rising price of petrol and diesel, and the high and rising price of energy. In Northern Ireland, where we suffer higher petrol and diesel costs than any other part of not just the United Kingdom but the European Union—hard as that is to believe—this is a very important matter indeed, but I am sorry to say that the Gracious Speech contained no reference to any measure that would tackle the high and rising price of fuel.
I know that people will say that the Government have taken action to deal with the problem, and I accept that measures have been taken that have made the price of fuel lower than it would otherwise have been. However, people are inundating me and other DUP Members with complaints about the proposed 3p rise in fuel duty next August, which will undoubtedly make things very difficult for families and businesses. It will, for instance, have knock-on effects on the price of food. People simply cannot understand why we are seeing these taxes go up while taxes on millionaires are coming down.
There is no doubt that the increase in VAT, which has already been mentioned today, has added enormously to the burden on families. In November 2008, the present Chancellor said that he would remind the then Government about the Labour party’s plans to increase VAT from 18.5%
“every single day between now and the next general election.”—[Official Report, 26 November 2008; Vol. 483, c. 741.]
He said that it was a shame, and all the rest of it. The tune has changed dramatically since the Opposition became the Government, but what was said then about the burden that the increase would inflict on individuals, businesses and families was absolutely true, and it is still true today. The VAT increases have added considerably to the cost of living, but I do not believe that VAT has been used to help stimulate the economy.
Businesses are facing extreme pressures as a result of bank lending policies and credit tightening. The Greek and French elections have taken place in recent days, and the results have shown a desire to move away from nothing but austerity to an emphasis on growth. Of course we need to deal with the deficit, but I for one am glad that emphasis is now being placed on the need to secure growth in the economy. We cannot deal with the deficit only by cutting expenditure or raising taxes; we must have economic growth as well. The priority of this parliamentary Session must be growth, growth, growth, and we will support the Government in respect of measures that deliver that essential, but so far elusive, piece of the economic jigsaw.
Simon Hughes (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (LD)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds), and it is a privilege to be the first Liberal Democrat to speak in this Session of Parliament. [Interruption.] Apart, that is, from my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce), to whom I am about to pay tribute. Let me start, however, by paying tribute to the soldiers whom we remembered at the beginning of the Session—and all who serve in places of danger in Afghanistan and elsewhere—and to our colleagues who died during the last Session.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) for his speech, and for his reminder of how diverse a country we are and how we benefit from that. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon, whom I ignored only accidentally and briefly, for his speech. He has served in this place continuously for nearly 29 years, and has been the most loyal and steadfast friend and colleague for all that time. He has been a wonderful representative of Aberdeen, of Aberdeenshire, of his constituency and of his country. He has served this Parliament with great distinction, not least today. We are very grateful for his public service, and I think we would all like to put that on the record. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] He is a very valued colleague.
On the second Wednesday in May two years ago, the coalition agreement was signed—within five days of the last election result being declared and within 24 hours of the new Prime Minister taking over at the request of the Queen, the deal was done. Two years later, I say on behalf of all my colleagues that I am perfectly clear that that was the right decision at the time. It was the right decision at the time for us to enter the coalition, in the national interest; and it was the right decision to continue for the past two years in the coalition, in the national interest; and it will continue to be the right decision to remain in the coalition, in the national interest, for the remaining three years of this Parliament. When we joined together, we did so knowing it would be a five-year programme, and knowing we were committed to seeing it through, and it absolutely is in the national interest that we do so.
It was obvious from the beginning that returning Britain to economic stability would not be achieved in one year or in two years, and that instead a full five-year Parliament would be needed. That was the truth then and that is the truth now. We were therefore right to legislate to make the constitutional reform necessary to have a fixed-term Parliament, in order to give the certainty that the county needed. If anyone does not believe that political certainty is a good thing, they should look at what is happening on the other side of this continent at this very moment. In five days, we were able to bring certainty to our country, despite an indecisive election result.
May I remind the House what the election achieved? The Conservatives won 306 seats, and got the support of just over a third of those who voted.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
Are we talking about the council elections?
Simon Hughes
No, this was two years ago. Labour won 258 seats and just under 30% of public support. We won 57 seats with 23% of public support. Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined did not make a majority. Indeed, Labour and the Liberal Democrats along with the next largest party, the Democratic Unionists, would not have made a majority—we would still have been short—whereas the Conservatives plus the Liberal Democrats made a majority, and the country needed a majority Government. We therefore did our duty, by agreeing to work with people who were normally our opponents, in the national interest, to deliver a common programme. We have done that twice in Scotland, working with Labour in the national interest, and once in Wales, again working with Labour in the national interest. I believe it was right to do so on all those occasions, and that it was right to do so on this occasion, too.
Meg Hillier
Given the Prime Minister’s not-so-ringing endorsement of Lords reform from the Dispatch Box, is the right hon. Gentleman absolutely sure that the coalition is still joined together in a common purpose?
Simon Hughes
The answer is yes, and if the hon. Lady will bear with me, I will deal later with Lords reform, as it is in the Queen’s Speech and the programme for the coming year.
We need to remember where we were two years ago: there was turmoil in Greece and in the eurozone, and our constituents were paying out of their money—not our money—£120 million a day just in servicing the interest repayments on our debt. That is not a way to use taxpayers’ money for the good. There was a financial crisis caused by a banking system that was entirely focused on short-term gain for the people at the top—as my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills said regularly in the previous Parliament—rather than on creating long-term value for the many small businesses that provide work for most people across the country. The public finances were out of control, we had the largest public deficit in the developed world and the living standards of those on low and middle incomes were being eroded, which had been gradually reducing the spending power of the British consumer over the previous decade. The cost of living was spiralling; for younger people, certainly in constituencies such as mine, a home had become an unaffordable dream. The economic system often encouraged people to take as much as possible for themselves rather than incentivising them to create long-term value and spread wealth and work as widely as possible, and the economy was reliant on energy from scarce resources, the price of which was rising year after year.
Two years later, we are still not where we need to be. We have unacceptably high unemployment, especially youth unemployment, which started long before this Government came to office and was on a significant upward trend in the last years of the Labour Administration. We are in an economic recession and banks are still not lending enough to viable small businesses, as we all know from our constituency casework, whereas the pay of those at the top is rising more than can possibly be justified by their performance. We heard the figures just this week: an 11% increase in salaries at the top last year, whereas the increase for the working population as a whole was 1%.
It is therefore absolutely right that the Government continue to focus on doing all we can to promote economic growth and recovery, it is right that we continue with the programme we set out and it is right that we have a programme that, as the last Budget did, seeks to put more money into the pockets of those low and middle income working people and to make work pay. The programme should regulate the banks, encourage the growth of renewable energy and put the public finances back on a sustainable footing so that the spending priorities of the Government, about which we care—health care, education and support for the less well-off—can be adequately financed. No Government have ever invested in better schools or hospitals by bankrupting themselves.
It has been difficult and we on the Liberal Democrat Benches know that. There was no parliamentary majority for getting rid of tuition fees and we were not able to deliver that—it just became undeliverable. The Health and Social Care Bill, the Welfare Reform Bill and the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill needed significant changes and we changed them and made them hugely better—all of them. The evidence is there in the legislation that is now on the statute book.
The Budget was grossly misrepresented. Its most significant element was that many millions of people were taken out of paying tax. Many more will be lifted out of tax next year and the year after, so that nobody will have to pay anything in tax on their first £10,000 of income. It was also forgotten that last month pensioners had the largest increase ever in the state pension since it was introduced by the post-war Government. Then there was the youth contract, the huge growth in the number of apprenticeships, and the support for further education.
There has already been huge success, but we must ensure that we focus on the priorities. The Gracious Speech started by setting them out very clearly: economic growth, justice and constitutional reform. We are proud on the Liberal Democrat Benches that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, my right hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Vince Cable), will see through the creation of the green investment bank in Edinburgh, for which some of us, as members of an environmental party, have argued for many years and will now see delivered. We are proud that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, our right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr Davey), will introduce an energy Bill to give us low-carbon energy generation and to develop renewables, which have a fantastic future—not just onshore, but offshore, tidal, wind and wave, and not just around Scotland but in the whole of the United Kingdom. We are determined to deliver cheaper electricity and greater security of supply.
My hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Andrew George) and others have campaigned for ages for a grocery code adjudicator Bill, and we are delivering that. It will ensure that farmers, local suppliers and local growers get good value for their products and are not trampled on by the power of the monopoly supermarket in their area. The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, my good and hon. Friend the Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb)—a Liberal Democrat Minister for Pensions—and his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, with whom he works so well, are determined to deliver the new single tier pension to ensure that by the end of this Parliament people will have, rather than the sum of just under £100 a week they get as the state pension at the moment, about £140 a week. That is particularly valuable to women, the low paid and those who have been self-employed. After 30 years of work, people will have a citizen’s pension, for which we have always fought.
The Minister of State, Department for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather)and others are determined, as the Deputy Prime Minister has been, that we should have flexible parental care leave, flexible parental leave and the right to flexible working. Why? They are not just good for the parent and the child, but they allow the parent to stay in work rather than giving it up and to be able to mix work, home, children and a career. That is really important for women’s equality in this country. Why do we not have many women in this place or on boards? It is partly because we do not have those flexible arrangements.
Mrs Helen Grant (Maidstone and The Weald) (Con)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that those provisions on shared parental leave also provide choice for families at a very important time, when they are having children?
Simon Hughes
Absolutely, and I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for her commitment to families and women in her profession. She is right—we absolutely need to do that.
We outline in the Gracious Speech the support for those with special educational needs, adding to early-years places for the rising fives so that there is a commitment that 40% of rising fives will be able to have support before they go to school. So, there is much for hard-working, ordinary families and their children in the programme. It is not a programme without legislative plans at all—quite the reverse.
A defamation Bill will deal with the fact that our libel laws still restrict the liberty of speech in this country. I pay tribute in particular to my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), who has worked very hard to make sure that this Bill is in the legislative programme. There is a strong proposal for a National Crime Agency to deal with terrorists and people who do not have the interests of this country at heart. We also have proposals for community sentences for restorative justice. My right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) has been absolutely clear about the value of such sentences not just in reforming people but in value-for-money terms.
We have been careful about the difficult issue that the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) raised about data and how to deal with it. It is perfectly reasonable, as my hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) said, to respond to the security services’ request that we make all species of communication areas of consideration for regulation of data control—not so that people can know what one is saying but so that we do not have no-go areas for the security services. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches will not sign up to legislation that will add to the intrusion into citizens’ lives that we saw so often from the Labour party when it was in government. Under Labour, we had a Big Brother state with identity cards and proposals for 90-day detention. Neither we nor the Conservatives are going down that road, and that is why there is a draft proposal, which we will look at carefully. Only if it is acceptable will it get through.
Let me say a word about the comments of the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) on gay marriage. May I say, as a member of the Church, that I think it is entirely reasonable that in a modern society in which we have accepted that both gay and straight couples should be able to have permanent, recognised relationships, the state should allow that to happen in an equal way? It happens in many other places in the world and it does not mean that any denomination of the Church or any other faith group has to accept that, endorse it or carry out such ceremonies in its buildings—it is simply about saying that the state recognises it when two people want to live their lives as adults together. This is not in the Gracious Speech and was never going to be, because the consultation has not ended. However, we should recognise that there is a civil liberties issue at stake for many of our constituents. We should not forget that. I bet there are people in every constituency in the United Kingdom who want us to make sure that this issue remains on the agenda.
Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)
Many people will have written to the right hon. Gentleman, as they have written to me, about this issue. Does he agree that when it is explained to people that there is a clear difference between a civil marriage and a religious marriage in terms of what is proposed, most of them are reassured? It is our duty to point that out.
Simon Hughes
The hon. Gentleman is exactly right; that is exactly the experience I have had. I have Evangelical Christian friends who are concerned about this issue, but when one explains that it does not suddenly make something sacramental if that is not what the Church or what the individual believes, they are reassured. It is a similar issue—I say this respectfully—as that of tax advantages for people who are married and those who are not married. In our book, if a couple have lived together for 25 years but have not married, they should enjoy the same position in the tax system as those who have chosen to marry. We have to respect people’s different life choices as adults.
Those issues are all important, but the most important legislative proposal for my constituents in a constituency that faces the City of London from across the river is none of those—it is banking reform. It is about making sure that we divide the banks into retail banks that will deal with people’s day-to-day business and separate them from the speculative, international playing with money that has brought us to the state we are in. In my view, the most important aspect of that Bill, for which my right hon. Friend the Business Secretary’s Department is also responsible, is that which allows shareholders to control the scandal of executive pay. This week, we have at last seen the beginning of a change in attitudes at the top; shareholder power has at last begun to be exerted. We absolutely need to give shareholders the power not only to advise and express their view but to say, “I’m sorry—if you don’t perform, you are not getting the money.” What has happened previously has resulted from an “if you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” attitude in the boardrooms, with people offering each other packages and salaries that are beyond the comprehension of most of our constituents. It was obscene and it is unacceptable, but it was allowed, encouraged and developed under a Labour Government, and that should be to their eternal shame.
Malcolm Bruce
Does my right hon. Friend agree that shareholders have come to their senses? They recognise that paying directors bonuses for reduced share prices and dividends is not a good deal for anybody.
Simon Hughes
Absolutely. If we can have a real rise of shareholder power over the next few years—individuals and pension funds—it will be a really good thing.
There are two more things I want to say. The first is about constitutional reform, in part to answer the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). We are right not to forget constitutional reform. The Liberal Democrat party is a party of reform. We have agreed fixed-term Parliaments—a good thing. We have agreed that there should be no transfer of powers to the European Union without a referendum, which is an absolutely reasonable thing. We have agreed that whatever the number of constituencies, they should at least have the same size electorate—a good thing. We have agreed to look at devolution to England, which I have argued for a long time, because there is unequal devolution. Since I have been in this place we have had fantastically successful devolution in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and I welcome it. England needs a bit of the same.
We have agreed that Back Benchers should be more powerful in determining the agenda in this place—a good thing. We have agreed that there will be a change in the laws of succession to the Crown—absolutely a good thing. I hope it will soon be part of the legislative programme. We have more work to do, to make sure we scrutinise legislation better in this place. We do not do it well enough in either place; often we do not have enough time here and we leave it to the other end of the building. That is not a plea for more legislation. In every Parliament I have sat in, we have asked for less legislation and I am glad that we are not trying to jam in all sorts of things that the public do not want. We want fewer regulations and less legislation, but we want to do it better.
Tony Baldry
Does my right hon. Friend think that the Opposition have suddenly started mischief-making over Lords reform, by asking for a referendum? Is it because they hope that in so doing they will cause Liberal Democrat Members to go slow on the equalisation of constituency boundaries? As Labour Members do not want equalisation of constituency boundaries, they hope that by frustrating Lords reform they can frustrate that idea. Can my right hon. Friend assure the House that he and his colleagues are committed to ensuring that a vote in Southwark is worth the same as a vote in Banbury, or in Wales or Scotland?
Simon Hughes
I am keen that we have a system whereby votes in all parts of the country are fair. Of course I would like a proportional system, but I accept that I shall not have that in this Parliament. Friends on the Plaid and other Benches know of my Welsh background. The Welsh have the most advantageous position at the moment, because many constituencies have far fewer electors. We need a fair system.
I do not know what the motives of Labour Members are, but if they try to play silly games and prevent the other place from changing from an entirely nominated or hereditary Chamber to a democratic one, it will be to their eternal discredit. This is the best opportunity they have ever had—especially as they did not do it—to change our Parliament. Why? There are only 15 countries in the world that still have a predominantly appointed second Chamber; I am sure Labour Members would think that Belize and Burkina Faso are good examples. In only one other country is heredity a determinant for membership of the legislature—Lesotho. It is a lovely country, but I am not sure that it is the best model for democratic, 21st-century politics.
There are more Members down the other end of the corridor who are over 90 than under 40. There are 818 Members there already—92 hereditary—and the balance between men and women is 638 to 180. The Chamber is not representative by gender, ethnicity or age. It is not representative in any way. Why not? Because it exists by patronage and heredity. We just have to move on. It has been on the agenda for 100 years and we have to finish the business.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Simon Hughes
No.
I say to hon. Friends on the Conservative Benches who are not entirely persuaded about Lords reform that I understand that it is a lovely place, that they look lovely, some of them are lovely, and that it is part of our great, historic constitution and offers a job for life— I am not going there, but they might want to—so I understand why it touches a soft spot, but come on, guys: we have to move on. If the Tory party is to be the modern party that it wants to be and that the Prime Minister says it needs to be, it, too, must deliver. We can talk about the detail, the percentages and the length of the term of office, but we must end up with a second Chamber that is predominantly democratically elected.
Mr Russell Brown (Dumfries and Galloway) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman mentioned that the regional variations are significant. On the point his hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) made about the reduction in the number of constituencies, is the right hon. Gentleman telling the House this afternoon that what we are all seeing on social network websites is wrong and that there will be no frustration as a result of that reduction?
Simon Hughes
First, I am surrounded by colleagues who say that those who believe social network websites are in trouble. Secondly, most things on them are wrong. Thirdly, they are sometimes libellous. Seriously, I understand the general point the hon. Gentleman is making. I am not a member of the Government and so cannot speak for them, but I can speak for my colleagues here. What we want is a package of constitutional reform that has a fair constituency system. There is an argument about how many constituencies there should be—I was never in favour of the number going down quite as far as it has done, but there was an argument for making it smaller—and there is a strong argument for having equal numbers, but there is an equally strong argument for Lords reform. I hope that Labour will support us in delivering both, and we will be watching.
Simon Hughes
No, because other colleagues wish to speak and I am bringing my comments to a close.
The new President of France said after he was elected on Sunday that his two priorities were a fairer country and support for the next generation, the young people of France. I think that those are good things for us to champion for our country from these Benches. We need a redistribution of wealth and of work, an end to the obscenity of top pay and a closing of the gap between rich and poor. We need to make sure that work always pays, to create more apprenticeships and a more skilled work force, to give more opportunities for employment and self-employment and to build the largest opportunity for infrastructure investment that we can manage, in all countries and regions of the UK, and the largest affordable programme for housing that we can deliver, particularly social rented housing, which is desperately needed in my constituency and elsewhere. I guess that there is not a single colleague who does not have constituents coming to their surgery every week pleading with them to find somewhere where they and their partner, or they and their parents, or they and their children can live. Young people need a decent careers and youth service, decent work experience, decent mentoring, good apprenticeships and good further and higher education.
To the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, I say, “You were right, of course, to take as many poor people out of tax as you have, but please do not again reduce tax rates for the well-off.” Whatever the balance of equity, it came across very badly, it did not look as if we are all in this together and the evidence does not show that any further reduction will do any greater good for the economy. We have had one Budget which does this and we know the outcome, but no more please. Let us take the poorer out of tax, not the people at the top.
To colleagues here who sometimes have disagreements with the Government—we all do—I say that we have to remain strong, united, determined, liberal and radical. We have to be committed to the things we came here for: the spreading of wealth and power and a cleaner, greener, safer and, above all, fairer Britain.
To the people outside who wonder what we are doing in this difficult coalition, I say that we are clear that we cannot achieve everything we want because in a coalition, by definition, that is not possible, but it is better to be in government influencing a huge amount than in opposition influencing nothing. We are determined to use our influence not unfairly, disproportionately or unreasonably, but this is a partnership of two parties. That is the deal and that is what we will stick to.
We won 16% of the vote in the local elections the other day; we won 23% in the general election. It is not an impossible task over three years to build confidence, but it depends on whether we can get the economy going, help growth, make sure that we are seen to be economically competent and deliver a fairer Britain.
I think that we can do it, and Asquith gave us something 100 years ago this year as an encouragement on our way. In his speech in Nottingham to our party conference, at a time when he was leading one of the greatest Governments in British history, he said this—
Simon Hughes
I was not there, no—not even in my previous life!
Asquith said:
“If we have—and I believe you will see that we have—concentration of purpose, unity of spirit, and unshaken firmness of resolve, then, long and stormy though the voyage may have been before it comes to an end, the ship will find her way with a full cargo into the desired haven.”
Liberal Democrats are determined to deliver us safely on the other side and, much more importantly, to deliver our constituents to a better Britain, with better prospects, higher employment, lower unemployment and a much more secure economy for the five years following 2015 than the one we inherited when we took over in 2010.
Mr Iain Wright (Hartlepool) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who I know takes a great interest in Hartlepool—largely because he spent most of the 2004 by-election there trying to stop me becoming a Member.
In his opening and closing remarks, the right hon. Gentleman mentioned elections both general and local, and I have to tell him that after Thursday’s local elections, on Hartlepool borough council the Liberal Democrats now have no representation whatever, which shows the scale of the challenge that he and his party face in terms of getting into bed with the Conservatives.
Mike Crockart (Edinburgh West) (LD)
I am confused by this continuing slur of “getting into bed with the Conservatives”, because in Scotland we now have coalitions of every possible hue, including Labour and Tory coalitions. Does the hon. Gentleman attack those coalitions with the same vigour that he attacks this one here?
Mr Wright
I use the phrase “getting into bed with the Tories” not because it is of my own making, but after speaking to my constituents and people elsewhere who were thinking about voting Liberal Democrat, who might have fallen out of love with Labour following the 2005 general election and who wanted to consider something else in 2010, but who now feel let down and betrayed. That is the scale of the challenge that the hon. Gentleman’s party faces with regard to reinvigorating the trust of the people.
Almost the first words that Her Majesty said in her speech today were:
“My Ministers’ first priority will be to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability.”
Those words were almost identical to the ones that the Queen uttered in the first Session of this Parliament, two years ago, when she stated:
“The first priority is to reduce the deficit and restore economic growth.”
In the intervening two years, the Government have done little that they set themselves on both counts. They have had to borrow about £150 billion more than they originally forecast back in 2010, and they have failed to deal effectively with the deficit and to restore economic growth, because they have focused exclusively—some might say almost obsessively—on the former, reducing the deficit, instead of giving sufficient priority to the latter, economic growth. It should not be an either/or game. Tax revenues are lower because of weak demand and reduced consumer spending, while expenditure is rising because of the need to pay out more in unemployment benefits. The British economy is now in a more perilous state than when the Government took office two years ago.
The Prime Minister and the Chancellor will trot out the excuse of the difficulties experienced in the eurozone, and there is some truth in that, but they cannot escape the fact that the retreat into recession has been caused almost directly by their actions and policies. We are experiencing this country’s longest downturn since the 1920s. Britain is emerging from the deep global recession of 2008-09 more slowly than from previous recessions and, crucially, more slowly than our main economic competitors, meaning that our rivals in the global marketplace are stealing a march on us. The actions of this Government today are compromising our competitiveness in the global economy of tomorrow.
The US economy grew by 3% in the last quarter of 2011 and by 2.2% in the first quarter of this year. Alongside Greece and Italy, Spain is generally—almost universally—acknowledged to be one of the economic basket cases of the eurozone, but even the Spanish economy grew more in 2011 than Britain’s. Today’s publication of UK retail figures, which show a 3.3% fall year on year—the largest fall in more than a year—demonstrates the general weakness of the economy, the lack of demand and the fragility of consumer confidence.
Mel Stride (Central Devon) (Con)
Will the hon. Gentleman congratulate the Government on maintaining our triple A credit rating status and acknowledge the fact that we have among the lowest long-term interest rates in the world at the moment? That is a major achievement.
Mr Wright
We do have those things, but we have no growth. I fear that the rehashing of phrases in the Gracious Speech today—often word-for-word repeats of what was said in 2010—will mean that the Government will continue to insist on economic policies that consign the country to a decade of stagnation, anaemic growth, mass unemployment and rising social division.
Dr Murrison
Will the hon. Gentleman explain how high interest rates will stimulate growth?
Mr Wright
High interest rates do not stimulate growth, but, equally, low interest rates indicate that there is no economic stimulus whatever. We need a rounder, more holistic approach to economic policy that focuses not solely on reducing the deficit, but on making sure that we can stimulate the economy to embark on jobs and growth.
Meg Hillier
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the challenges is the issue of businesses not being able to get loans? The Prime Minister spoke with enthusiasm about Project Merlin and the loan guarantee scheme, but that is not delivering to businesses. There is no contradiction between cutting a deficit and getting banks to lend. It is in the Government’s power to do so, but they are not acting.
Mr Wright
I absolutely agree. Later, I want to mention that we need more investment and to unlock investor confidence and provide more business investment. That is at terminally low rates at the moment.
Emphasis should have been given to a new finance Bill with measures to boost demand in the economy and put more money in the pockets of millions, rather than prioritising tax cuts for millionaires and tax rises for pensioners. Communities such as mine in Hartlepool and the wider north-east see a Government presiding over unprecedented cuts to income, living standards and public services, huge rises in unemployment and matters being made worse by Government measures such as the rise in VAT, hikes in student fees, cuts to tax credits and increased taxes for pensioners.
At the same time, the Chancellor is insisting that the country can afford to give those earning more than £150,000 a year a tax cut and that, in the current climate, millionaires should be given priority and pay about £40,000 a year less in tax. A new finance Bill could have set about repairing some of the damage from the previous Finance Bill, which has been carried over into this Session; it could have put us on the path to economic recovery, jobs and growth.
Andrea Leadsom
It seems rather astonishing that the hon. Gentleman should be suggesting that the Government should be spending more money. Does he run a household budget as I do? When people are trying to feed a family, it is clear that if they borrow lots of money and pay extremely high interest rates—because their intention is to borrow even more money—that will not get them into any position to balance their budget or move on from the parlous state in which they find themselves. Is the hon. Gentleman not aware that we are already paying £200 million a day in interest, just to service the debt that his Government incurred?
Mr Wright
What I am suggesting is that if the Government were serious about economic growth and promoting the conditions for competitiveness and enterprise, they would be doing a lot more to stimulate growth and job creation. For example, they could have announced a British investment bank Bill, which would have provided a clear and welcome acknowledgement that active partnership between Government and productive businesses will allow the state to ensure that growth capital is provided to the small and medium-sized businesses that need it, for which the market has failed.
Active partnership between Government and businesses can work. Successful modern economies such as Singapore and Germany do it, and their economies will see long-term, sustainable business success and economic growth as a result. Even the US, supposedly the most free market economy on earth, does it; we saw the likes of fast-growing young companies such as Apple and Intel receive growth funding through the US Government’s small business investment company programme. On the subject of active government in the US, why did not the Gracious Speech include the British equivalent of President Obama’s Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, which is designed to increase the number of jobs and to kick-start initial public offerings for companies and ensure that they have access to finance for growth? We should be doing the same here.
Mel Stride
Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that according to Companies House there were more new business start-ups in the last quarter than at any time since this Government came to office?
Mr Wright
You will never hear from me, Mr Deputy Speaker, any criticism of trying to get as many start-ups as possible. I would welcome a culture of enterprise and allowing businesses to grow, but firms that are starting up are being penalised by not being given access to finance and capital to allow them to do so.
The Gracious Speech referred to the introduction of
“legislation to reform competition law to promote enterprise and fair markets.”
I hope that the Government will confirm that that Bill will contain measures to curb excessive executive remuneration and encourage increased shareholder activism, as that was not specifically mentioned in the Queen’s Speech. I also hope that they will legislate to implement all—I emphasise all—the sensible and widely accepted recommendations of the High Pay Commission earlier this year on matters such as simplification of executive remuneration, standardisation of reporting to ensure that meaningful comparisons can take place, and, importantly, the inclusion of employee representation on remuneration committees. Recent events at the likes of UBS, Trinity Mirror, Barclays, AstraZeneca and Aviva have shown that there is shareholder appetite for ensuring that poor performance is not rewarded through excessive pay. I hope that the High Pay Commission’s recommendations will be implemented in full.
I hope that the reference in the Queen’s Speech to “repealing unnecessary legislation” will not mean stripping away workers’ rights. Making it easier to fire people does not create jobs, employment or economic growth; instead, such an environment creates a Victorian-mill-owner culture of bad bosses being accepted and enshrined in legislation. It will do nothing to stimulate consumer confidence or growth in demand, which are so very vital. It is also wrong to suggest that the level of employment protection and rises in unemployment are closely correlated, as David Blanchflower points out in his article in The Independent today. He argues that Germany and the Netherlands have much higher levels of employment protection than the UK but experienced a much smaller rise in unemployment during the recession and its aftermath.
Andrea Leadsom
I agree that we have got into a position in this country whereby certain big businesses have behaved extremely badly towards their employees, and towards capitalism itself. That has not been about true entrepreneurism but just money for old rope. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the answer to that is to change the way in which we do corporate governance by introducing new powers for shareholders to ensure that they can hold to account the chief executives and boards of such companies?
Mr Wright
I would certainly agree with making improvements to this country’s corporate governance model. Germany has a good model, and although it cannot be replicated exactly, it is something that we should consider. I have mentioned the recommendations of the High Pay Commission, which referred to employee involvement in remuneration. I hope that that approach will continue. By having a responsible capitalist agenda, we can make improvements to secure long-term sustainable growth in this country. Perhaps the hon. Lady and I can agree on that.
Mr Wright
I speak to businesses in my constituency and elsewhere virtually every day, and they are not telling me that they are hindered in that way. This goes to a wider point about the Queen’s Speech and about the Government’s having the wrong priorities and the wrong values in this respect. I am arguing that we should be concentrating on increasing employment and having a system whereby we can secure long-term sustainable business growth for this country. We should be making it easier for people to hire workers, not fire them.
I hope, too, that the reference in the Queen’s Speech to the limiting of state inspection of businesses will not serve as a cover for further cuts to the Health and Safety Executive’s budget or an undermining of the safety regime in the workplace. On 28 April we commemorated workers memorial day and were reminded that 20,000 people would die prematurely this year from injuries sustained or diseases contracted as a result of unsatisfactory health and safety in the workplace. Fatalities in the construction industry have risen in the past year, and responsible Governments and businesses recognise that a comprehensive safety regime, suitably audited, actually enhances productivity and efficiency and ultimately has a beneficial effect on the bottom line. I therefore hope that workers’ health and safety rights will not be stripped away.
The Queen’s Speech referred to the Government’s commitment to
“improve the lives of children and families”,
with which the whole House would agree. However, today’s report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation forecasts that child poverty will increase in the next decade. It concludes by stating that the Government should take a more targeted approach to employment programmes and aim them at families in my constituency and elsewhere who often have not seen meaningful or sustained work for three generations or so. That could break the cycle of unemployment, poverty, deprivation and the loss of ambition and aspiration. There was nothing in the Queen’s Speech to allow that to take place.
The most serious issue facing Hartlepool both socially and economically is the level of unemployment, which is higher now than it was at the height of the global recession in 2008. Youth unemployment is a particular concern. One in four young men in my constituency are out of work, which will cause immense social and economic problems in the next 20, 30 or 40 years. The Government really need to deal with that, and measures such as the abolition of the future jobs fund, the cancellation of education maintenance allowance and the hike in tuition fees do not help young people in my constituency. I wanted to see in the Gracious Speech something like a future jobs fund or a skills and retraining Bill, to ensure that my constituency and others were best placed to come out of their economic difficulties in a better position than when they went into them. Sadly, the Queen’s Speech was lacking in that regard.
Mr Wright
I believe the balance that the Labour Government struck was probably about right. There will always be different emphases, but I reiterate the point that I made in answer to a previous intervention. Businesses say to me, “We want to have the conditions for growth. We want to be able to hire workers. The issue is not about being able to fire workers more easily—that is not what we are about.” The emphasis and priorities that the Government have set out in the Gracious Speech and elsewhere are completely wrong.
It astonishes me that after only two years, the Government seem to have run out of steam. The rehashing of words and phrases in the Queen’s Speech is evidence of that. It is difficult to think of the big reforming Governments of the past century—the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark mentioned Asquith, and we can think about Attlee, Thatcher or Blair—being devoid of policy areas only 24 months after being elected. Governments used to talk about relaunches after two terms of office, not after two years. The Government have no sense of national mission and have not set out the values that are really needed or what they want the British economy to look like in 2020 or 2030. They lack, in the eloquent words of the Business Secretary, a “compelling vision” of where they want to take the economy.
As The Sunday Times stated this weekend:
“People now regard this as a government that fails on the three i’s: it is incoherent, incompetent and has run out of ideas.”
Today’s Queen’s Speech provided the opportunity for a true and meaningful relaunch, which could have ensured that the Government reassessed their values and priorities and tried again. They failed to do that. This country and my constituency, particularly its young people, will suffer the consequences of that missed opportunity for decades to come.
Mr Stephen Dorrell (Charnwood) (Con)
The hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) was on stronger ground when he talked about the importance of policies and opportunities to create growth to address the unemployment that affects his constituency and many others. Although I did not agree with many of his policy prescriptions, I agreed with his definition of the challenge—I think, from his speech earlier, that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister did, too. However, I did not follow the hon. Gentleman into the closing stages of his speech because he is simply wrong to say that the Government do not have a clear view about what they are trying to do.
I welcome the Queen’s Speech precisely because it refocuses the minds of hon. Members and supporters of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, and more importantly, of those beyond the political world, on the objectives that we set ourselves when the coalition Government were formed. To me, that is the key win in the Queen’s Speech.
Some members of my party have, in the past few weeks, and particularly in the past few days, sought opportunities to strengthen the Conservative flavour, as they see it, in the coalition. I want to offer one or two responses to that, based on the Queen’s Speech, and comment on one or two specific proposals.
As a lifelong Conservative, I have no problem in arguing the case for Conservative ideas. However, I have a problem with those who seek to reinterpret the Conservative case excessively narrowly. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech that cannot be argued full heartedly as a mainstream Conservative proposal. All the measures can be traced to proper Conservative roots and, indeed, to roots in the Liberal Democrat tradition.
There has been much debate, including in the House this afternoon, about House of Lords reform and whether there is a proper Conservative narrative for it. I argue strongly that there is. I intervened on my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) to remind him that it is nearly 50 years since Lord Hailsham, who happened to be Margaret Thatcher’s first Lord Chancellor, described our system of government as possessing inadequate checks and balances on the powers of the Executive. He described it as an “elective dictatorship”, so when my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of Lords is quoted in today’s Financial Times as arguing the case for reform of another place on the ground that it will make that Chamber,
“‘stronger, more independent’ and better able ‘to challenge the decisions of the Commons’”,
I allow myself a gentle cheer. I think that Lord Hailsham, from his grave, would cheer the prospect of our seeking a structure that allows Parliament to be a more effective check on the Executive.
We either believe in the case for less and better government, and more checks and balances in government —as a Conservative, I do; that Governments should be subject to checks and balances and accountability is a core Conservative belief—or we do not. My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House of Lords clearly does. I am delighted that the Government, from both Conservative and Liberal Democrat traditions, believe in the case for more effective checks and balances and accountability to Parliament. I look forward to the conversion of that big idea into precise legislation as the Session goes on.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
I am listening carefully to the right hon. Gentleman, who makes a strong case. I do not know what we will end up with, but does he agree that one way of improving the checks and balances would be through avoiding the strict timetabling of every single measure that comes before the House?
Mr Dorrell
I have much sympathy for that point of view. I have been here for perhaps rather more years than I should, but I remember long debates when parliamentary scrutiny was more effective than it often is now. Before the last general election, there were repeated occasions on which complex legislation passed through on a timetable that suited the Government rather than provided for proper parliamentary scrutiny.
There will be those—I am certainly among them—who will look for ways to strengthen the voice of the House of Commons, as we should. I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), who referred to the strengthening during this Parliament of the Back-Bench voice, which has been a step forward and a good thing. However, those who look for effective checks within the legislature on Executive enthusiasms do well to look at another place as part of the answer to that, in addition to reform of House of Commons procedure.
Therefore, to those in the Conservative party who ask, “Where is the Conservative provenance for House of Lords reform?” I say, “Read the history books.” I will certainly be uncomfortable if we are manoeuvred into a position in which we appear to defend what I regard as a wholly unacceptable Blairite compromise, which we opposed vigorously at the time of the legislative proposals at the beginning of the Labour Government.
Having said all that, it is clearly true that such reform is an important internal process within the Westminster village, but not the key issue that our constituents look to the Government, the Queen’s Speech and the House to address. To again pick up a theme developed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark, we should remind ourselves that the Government are a coalition. Because they are a coalition, they have a large working majority in the House of Commons, which is a good thing in terms of the stability and strategic purpose it provides. However, the majority is more important in another respect: the two parties that make up the coalition have a broader electoral base in the community outside Westminster than has been the case for any recent Government. We have a stable Government with a clear purpose, which was redefined and re-emphasised in the Queen’s Speech and in the speech of my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, and not just a Government cobbled together in the immediate aftermath of the last general election.
At the very heart of the purpose of the coalition Government is the intention to create a stable economic base not merely to address the deficit, but to move on from that to create the environment in which growth begins to re-emerge, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool said. The purpose of economic policy is not to make the books balance—as the Prime Minister said over the weekend, it is not an exercise in accountancy—but to create the environment in which interest rates are low, confidence returns, and growth starts the process of creating jobs in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency and elsewhere.
I find the argument of the shadow Chancellor wholly unpersuasive. He appears to believe that we lack a Government appetite to borrow. How a British Government deliver stability in the Europe of 2012 by building on their already excessive borrowing rate and building more borrowing into our public finances is simply beyond me. I believe that that is unrealistic, but more seriously, I also believe that the shadow Chancellor knows it is unrealistic. If he does, it is not only unrealistic, but dishonest.
The purpose that brought the Government together, which enlists the support of every Conservative and Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament, is the prime objective of recreating economic stability to create growth, so that we can deliver the wealth required to deliver improving standards of living and improving public services. How do we do that? The hon. Member for Hartlepool argued that what we need is a state bank that would make better investment decisions than the private banking sector. I do not agree with that.
What I do agree with are the two key Bills in the Queen’s Speech, one of which is the Bill on banking reform, to address some of the failings that have been identified, not just by politicians but by the Governor of the Bank of England last week and by many commentators. One of the learning experiences of the events of 2005-09 was that the banking system did not have proper risk assurance to reduce the risks that the taxpayer ended up picking up. The process of banking reform is important and I welcome the fact that the Government are pressing forward with it.
I also welcome the fact that the Government are pressing forward with the reform and accentuation of competition policy, because I strongly believe that, once the Government’s finances are under control, the real answer to the question of how to recreate growth, confidence and prosperity in the economy is through a banking system that works and a competitive, free-enterprise economy. That is at the heart of the Queen’s Speech. It has obvious provenance in the Conservative tradition, and it has equally obvious provenance in the Liberal Democrat tradition, and that is why this stream of ideas comes together to create a strong coalition Government.
The Government are not, I am pleased to say, just about economics. They also have a broad-based programme for the reform of public service delivery—in which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education in particular is carrying forward a programme of reform that will deliver strong improvements in our school system and our wider education system as a result of the ideas that we share across the coalition. We also have a shared commitment to the promotion of environmental policies through the Green investment bank. That such ideas are shared across the coalition is the key point that I want to draw out of the Queen’s Speech.
I wish to focus on one specific policy—social care. This is a more techy point than a political ideas point, but it is an extremely important point from the perspective of the people who rely on our health and social care system. There was, of course, an expectation of legislation on social care reform in this Session. What we now have is a commitment in the Queen’s Speech to a draft Bill reflecting a continuing thinking process within the Government—I am pleased to see that the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Burstow), the Minister with responsibility for social care, is in his place. I shall not seek his comments on what I am about to say, but I am glad that he will hear it.
Tony Baldry
In the briefing that hon. Members were sent before this debate by organisations including Carers UK, they actually asked for a draft Bill so that it could be properly considered before final legislation was eventually brought forward.
Mr Dorrell
My hon. Friend leads me neatly to my next point. It seems to me to be an odd argument to suggest that if the Government have not yet clearly made up their mind precisely how they propose to deliver the important issue of social care reform, it then becomes a source of criticism that there is not a Bill with a commitment to legislate. I am old-fashioned enough—as my hon. Friend suggests most of us interested in this issue are—to think that the most important issue is to deliver a clear policy and then to legislate. I do not criticise the insistence that we have a clear policy before we have a Bill and a commitment to legislate.
I welcome the fact that the process of clarification of policy is continuing, provided that it takes us beyond discussion about funding. While Dilnot made some important points about the need for a fairer system of distributing the cost burden among those who pay for social care—some of those ideas will be part of the eventual conclusion on health and social care—the problem is that he was asked to answer the wrong question, and that is becoming increasingly obvious as the public discussion continues. The question put to Dilnot was how to restructure the payment arrangements for the existing structure of social care. But if we step back from the question of funding and look at how care is actually delivered in each locality—between the social care system, the primary health care system and the community health care system—the inescapable conclusion is that the structure is no longer fit for purpose. It was designed primarily to deliver health care to people who had a burden of disease that was the pattern 30, 40 or 50 years ago, whereas today’s health and care system needs to meet the needs of a very different group of patients. It is a difficult thing to measure, but depending on how one chooses to do so, between two thirds and three quarters of the resources employed in the health and care system are devoted to people with long-term, complex needs. Their requirement is for joined-up care that supports them and enables them to lead lives that are as full as possible during the period of their longer life expectancy.
Meg Hillier
As a former carer for two adults with complex needs, I counted that at one point I was dealing with 13 different agencies to provide their care. The right hon. Gentleman seems to suggest that simplification of the system is as important as proper funding. Funding may be a big challenge, but simplification is vital if we are to deliver the domiciliary aspect of care.
Mr Dorrell
I entirely agree with the hon. Lady’s view. Reform of social care is not the same thing as reforming the funding system. In my view, we cannot deliver a good value, high quality health and care system just by changing funding flows. What is required is something more fundamental, which is changing the way in which care is delivered in each locality, in order—as the hon. Lady rightly says—to reduce the number of competing, and often non-communicating, bureaucracies in the system.
If the time that the Government are taking will be used to answer the question of how to deliver more integrated, joined-up care, and then how to pay for it, it will be time extremely well spent. If it is simply a delay while we try to solve the problems of how to pay for the existing system, we will continue to ask the wrong, unanswerable question.
On social care, I have made a specific point, but on the Queen’s Speech as a whole, I have made a more important point with a broader political reach. The Government have a clear purpose, both in our economic policy and in our broader views about the type of society that we are seeking to create. It is not a coincidence that my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden spoke today about liberty and justice, or that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark focused on the importance of individual responsibility and rights as opposed to the collective tradition that comes from parties on the political left. I support the Queen’s Speech and this Conservative-led coalition, because it already has achievements of which both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats can be proud. The Queen’s Speech makes clear the continuing commitment on the part of the Government to build on and follow through the achievements of our first two years.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell), who has once more shown that he is a master of his brief. His remarks about care were thoughtful. Over the coming weeks, we can develop some of the thoughts he has expounded, and undoubtedly he will make an important contribution to this debate, if he has not done so already.
I am tempted into the arena of reform of the other place. I will be honest: it is the least of my worries. As we all know, it began in 1911, and for all I know, in the next century we will still be talking about it—well, we will not, but others will be. I recall the valiant efforts of the late Robin Cook, for example, who was effectively stitched up to fail by the Labour Whips. There are very powerful forces at work within and without the usual channels, so let us not get too excited about sudden reform.
I am sure that Members will recognise, however, that the other place needs reform. Clearly, any Chamber with even a partly hereditary principle has got to be wrong and due for reform, but how do we reform it? Each suggestion seems to have consequences we have not thought about. For example, would elected or appointed Members next door have the same validity, legitimacy and so on? If we empower the other Chamber, will we have a political boxing match with them all the time as we often have within this Chamber? I am sure that we will address those questions, but personally I will not hold my breath in expectation of imminent reform—although I might be wrong, as I often am.
That is not to say that I favour the status quo, but I do foresee problems—some visible ones, some undercurrents —that could stymie our debate. We might come up with wonderful solutions, but with the best will in the world, will they happen? [Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) wish to intervene? I would be pleased to accept an intervention. [Interruption.] It was just the way he was sitting. I beg his pardon.
Dr Murrison
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his invitation to intervene. He referred to excitement in his remarks. How much did he detect across the country in the run-up to the recent elections? I looked but could not find any.
Mr Llwyd
The hon. Gentleman has hit an interesting note. The good people of Dwyfor Meirionnydd were hugely underwhelmed at the thought of House of Lords reform, given that there were at least another 210 subjects they wanted to talk about first.
For what they are worth, I shall leave those comments on Lords reform up in the air—pointless, as they may well be.
The Gracious Speech contained several interesting proposals, but as always the devil is in the detail. Nevertheless, I shall speak on the basis of what I know now of the speech. First, though, I would like to congratulate Her Majesty on her reign and on having been an excellent monarch for many years. I fully welcome the Government’s intention to bring in the groceries ombudsman—I think that is what it is called—in the Gracious Speech. Many of us throughout the House have championed such a thing for a long time. I first came to it in about 2004—2005 possibly—and many people in the Chamber and outside have argued similarly.
As we know, a draft Bill was published and scrutinised during the last Session and might well be the basis of the legislation coming before us shortly. Ministers in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, I and everyone in the Chamber are aware of the crisis in the milk industry, for example. We need an ombudsman with real powers and teeth to tackle these problems, as the right hon. Member for Belfast North (Mr Dodds) said. We owe it not only to the farming community but to the many other suppliers to ensure that the ombudsman can act to good effect. Unless we do that, I am afraid that the measure might prove a damp squib.
Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that it would be sensible to seek amendments to ensure that the ombudsman’s powers are in the Bill and not kept in reserve?
Mr Llwyd
I am always in favour, where possible, of putting the powers in the Bill, because many things happen by way of secondary legislation that slip through on the nod, and suddenly we have unintended consequences and law that is not as workable or useful as we might have thought. I agree, therefore, with the hon. Gentleman.
I have heard it said that there will be a power to name and shame. That is one thing that supermarkets, for example, would be concerned about, but equally there must be a power to impose substantial financial penalties. Small financial penalties will not do the office justice; they must be substantial if they are to mean anything at all.
I referred to the dairy industry. The problems are not unique to Wales—they are across the board—but since 1999 the number of Welsh dairy farmers has halved. This week’s tuppence cut by Dairy Crest has wreaked havoc on many people in north, mid and south Wales. It is said that a cut of between 3p and 4p, for example, means a loss of £65 million to the Welsh dairy sector. I would like the EU dairy package on contracts introduced on a compulsory rather than a voluntary basis, and I hope that DEFRA Ministers will hold a full and frank discussion with devolved Ministers on that basis.
This issue does not only concern dairy farmers, however; suppliers in general are being hammered by the unfair contract terms and pressures being applied. I remember seeing several Ministers about this matter, including Lord Bach, who said, candidly, “I need six or seven names and examples of pressure being applied”, but dairy farmers, concerned about being victimised and losing their contracts, were not prepared to put their heads above the parapet. As one said to me, “Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all.” So, there we are. I understand that there will now be a right to complain anonymously.
I will give the House the example of a farmer in the constituency whom I have the privilege to represent who bottles water—the purest water in Wales, apparently. On occasion, I have even drunk it.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Crispin Blunt)
When desperate.
Mr Llwyd
Well, with something else. [Interruption.]
The farmer came to an agreement with one of the large supermarkets. Believe it or not, it came out like this: the supplier was allowed 1.5p profit per litre of water, but the water was sold by the supermarket for more than 80p. He declined to do it. That 1.5p included travelling from mid-Wales across to Shropshire to deliver the water every day. It simply was not worth his while, yet apparently those terms are typical. We need to get to grips with these issues, otherwise all our home producers —of good vegetables, apples and so on—will say, “Well, it’s not worth it. We’re packing up.” That is the last thing we want.
Dr Murrison
I agree absolutely with the right hon. Gentleman’s remarks about producers and farmers. Of course, my constituents, many of whom farm, would expect me to say that. However, my constituents also require good value for money from supermarkets. Does he agree that it is important that supermarkets can apply pressure to large multinational chains that produce goods and from which consumers need good value? There is a clear difference between the two.
Mr Llwyd
Yes, and one hopes that the ombudsman will be involved in that scenario as well. We shall no doubt consider the Bill shortly, and I hope that that aspect will be covered; otherwise, we will be doing only half the job. I agree with what the hon. Gentleman says.
I shall move on swiftly to the notion of televising court proceedings, which has not yet been mentioned. As a lawyer, I am not in favour of televising advocates, because there could be a danger of their playing to the gallery. I am not saying that many would do so, but some might. I understand, however, that the proposals will follow the Scottish model, which would be very sensible. They would confine the televising to the judge’s summing up and sentencing remarks. That would be helpful, because sentencing remarks give out not only a warning to the public but an indication to practitioners of the penalties that certain offences attract. A period of experimentation would be helpful in this regard.
Much has been said about the recent flurry of activity from active shareholders in companies such as Trinity Mirror and Aviva. I will not rehearse those arguments, but I hope that we will see a strengthening of shareholder democracy. It is abominable that share values can go down while bonuses go up. That makes no sense whatever. We also believe in a maximum wage, with a set differential between those at the top of a company and those at the bottom. That is not a new idea. In fact, it was first floated by the successful financier J. P. Morgan more than 100 years ago. It seems to work well in many spheres, and I would like to see it happening in this context. I would also support workers’ representation in the boardroom, to provide perspective for companies on remuneration and on the business of the company in general. Perhaps we can learn from structures that are already in place in successful countries such as Germany.
I wholeheartedly welcome the notion of the separation of retail and investment banking. The Chancellor will know that that proposal has the support of the whole House; it is long overdue.
Proposals have been put forward for a single-tier pension and, from what I have heard, that seems a good idea. We floated the idea in 2010, with what we called the living pension. This seems to be a similar idea and, whatever it is called, if it is pitched reasonably, it will be a good measure. We all have examples of widows telling us that they have missed three or four years’ work while they brought up their children, and that they are now condemned to receiving a much lower state pension. A single-tier pension would be simpler to administer and better all round. I welcome the notion, at least, although we will need to look into the details that will no doubt appear before long.
On the proposals for procedural changes to adoption, there is certainly a case for ensuring that youngsters who come up for adoption are taken care of with the minimum of fuss and delay. Delay only adds to the heartache. I have no doubt that we all have the best interests of the children at heart, but we must remember that 40% of our courts have now been shut down and tens of thousands of court staff have been laid off. Those staff would have assisted families in their first encounter with the court process. In addition, hundreds of people at the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service—which prepares reports on families involved in placement and, ultimately, adoption—have also gone, and there have been huge cuts in the probation service. There have been cuts in social services as well. How are we going to improve the adoption service against the background of those cuts? I think that there will be problems ahead. I hope that we will be able to achieve those improvements, because there is certainly a case for doing so, but I am afraid that there will be problems.
I can add nothing to what the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) said about the proposals for internet surveillance. He put forward his views on them in the clearest possible way. I actually believe that there is a case for surveillance to enable the security services to carry out their work, but there must be safeguards in place. I am sure that we will be able to discuss that matter further. The proposals for secret courts are doomed to failure from the beginning. What the right hon. Gentleman did not say—unintentionally, no doubt—was that several special advocates have resigned, over the years, because they find the concept so one-sided and unjust that they do not want to be part of it. Should we be perpetuating and extending that system? The answer, quite frankly, is no, and anyone with any concern for the court process would undoubtedly say that that is the proper response.
I am surprised that there was no mention in the speech of the High Speed 2 rail link. We have heard a lot about it over the past few months, but it seems to have gone to ground for the time being. I was rather looking forward to Wales receiving a Barnett formula consequential of around £1.9 billion, which could be spent on improving transport infrastructure across Wales and electrifying the lines that sorely need it.
Geraint Davies
I agree that we should be campaigning for that £1.9 billion consequential for Wales. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, in addition to the case for electrification, there is a case to be made for a reduction in the Severn bridge toll? Traffic across the bridge was reduced by 7% last year, but we need that connectivity to the south-west if we are to build the economy of south Wales.
Mr Llwyd
The hon. Gentleman is right; that is becoming an issue. The decrease in traffic across the bridge in the past two years has been quite stark, and that is not going to help anyone’s economy. I am sure that there is a case for such a reduction, and we should look carefully at it. Otherwise, there could be a drag on further development in that part of Wales, if not the whole of the country.
I would have welcomed further steps towards devolving powers relating to energy generation projects over 50 MW to the Welsh Government. Some of us who took part in the deliberations on the last Wales legislation did not understand how the figure of 50 MW had been arrived at. The result has been that potential developers, often multinationals, can get their developments—windmills, for example, which not everyone is in favour of—pushed through on the nod by the Department in London over the heads of those in the Welsh Government. That is not right. The other side of that coin is that several thousand people in mid-Wales make their living out of developing sustainable energy materials and projects. I would like to see that expanded, which is why I would like the limit of 50 MW to be removed. We need to develop that industry further. It is already moving forward; mid-Wales is like a mini-silicon valley, with thousands of jobs involved. We need to carry on encouraging that, and we are well placed to do so.
I would also like to see Jobcentre Plus devolved to Wales, provided that the relevant budget was also devolved, and there has been talk of that happening. The closer to home that all these matters can be dealt with, the better. The buzz word in European circles used to be “subsidiarity”. The devolution of the jobcentre system to Wales would be an example of subsidiarity at work. There was no mention of it in the Queen’s Speech, but I understand that there is talk of it happening. I can tell the House that, if the system had been devolved, the Remploy factories in Wales would not now be under threat; that is for sure. I believe that that provides a stark example of what not to do in such circumstances.
I do not see any one particular policy in the Gracious Speech to develop economic growth, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr Wright) said in a speech that concentrated on that point. I think economic growth should have been in there. That said, there are some good elements in the Gracious Speech, and I look forward to participating in the debates over the coming months to strengthen some aspects and bring them forward. There is, however, precious little to work on when it comes to creating growth. I believe, as the hon. Member for Hartlepool and others believe, that if cuts are necessary, we need a parallel movement to increase economic growth—otherwise we are tilting to just one side. However, as I said, there are some good things in this Queen’s Speech and I look forward to participating in the debates over the coming weeks and months.
Tony Baldry (Banbury) (Con)
I think that Members of all parties would endorse the support of the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) for the Queen’s Speech proposal to introduce legislation to establish an independent adjudicator to ensure that supermarkets deal fairly and lawfully with suppliers. That is clearly one of many proposals that will have all-party support.
In reflecting on the Queen’s Speech, it is probably sensible to consider where we are and where we have been. In recalling where we are, it is important to remember that the Prime Minister’s party does not have a parliamentary majority. After the general election, it was clearly in the nation’s interest to form a coalition. A coalition, however, requires compromise every day. To govern, the Prime Minister has to agree policy initiatives with a political party very different from his own. In practice, the coalition is working a lot better than many would have imagined. The fact is that the Conservative party did not win enough seats or votes to enable us to deliver all our manifesto pledges. The solution is not to blame the coalition, but to seek to win more votes next time.
Notwithstanding the challenges of the coalition, the Government have, since the general election, embarked on a vast reforming programme unprecedented in modern times to reduce the structural deficit and to put through reforms of the NHS that will enable GPs better to design local NHS services for their patients. The Government have reformed primary and secondary education, introduced a new system of university tuition fees and completely overhauled the welfare system to ensure that as many people as possible can live responsible and worthwhile lives free of state dependency. The Government have capped housing benefit and passed the European Union Act 2011 so that in future any EU treaty that transfers powers to the European Union will be subject to a referendum, and never again will a Government be able to surrender sovereignty to Brussels without the full consent of the British people. On Europe, too, the Prime Minister and the Government have vetoed the fiscal pact. Ministers have swept away pages and pages of planning regulations, but in so doing have still managed to protect the green belt, while providing local councillors and local communities with the opportunity to design and develop their own local plans free of top-down Whitehall directives such as regional spatial strategies.
The Government are introducing elected police commissioners and reforming public sector pensions that would otherwise become unaffordable and unsustainable. Importantly, the Government have taken millions of the low-paid out of income tax and have cut corporation tax. We inherited corporation tax at 28% , but by 2014, it will be reduced to 22%. As a result, the UK will have the lowest main corporation tax rate in the G7 and the fourth lowest in the G20. To help businesses further, the Government have introduced a £20 billion national loan guarantee scheme to get cheaper loans to businesses. These have been bold reforms and they have all been achieved without a Conservative majority.
It is not only that the Prime Minister has had to govern with a party that does not have a parliamentary majority, as the second reality is that the Government have no money—and it is not unreasonable to think that a Government with no majority and no money will have problems. We should never forget that the Labour Government left Britain with a deficit that, at £160 billion, was bigger than Greece’s. The Labour Government gave us the longest and deepest recession on record, so that we were one of the first countries into recession and one of the last countries coming out of recession. We should never forget the telling letter left to his successor by the former Chief Secretary to the Treasury, the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne):
“Chief Secretary, I’m afraid there is no money. Kind regards—and good luck!”
That pithy 13-word message—whether it was tongue in cheek or not—well summed up the 13 years of the Labour Government.
Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)
Does my hon. Friend think it important to remind the House and the country that we are only two years into this historic coalition Government, and considering the economic mess that we were left, it is remarkable how many positive things are in this Queen’s Speech?
Tony Baldry
Yes, this Government have probably achieved more in two years than the Blair Government achieved in the whole of their first term.
Gavin Shuker
Why does the hon. Gentleman believe that we are in the first double-dip recession for 37 years?
Tony Baldry
The hon. Gentleman has just heard me comment on the legacy of his Government, so I find it extraordinary that he has the cheek and audacity to ask such a question. The Labour Government left the country with no money and the biggest debt crisis of our lifetime. Indeed, over many years, this country built up massive debts, which we have to pay off. Of course, it is much more difficult to do that when so much of the rest of Europe is in recession. As I suspect France will soon demonstrate, trying to pile debt upon debt is what got Britain and Europe into such difficulties in the first place. It did not work for Britain over 13 years of a Labour Government and would not work now. The eurozone’s troubles are caused by too much debt, the burden of excessive public spending and the burden of excessive public borrowing. It is not surprising that Government are seeking the approval of Parliament relating to the agreed financial stability mechanism within the euro area.
It is no mean task recovering from the deepest recession in living memory, accompanied as it was by a debt crisis. Our banks had too much debt; our households had too much debt; and the Government had too much debt. As Sir Mervyn King, commenting on the performance of the last Government, observed in “The Today Lecture” that he gave last week while the House was in recess:
“Bailing out the banks came too late though to prevent the financial crisis from spilling over into the world economy. The realisation of the true state of the banking system led to a collapse of confidence around the world...unemployment in Britain rose by over a million....to many this will seem deeply unfair and it is. I can understand why so many people are angry.”
One can speculate only that perhaps more than a million people may have lost their jobs unnecessarily because the previous Government failed to act on warnings from the Bank of England.
Notwithstanding the challenge, Britain has so far hung on to our triple A credit rating. We have kept a lid on borrowing costs and, compared with other countries in the eurozone, many of which are in the process of changing leaders or just starting to tackle their debts, we are thriving.
John Cryer
I thank the hon. Gentleman—or is it right hon. Gentleman? [Interruption.] Well, I am sure he should be right hon., and I shall put down an early-day motion tomorrow to achieve it! Returning to the last election, is the hon. Gentleman aware that at that time both unemployment and the deficit were falling, yet they are both now rising? The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that the deficit is going to be a lot higher at the end of this Parliament than was predicted two years ago.
Tony Baldry
I think we need a bumper book of excuses from the Labour party, explaining why it was not responsible for getting us into the difficulties we face. Let us develop a bumper book of excuses and put all these various contributions into it, saying “Nothing to do with us, guv”! That would be impressive. We must not be complacent. The UK has to rebalance its economy. We need a bigger private sector; we need more exports; and we need more investment. In short, we need to do everything possible to boost growth, competitiveness and jobs.
Geraint Davies
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that the big debate is the balance between the need for growth and the need for cuts to lower the deficit? Does he accept that, as we entered 2010, two thirds of the deficit was caused by the banks and the remaining third by the then Labour Government—who had invested more than they were earning, but who had done so with good reason to project a positive growth trajectory? With hindsight, does he accept that the balance between growth and cuts is wrong, and that we should act on the mandate in Europe and invest more in growth and less in cuts?
Tony Baldry
Since the general election the Labour party has engaged in a wonderful exercise in propounding the motif that cuts are being made too far and too fast. In his autobiography, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer responsibly acknowledges the mistakes made by the last Labour Government. Opposition Members, however, have tried to develop a line that will enable them simultaneously to go around the City of London saying “We are being sensible and responsible about the deficit and about the need to reduce public spending” and, when campaigning, to present the impression privately, on the doorstep of every household in the country, that, given their own way, they would not reduce any individual item of public expenditure. That is a circle that the Opposition cannot square, and until they get real in explaining to the country and the markets how they will actually tackle the budget deficit, they will not be taken seriously as an Opposition, let alone as a Government in waiting.
We must never forget that the present Government inherited a budget deficit of 11%—bigger than Greece’s, bigger than Spain’s, and bigger than Portugal’s. We all know that if we do not deal properly with our debts and with the nation’s deficit it will be impossible to keep interest rates low, and that, quite apart from the benefit that low interest rates provide for businesses and those paying mortgages, they offer us the best prospects of getting out of our present difficult economic situation.
The Government and the Chancellor inherited a deeply dysfunctional economy in which, all too often, the taxes generated by the financial and property sectors in the south paid for higher public spending in the north. As Sir Mervyn King so tellingly testified in his speech last week, it was an economy in which the City had been poorly policed, and in which growth was too dependent on debt. Making clear that we intended to have a credible fiscal plan has helped us in Britain to maintain our top international credit rating and has brought interest rates to record lows, making family mortgages and business loans cheaper. Sticking to the deficit plan means that, having inherited a deficit larger than those of Spain or Greece, we have interest rates similar to those in Germany. Indeed, the IMF’s latest forecast for the UK expects it to grow faster than France or Germany. In considering where we are now, we should not forget that the recent Budget cut taxes for 24 million working people.
Tony Baldry
I love the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)! He left the Chamber for a considerable period, has been back for two seconds, and now wants to intervene. However, because he is very supportive on Church matters, I am happy to give way to him.
Chris Bryant
So much excitement was being engendered by the hon. Gentleman that I felt the need to return to the Chamber. Then I started to listen, which is where I made my mistake. I think the hon. Gentleman said that the present Government had cut interest rates. Can he tell us when they did so? My understanding is that they have been entirely flat since they changed under a Labour rather than a Conservative Government.
Tony Baldry
The hon. Gentleman was so excited by my speech that he misheard me. I made no reference to the Government’s cutting interest rates. What I said was that the Government’s financial and economic policies had enabled us, and were still enabling us, to keep interest rates low, while also ensuring that our interest rates compared with those of Germany. I have absolutely no doubt that if we followed the economic policies advocated by Opposition Front Benchers, we would soon see interest rates, including mortgage interest rates, soaring as a consequence.
The Government have taken 2 million people out of tax, they have continued to freeze council tax, and—as I have already observed—they have cut corporation tax so that we can compete with the rest of the world. Moreover, notwithstanding the challenges at home, Britain is meeting its commitments overseas. We are behaving as one would expect of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, honouring our obligations in Afghanistan, seeking to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation—particularly with Iran—and helping to bring greater stability to the horn of Africa. We are supporting democrats in Libya, and, through the Department for International Development, we are helping to tackle poverty around the world.
We should be proud that Britain is sticking to its aid promises. We are a friend to the world’s poorest, and giving aid represents the best of British values. Some 40 years after they first promised to give 0.7% of their national income in aid, rich countries are less than halfway there. Among the major economies, only we in the UK are on target to meet our commitments. Some of the more Poujadist elements of the press claim that public support for aid is diminishing. I suspect that that is because some two thirds of the public think that we spend up to 20 times more on foreign aid than we actually do. Once people know that our aid budget is just over a single penny in every pound spent by the Government, they are much more supportive.
Understandably, the Session of Parliament since the general election has been unusually long, but it is still impressive that the Government have passed more than 30 main programme Bills since the election to help to reduce the UK’s budget deficit and reform our public services. Their programme has been guided by the three core values of responsibility, fairness and freedom. The new Session will be shorter, so it will provide scope for fewer Bills. I do not think that there was any doubt on the doorsteps about what our constituents want us to focus on. They want us to continue to get the economy going, continue to improve the NHS, and continue to sort out welfare and education; and, importantly, they want us to demonstrate that we are on the side of those who are working hard and doing the best they can for their families.
One of the best-kept secrets of the last Budget is that the Chancellor raised personal allowances—the amount that people can earn before being taxed—so that 24 million middle-earning taxpayers will keep more of their money, and, from next April, 2 million low-paid people will not pay income tax at all. I can tell those who call for tax cuts that this year we have already made the largest tax cuts for more than a decade. I think everyone would agree that we should be doing all that we can to help families who are trying to do the best for themselves.
Of course we need to focus on jobs and economic growth. I am very glad that the proposals in a report by my constituent Adrian Beecroft for streamlining of the rules that make it hard for businesses to hire and fire employees are to be taken up. Redundancy rules, employment tribunals and rules about unfair dismissal all need to be changed, as Adrian Beecroft’s well-researched and well-argued report clearly demonstrates. We should be doing everything possible to encourage employers to expand and employ more people.
It is good news that the Government will reduce burdens on businesses by repealing unnecessary legislation and legislating to limit the state inspection of businesses. It is also good news that they will reform competition law in order to promote enterprise and fair markets. I think that many businesses will welcome the news that there is to be strengthened regulation of the financial services sector, and that the recommendations of the Independent Commission on Banking are to be implemented.
I also welcome the proposals relating to pensions. I think everyone agrees on the need to modernise the pensions system and reform the state pension, and on the importance of creating a fair and sustainable foundation for private saving. Governments must always seek to be on the side of those who save for retirement. I do not think that anyone seriously believes that it is possible to avoid reforming public service pensions in line with the recommendations of the Independent Public Service Pensions Commission.
As co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on carers, I particularly welcome the news that a draft Bill is to be published to modernise adult care and support in England. The health White Paper of July 2010 promised legislation on adult social care in a second session of the present Parliament. We have all had plenty of time in which to read and digest the Dilnot report, which recommended a system under which people would pay the first chunk of nursing care costs and the state would pay after that. Given our increasingly ageing population, we need clarity, and cross-party talks have been taking place for a long time.
I also welcome the news that it is to be a draft Bill. Given such a major overhaul of social care legislation that needs to stand the test of time, and given the number of Select Committee reports on the issue, it is vital that we have an opportunity to get it right by co-operating with the Government, the Opposition and, indeed, every party in the House to produce legislation that seeks to achieve the right outcomes for everyone concerned.
Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)
I agree about the need for cross-party agreement on care for the elderly. We do not want a repeat of what the Conservatives did when they were in opposition, however; they played games over this issue to try to gain short-term political advantage. What we need is a long-term solution.
Tony Baldry
I think we all want a long-term solution, which is why it is sensible for a draft Bill to be published so that everyone can agree the way forward, and so that when a Bill is presented to the House it has all-party support.
May I say in my capacity as Second Church Estates Commissioner that I welcome the introduction of a Bill to reduce the burdens on charities by enabling them to claim additional payments on small donations? Many Members of Parliament are involved in charities, perhaps as trustees or patrons. Church groups often rely on Sunday collections and small giving by large numbers of people. This move will allow extra support for charities.
Like all Members of Parliament, a fair amount of my constituency casework involves helping families with disabled children and children with special educational needs, so I greatly welcome the proposals in the Queen’s Speech to introduce measures to improve provision for such children, and the arrangements for supporting children in family law cases and reforming court processes for children in care. That is important, painstaking and detailed work that should improve the lives of many children.
I do not think too much should be read into the fact that the Queen’s Speech does not contain a specific proposal for a hybrid Bill on High Speed 2. The matter is now before the High Court, which is having to consider several applications on judicial review involving points of law on both the process and substance of the HS2 project. Notwithstanding any judicial review proceedings, however, I continue to hope that the Government will reflect that the economic case for HS2 simply does not stack up.
It is clear that in this Session of Parliament the Government will continue to strive for smaller government, freer competition and greater international trade, and they will continue to pursue policies that have been proven to work in the past and that will also work in the future.
Chris Bryant
On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. On 25 April, I told the House that the Leveson inquiry had published certain information regarding meetings that had been held between Rupert Murdoch and the Prime Minister. I believed at the time that that was the case, but it has subsequently turned out not to be true. I have, of course, apologised to Lord Justice Leveson, but I thought I should take this opportunity to apologise to the House as well. I hope the apology will be accepted. I had no intention of misleading the House; that was purely inadvertent.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
I am grateful to you, Mr Bryant, for your point of order and for putting that apology on the record.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I had not intended to talk about Lords reform today, but I have been provoked to do so by the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes). He said that one of the reasons for House of Lords reform was to encourage more gender diversity in the Lords. He is no longer in his place, but I would point out to him that there are more men in the House of Commons today than the number of women ever elected. We must look at parliamentary reform across the board, not just in the House of Lords.
Greg Mulholland
I agree with the hon. Lady’s point, but does she also agree that we should have a fairer system of voting for Members of both Houses of Parliament?
Meg Hillier
Will the hon. Gentleman allow me to continue for a short while?
One of my principal objections to the current House of Lords reform proposals is that I do not agree with the argument that we are making the House of Lords more accountable by having Members elected for a single term of 15 years without being able to stand for re-election. I cannot see how, in a democratic system, that is accountable. Members of the House of Commons have to face the electorate once every five years, and we have witnessed colleagues losing their seats as the electors have made that decision based either on the individual or their party. That is true accountability, although it has been weakened by proposals to change the boundaries every five years, as some electors will therefore never have the chance to vote again for the MP who has represented them. The Government are doing great damage by reducing the accountability of the Members of both Houses. That is a backward step, but it is being dressed up as reform. We must reflect and improve on these proposals if we are to have real change.
I come at this subject as a democrat. I believe that it is beyond the pale to have even an element of heredity in the House of Lords, and that that is rightly out of kilter with modern attitudes. We must not rush headlong into trying to improve the situation and see any change as an improvement. Instead, we must take measured steps and ensure that Parliament properly represents the people, and that we do not fill the House of Lords with stooges who have been selected by party leaders and who never have to face the electorate.
Although I look forward to our debates on this subject, I have to say that it was not raised even once on the doorsteps in my constituency during the most recent election campaign. Indeed, I am usually out on doorsteps while on roving surgeries a couple of times every month, and the last time I canvassed opinion on this topic everybody said they supported a democratically elected House of Lords save for one person who was of Nigerian origin and believed there was some merit in the hereditary principle. His was a lone voice, however. We need democracy, but not in the way that is being proposed.
The Queen’s Speech was a big disappointment. When I was watching it, I suddenly realised that it was nearly over, but many of the issues I had hoped it would address had not been mentioned. It is flimsy and expresses no compelling vision of what the Government want to achieve for this country. We agree with the opening sentence, but its sentiments were not backed up by proposed legislation. There is also no strategic approach to the economic crisis. We repeatedly hear about the need to tackle the deficit, but there are other issues that need to be tackled alongside dealing appropriately with the Government’s finances.
The Queen’s Speech demonstrates that the Government are out of touch and unfair, and we are also increasingly seeing signs of incompetence. The Prime Minister acknowledged that the economy is a higher priority than House of Lords reform, but the Queen’s Speech does little to tackle the economic problems, and I am particularly concerned for the businesses in my constituency and about unemployment.
The unfairness is seen in the retention of the cut in the 50p tax rate, helping the top 1% of earners in this country, while many of my constituents are keen to work but are unable to find the extra eight hours they will need to continue to receive tax credits. At one end, therefore, families who are doing everything they should—they are working hard and trying to work more, but are unable to find those extra hours—are losing out. What they need is some extra hours from their employer, as it is currently very hard to find another job. At the other end, however, millionaires are saving thousands of pounds in tax. That does not strike me or my constituents as fair.
Fortunately for the Government, I do not have sufficient time to dwell on their increasing incompetence. I might mention, however, the border controls fiasco that has been going on since last autumn. It is continuing now, which is especially serious given that we are in the run-up to the Olympics. I might also mention the youth unemployment figures. The Government’s incompetence in that regard will affect a generation of our young people and their families. There are also the ministerial dalliances with BSkyB, which demonstrate a real lack of appropriateness, to put it politely.
There were some announcements in the Gracious Speech that I welcome. I have long been a supporter of the Green investment bank. My big concern is that it is being introduced too late, even though there will be £3 billion of funding—although not all of it is certain. Will the bank be able to move quickly enough to ensure we secure the green investment required to help businesses grow and create the jobs we so desperately need? The environmental ship might have already sailed to other ports in Germany, China and other countries, whose Governments are far ahead of ours.
I also welcome the flexible parental leave proposals. It is important that people have that choice, but it must be couched in the right way so that women do not feel forced to go back to work and pass over the care of the child, whom they may still be nursing, to their partner. The principle of allowing families freedom over how they manage their own affairs is important, however.
Overall, the Government’s economic policy is hurting and it is not working—not in my constituency. Unemployment is rising. It is the worst we have seen for 16 years and of course, youth unemployment—I am on the record as having spoken about this a number of times before—is a real scourge of our society.
There are a couple of proposals I welcome. I welcome the intention to ensure through the children and families Bill that there is an all-through assessment for children and young adults. Too often, my constituents have experienced breaks in the support for their children, either at the age at which they transfer to a different school or when they transition into adulthood. Personal budgets provide a real opportunity for those young people and their families to have control as long as there are safeguards for the many families with whom I deal who would not be able to manage those budgets themselves. We must not throw out the baby with the bathwater and although I welcome the personal budgets, we must ensure that there is a safety net and support for those who are unable to do the necessary paperwork and to manage the employment side of it. The detail will matter if the good intentions in the Bill are to be met, and I look forward to working with my colleagues on my Front Bench to ensure that those needs are considered.
I hope that the children and families Bill will talk about ensuring that children are protected and supported. That seems to be the general feeling. I am concerned, however, that although the Government are considering protecting and supporting certain groups of children on the one hand, actions by other Ministers on safeguarding—such as the suggestion that faith leaders should be exempt from vetting and, if necessary, exempt from being barred from working with children—are a very worrying step. We must be vigilant about ensuring that we do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The Government are very keen to talk about rolling back the frontiers of the state and rolling back red tape, but as far as the protection of children is concerned, when we put our children—and vulnerable adults, too—in the presence of a stranger, we need some surety that that stranger has been properly vetted. It is not acceptable to rule out one group simply on the basis that they are faith leaders.
Businesses in Hackney have been struggling for some time. We have had some great successes—Silicon roundabout is in my constituency—but they are largely small start-ups and are finding it hard to grow. We have some very innovative business models in a very innovative part of London, but businesses in Hackney are struggling to get loans and even, in many cases, an overdraft facility from their bank. The Prime Minister spoke earlier about Project Merlin, saying that it had worked and that the loan guarantee fund was generous. It is not so much the level of a loan that is an issue, however, but the fact that banks will not loan in the first place. There is an opportunity that has perhaps not yet been missed in the Gracious Speech—we will see whether it has when we have the detail of the legislation—to consider alternative funding methods for businesses. Innovators out there are prepared to fund innovative businesses in a different way and we must ensure that they are properly supported and regulated so that investors and businesses are protected. There are opportunities for more mutuals in the banking sector, which ought to focus on investment in their own areas, helped by their understanding of their locality. They would, of course, be owned by their members.
That brings me on to one thing that was missing from the Gracious Speech. As a Co-op and Labour MP, I was keen to hear the co-operatives consolidation Bill debated during the next Session, but it is not here. Where has that Bill gone? It would have been supported across the House. The previous Government did a great deal to change the law on co-operatives and to provide new legislation that made it easier to set them up, but as that was done piecemeal through different Acts of Parliament, there was room to bring it all together. Consolidation Bills, by their nature, are complicated and difficult, but it would have provided the platform for the introduction of yet more opportunities for mutuals and co-operatives. There is a feeling across this House, shared by members within every party—although it is not necessarily the view of every party—that there needs to be a different way of doing business in this country. If there is a better way of doing business than mutuals, which are owned by their members, who benefit from and see the direct outcomes of that ownership, I do not know what it is.
There is no commitment in the Queen’s Speech to introduce any mutual models at all, as far as we can see. The water Bill would have offered such an opportunity and the energy Bill might have offered opportunities for some mutual solutions, as would, of course, the banking Bill. We need new measures on demutualisation and we have already missed an opportunity through the selling off to the highest bidder, rather than remutualisation, of Northern Rock. If the House is united on the need for banking reform, why not join that up with the idea of the mutual model and ensure that businesses as well as individuals are supported by mutuals?
Another element missing from the Bill that is a concern to my constituents and to me is the antisocial behaviour legislation that we had hoped might be introduced. The message is very confused. One whole year ago, the Government’s consultation on antisocial behaviour finished. They have done the work, yet 12 months on there is no Bill in the Gracious Speech to deal with those issues. A year ago, the Government all but announced their intention to end antisocial behaviour orders, but there is no Bill to do that and the police and residents are left confused about where they stand.
The Government regularly pass the buck to local police forces when challenged on crime issues, but they are robbing them of the tools to do the job. We know that ASBOs require better enforcement and we accept that they are not perfect in every way, but they could be strengthened to deal better with the problem of repeat victimisation. The Government should be trying to build on what is in place and on what has been shown to work, rather than starting again from scratch. We hear that the Government has a plan for a community trigger, which would only guarantee action if five different households reported the same incident. For me, if one person complains, that incident of antisocial behaviour needs to be tackled. It should be taken seriously and investigated.
We also have an alphabet soup of other proposals. The crime prevention injunction and criminal behaviour orders do not do what they say on the tin. I know from experience with gang injunctions in Hackney that it can take a very long time for agencies on the ground to get used to the new powers, for the Crown Prosecution Service to deal with them properly, for courts to understand them and for them to embed. ASBOs might not have been perfect, but they were in the language of my constituents and of constituents up and down the country. People understood them and so did the system. To throw them out without having proper plans in place to replace them is a big mistake.
My constituency has a number of challenges. We have heard from others about youth unemployment. In my constituency, one in four young people under the age of 24 is out of work. Our overall unemployment rate is 12.7%. Those challenges have a major impact on child poverty. There are still children in my constituency who turn up to school in September after a long summer holiday malnourished, because their parents have chaotic lifestyles and have been unable to get them fed. We all support measures to get people into work, but to have a whole generation of young people who are unable to get work or work experience will, I fear, lead to greater challenges for their children.
I do not have time to go into the figures for the ethnic breakdown of unemployment, but let us just take the example of young black men. About 55% of young black men are out of work, which is a staggering figure and much higher than the general norm. It risks becoming a real divide in this country if it is not tackled. It might not be an issue for every hon. Member in this House—as the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi) said, his is not a kaleidoscope county—but let me tell hon. Members that my constituency is a kaleidoscope constituency, as are many others. It is a great strength of our area, but we must not have one group of people so badly affected by Government policy.
Other issues have not been tackled. Housing benefit levels have been cut, rents have continued to rise by a great deal in my constituency and house prices have risen, too. That means that my constituents face a real challenge on housing and homes and nothing in this Queen’s Speech will tackle that, which is a serious mistake. It demonstrates again how the Government are very much out of touch with what really matters to people. Families want to be in a position to support themselves and my constituents’ requirements are very limited in many respects. They are not as demanding as they should be, I believe, but they want a job, a good school for their child, a health service that will work and to know that they can afford a roof over their heads. The job and the roof over their heads are particular challenges at the moment, so although we have these esoteric debates in the Westminster village about House of Lords reform—an issue not once raised on the doorstep—and as much as I think we need to reform the House of Lords, right now the energy of this place should be focused on how to move this country forward, invest in jobs and growth and ensure that we create job opportunities and homes for constituents in my constituency and up and down the country.
Mr David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
I congratulate the Government on the Gracious Speech and the measures in it. There are two proposals about which I am concerned—House of Lords reform and the televising of court proceedings—which I shall address in a moment. First, however, I have to say how lucky we are to have a monarchy in this country. We tried a presidency under Tony Blair, and what a disaster it was: indeed, we are still suffering the consequences of that presidency, which took us into an illegal war with Iraq, destroying the United Kingdom. How I wish that I and the other 17 Members of the House who wished to impeach him at that time had been successful. Now, he is going around not only our country but the rest of the world still earning money at our expense.
Charlie Elphicke
Has my hon. Friend noticed that as well as earning money at our expense Tony Blair does not seem to pay an awful lot of tax?
Mr Amess
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, Tony Blair gave evidence at the inquiry last year and I hope that when the report comes out, the matter will be dealt with. To have him as a special peace envoy in the middle east is absolutely ridiculous.
So, I rejoice in the fact that we have a monarchy. I always think that Conservative Queen’s Speeches are better than Labour Queen’s Speeches and today is no exception. I am delighted that we heard today that the Prime Minister is determined to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability. I enjoyed the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Tony Baldry) who was right to remind the House what a disastrous economic legacy Labour left us.
I absolutely agree with the remarks that a number of Members made about policies that we talk about in this House that are not mentioned on the doorstep by our constituents. Last Monday, some Conservative Members got together and had a party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the election of a Conservative Government on 9 April 1992. At that party, which the Prime Minister attended, we were delighted to launch a pamphlet called “Basildon—Against all Odds”. The Prime Minister generously referred to the victory in Basildon, and I was delighted that he visited my old constituency yesterday and talked broadly about policies because I think we need to reflect on the things that took us back to government in 1992. There in Basildon, 20 years ago, voters locally wanted to support what were then the Conservative party’s policies. What were those policies? Giving every woman, man and child the opportunity to make the most of their God-given talents. I know that 20 years later our country and the world have changed but I say to my Conservative colleagues that we should reflect on the policies that brought us back to government in 1992 and I recommend that they read “Basildon—Against all Odds”, which is a very good pamphlet.
Meg Hillier
The hon. Gentleman might regret giving way. It seems to me that he is living in the past. Why is he having to celebrate an electoral victory from 1992? Is it because there were not enough electoral victories to celebrate on Thursday?
Mr Amess
I am very happy to talk about Thursday. I think that during the whole day the BBC’s parliamentary programme broadcast pieces about the 1992 election. It was something worth celebrating.
Speaking of irrelevant issues, last week I got a phone call from someone about the Leveson inquiry and so I got quite excited.
Geraint Davies
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that in 1992 his party was laying the siege for 1997—doubling crime, cutting the health service and having 15% interest rates with soaring debt and unemployment? That is precisely the same template as his Government are adopting now, so for once I find myself agreeing with him.
Mr Amess
I do not accept what the hon. Gentleman says but I am sure that you would get a little tired, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I were to rehearse all that has gone on in this place in terms of the Conservative party leadership.
I hope that the House will be interested in the telephone call I got regarding the Leveson inquiry. I thought, “Fantastic—someone has hacked my phone: I’m in the money.” But instead I was told that my phone number had been found in a journalist’s phone book. Well, for goodness’ sake—so what? I am sure that many journalists have our phone numbers. I was very disappointed to learn that my phone had not been hacked. Frankly, I cannot think that some of the politicians whose phones were hacked would have had any conversation worth listening to. I am interested in colleagues’ phone calls only if they happen to concern me. There is an obsession with hacking at the moment. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) just came and apologised about something to do with the Leveson inquiry, but none of our constituents are raising these matters on the doorstep. Honestly, the amount that this inquiry is going to cost us—millions of pounds—is crazy.
Similarly, no one on the doorstep is mentioning House of Lords reform. I go back to the point that what people were concerned about in 1992 was the fact that they did not trust the noble Lord Kinnock and the Labour party to run the country because of their economic policies.
John Cryer
On economic competence, I hope that the hon. Gentleman had a good celebration in 1992, but does he remember that a few months later we had Black Wednesday, when £20 billion was spent on propping up the currency and interest rates rose twice in a day, ending up at 15%? Does he recall that with the same fondness?
Mr Amess
I remember that only too well because I happened to be in Japan with the now Foreign Secretary who was then the parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor; I was the PPS to Michael Portillo, and we got called back. The hon. Gentleman wants to lead me down a track to do with Europe and shadowing the Deutschmark, but I shall not succumb.
I congratulate the Government on the banking reform Bill. Shortly after the election, the Chancellor announced the creation of the Independent Commission on Banking, which was asked to consider structural and related non-structural reforms to the UK banking sector to promote financial stability and competition. Any reforms should be implemented by 2019. No doubt there will be lots of discussion about this legislation, which I hope will at long last bring about fundamental reform of the banking system. It will include the ring-fencing of retail banking and measures on capital adequacy requirements. There will be radical reforms in the Bill which are needed entirely because the Labour Government and the previous Prime Minister completely destroyed the banking sector through what went on with the Financial Services Authority. They should be absolutely—[Interruption.] Some Labour Members, although not all, have a very short memory about what happened at that time. The financial crisis originated in the financial sector and so I believe that regulation is very important. London is the capital of the financial world and we need to lead the globe in these reforms.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
The hon. Gentleman has mentioned the legislation on changes to banking, which we agree with and look forward to. Does he think the banks should be listening to what is happening now so that they can make changes in anticipation of the legislative changes to enable small and medium-sized businesses to acquire the money they should already be able to get but which is being denied them at the moment? We hope the new legislation will give those businesses that opportunity.
Mr Amess
I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman. Some of the banks have forgotten everything that happened. They are not lending particularly to small businesses and I agree with him that they should act now rather than wait until the Bill becomes an Act.
The right hon. Member for—it is a Welsh constituency —[Hon. Members: “Dwyfor Meirionnydd.”] Well, it is in Wales. I am glad that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) mentioned the draft Groceries Code Adjudicator Bill. In 2008, the Competition Commission conducted an inquiry into the UK grocery market, because of concerns that supermarkets were exploiting their supply chains. The right hon. Gentleman was spot-on with the points he raised. The draft Bill was published last year and will establish an adjudicator. The right hon. Gentleman expressed some concerns about the powers, and another Member—I think it was the hon. Member for Luton South (Gavin Shuker)—asked whether they should be in the Bill. It is good that an adjudicator will be appointed, with the power to investigate a grocery firm with revenue in excess of £1 billion if it is suspected of breaching the code relating to its suppliers.
It is vital that we do everything we can to help small businesses in these troubling times of austerity. That certainly includes grocery suppliers that are often family-run local businesses. There is no doubt that the major supermarkets have a monopoly in the United Kingdom grocery market, so I welcome any steps to prevent them from using their powers to leave their suppliers out of pocket.
Jim Shannon
The hon. Gentleman is right to mention the importance of having a grocery ombudsman. Over the last three years, 3,000 small businesses related to farming and the supply of large stores have gone out of business. That is a real concern. Does he feel that legislative change will prevent that and does he think it will come quickly?
Mr Amess
I believe that the Bill will achieve that end and that it will be effective. I know how tough things have been for farmers, particularly in Northern Ireland.
It is important to have a balanced grocery market, where suppliers get a fair deal. There will be further benefits for consumers, because they will be able to buy the best of British produce, which will make the market more sustainable.
The hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), among others, mentioned adoption and family matters. Pro-life Members will have been sad to hear that Phyllis Bowman died at the weekend. With the late Lord Braine, she did iconic work on pro-life matters and I pay tribute to her.
I was delighted to see that there will be a Bill on adoption and family matters. Some years ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) introduced a measure on adoption, but we badly need updated legislation. It will remove the absurd barriers that make the adoption process difficult. A new six-month limit on care proceedings will be introduced in England and Wales, and the law will be changed to ensure that more children have a relationship with their father after family break-up. All Members get letters from constituents about that difficult issue.
I welcome the provision for mothers and fathers to swap their parental leave allowance after the birth of a child. The Leader of the Opposition said that the Opposition would support the measures. The Prime Minister is right to be passionate about giving children a good start in life.
I welcome the measures to deal with the royal succession that were announced by Her Majesty in the Gracious Speech. Very much in the future, when there is a change of monarch we shall have King Charles, but if Princess Anne had been the oldest child she would not have succeeded. Anyone who knows Princess Anne applauds her hard work; she does a wonderful job. I am delighted that there will be a change to the law on royal succession. As a Catholic, I suppose I am biased, but I am also delighted that Catholics will finally be allowed to marry into the royal family.
I am already sick to death of hearing about Lords reform, even before we spend 18 months going on about it. If anyone wants to know what is wrong with the House of Lords, I can tell them that it is the Labour party, which completely messed up the House of Lords without a plan for dealing with it. I do not address my remarks to Labour Members elected in recent years, but it was a bit rich to listen to speech after speech from Labour Members who condemned the House of Lords and everything it stood for, and the next minute accepted a peerage. There is no consistency.
When the Labour Government took office in 1997, they thought for narrow class reasons that they would get rid of the House of Lords—all those hereditaries, all terribly posh—but there was no actual plan for reform. As a Conservative Member of Parliament, I am totally against the Americanisation of our system, so I am opposed to a wholly elected second Chamber, which would definitely be in competition with this place. I agree with the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, who asked how it could be fair to have Members elected for 15 years. It certainly is not fair. I hope that we shall not waste hours and hours of precious time arguing about House of Lords reform. I know that the Liberals are keen on it—
Martin Horwood
On the subject of consistency, House of Lords reform was in the Conservative manifesto. Surely, if we all agree on a predominantly elected second Chamber, it should not take that much time.
Mr Amess
I suppose the get-out clause is that we did not have a solely Conservative Government, but a coalition, so there was a compromise. I certainly was never in favour of reform. In the other place, there are women and men of wonderful experience, who bring great value in a revising Chamber. I am totally opposed to having the second Chamber in competition with this place.
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend is being extraordinarily generous in taking interventions. Is not part of the problem that the House of Lords used to be a brilliant revising Chamber but then Tony Blair, who is now to be found in various parts of the world making money and not paying tax, stuffed it full of cronies and wrecked the flavour and excellence of that House? He made it the broken place it is today because of Labour’s galactic incompetence in government.
Mr Amess
I agree with my hon. Friend that there are now so many peers that apparently they cannot all find a place for prayers. It is crazy. There are too many Members in the House of Lords—nearly 1,000. It is a complete mess and I do not want this Chamber to waste hours and hours talking about something on which we will never agree. It is certainly not No. 1 in the list of priorities of the British people.
I welcome the proposal for a National Crime Agency. My right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) is an expert in such matters and I shall not compete with him; I will speak in more simplistic terms. Phasing out the National Policing Improvement Agency is a good thing. Creating a National Crime Agency will help further to tackle serious crime in the UK. As we have seen over the past year, our border forces and urban police forces can be overwhelmed, so the establishment of the agency will help to ease the burdens and protect us against one of the most serious threats facing this country—organised crime. It costs the United Kingdom between £20 million and £40 million in social and economic terms, and affects the most vulnerable people in society. Only yesterday, we heard the judgment in the terrible case of girls who had been groomed. I hope that the Bill can deal with that sort of issue and tackle it head-on. I hope the whole House will come together to support such welcome measures.
On the defamation Bill, I do not know how honourable colleagues feel, but I am certainly libelled morning, noon and night and do not have the money to defend myself. A range of concerns have been raised about the detrimental effects that the current law on libel is having on freedom of expression, particularly in academic and scientific debate, the work of non-governmental organisations and investigative journalism, and about the extent to which this jurisdiction has become a magnet for libel claimants. I do not want to upset my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), who is a Queen’s counsel, but the law has become so expensive in this country that I do not know how ordinary women and men can possibly defend themselves.
Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of our constitution, but it does not mean that people should be able to ride roughshod over the reputations of others. When someone writes to the newspapers these days, the letter is published on the internet and in no time at all there are very insulting comments posted on the website, particularly if the letter is about a politician, and we do not seem to have any legislation to deal with that. Therefore, our defamation laws must strike the right balance between protecting freedom of speech and protecting people’s reputations, and that includes those of Members of Parliament. I know that we are No. 1 on some people’s hate list, but the overwhelming majority of Members of Parliament are here for the right reason and do a jolly good job, and I am getting a little fed up with our being continually insulted and considered fair game, which I think is very wrong indeed. I want slander on the internet to be prevented. Her Majesty said that legislation would be laid before us. I know that we already have 14 Bills and four further measures, but I hope that there will be time to introduce legislation to deal with slander on the internet relating to comments on media articles. I think that there should be much tighter controls and more severe punishments.
There is no point in any of us being Members of Parliament unless we have some real power, and over recent years our heads have been down and we have lost so much of our power, so we need to reassert it. I hope that the Government will consider introducing a measure to enable far greater scrutiny of public bodies. I will give the House one example. I have been on a mission in relation to Essex police—two Essex colleagues on the Government Benches are present—because I knew from the outset that the chief constable of Essex was chosen from a shortlist of one, which is absolutely outrageous. It has happened and nothing has been done about it; we just accepted it because we are more concerned about hacking and reform of the House of Lords. How could the Essex police authority allow the chief constable to be chosen from a shortlist of just one? That is unacceptable.
Charlie Elphicke
Is that not why elected police and crime commissioners are such a good idea, because we can get the right chief constables and make police forces much more effective and responsive in cracking down on crime?
Mr Amess
My hon. Friend is absolutely right and that is what I was about to say. I hope that in November there will be a huge turnout in Essex and we will elect a very good commissioner.
Another point about Essex police is that I have had to resort to using the Freedom of Information Act to get confirmation that the chief constable was chosen from a shortlist of one. Why should a Member of Parliament have to use the Freedom of Information Act? Then there is the closure of police stations. When the Leigh-on-Sea police station was closed there was no consultation. The consultation took place in the car park of a large supermarket in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), which is on the other side of town, and received about 20 responses, which meant that they could close the police station. That is not good enough, which is why I think Members of Parliament should get power back from some of these public bodies. I have been trying to find out more information about Essex probation service, the Crown Prosecution Service in Essex and a range of public bodies. Members of Parliament are scrutinised all the time and have to submit themselves to the electorate. Why cannot we have more scrutiny of at least the management of public bodies? I hope that the Government might consider introducing a Bill to deal with that matter.
I said earlier in my speech that I was concerned about the proposal to introduce the televising of sentencing in major criminal trials. I thought that the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, who mentioned it earlier, was going to agree with me entirely, but he threw me when he said that it works well in Scotland. As far as I am concerned, once the TV cameras get into our courts it will not end there. Coverage will get wider and soon we will be like America, with coverage for the trial of the basketball player who shot someone, or whatever it was he did, and the cameras panning across to see the jurors. I think that cameras would be a very retrograde step.
Mr Llwyd
I clearly understand the hon. Gentleman’s fears, but if he looks at what has happened in Scotland over the past seven or eight years, he will see that televised coverage is strictly confined to sentencing remarks and possibly the summing up by the judge and there is nothing whatsoever outside that remit. Given that there will be only an experimentation period, his fears might well be allayed. Clearly, I would share his concerns if coverage were to be extended in any way, but it is limited to an experimental period and confined strictly to such use.
Mr Amess
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman is right—he obviously knows much more about the proposal and where it came from than I do—but I am puzzled about who thought it was a good idea; has the proposal somehow come from the media? At first, televising this place was going to be static, but all that has gone out the window. Once we let the TV cameras into our courts, it will become an opportunity for voyeurism of the worst possible kind. I cannot understand why we need to see the judge deliver the sentence. Will it be shown on “News at 10”, or will there be a dedicated channel?
Mr Llwyd
The limited televising would help with legal education and it would help practitioners. For example, when we had the awful riots in August, some courts were not sure how to deal with the circumstances, which were exceptional. If anything of that kind happened again—God forbid—televised remarks of sentencing in the courts would be available so that people would know exactly where they are going and what the going rate is. It would be a deterrent to those members of the public who might otherwise get involved and it would also have an educative process. I seem to be defending the Government on this, and I really should not be.
Mr Amess
I hope that the right hon. Gentleman is right, but I have grave concerns about the proposal. Will it be like the guillotine, with everyone standing around gathering heads, and will it become gory? We will have to see what happens.
In conclusion, I welcome the measures in the Gracious Speech concerning the energy Bill, the interception of communications Bill—I thought that a co-operative Bill would be included—public sector pensions, individual electronic registration, EU accession treaties and the justice and security Green Paper. I think that this will be a year of real celebrations for our country. We have the diamond jubilee, the Olympic games and the Gracious Speech leading our country back to recovery.
John Cryer (Leyton and Wanstead) (Lab)
It is always a pleasure to follow the sane and balanced observations of the hon. Member for Southend West (Mr Amess). Given that the hon. Gentleman brought up the issue of the Iraq war and the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, I remind him that I voted against the war—I think seven times, but certainly six. I did not have any particular prescience or a crystal ball, but some of us could very early on see that it was going to be an horrendous mistake. It was entirely wrong, and we opposed it every step of the way.
I remember the hon. Gentleman asking the then Prime Minister during Prime Minister’s questions:
“What plans he has to visit Southend, West.”
The answer was:
“I have no plans to visit Southend—and I rather think that the hon. Gentleman did not either, until he saw the writing on the wall in Basildon.—[Official Report, 19 May 1999; Vol. 331, c. 1061.]
That might explain his criticism of the former Prime Minister.
I, like many hon. Members, note that House of Lords reform is not exactly the centre of my universe. I do not lie awake at night fretting about it, but a number of speeches today have prompted me to make a few comments on it. The right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), at the end of his remarks, seemed to imply that the Government will come along with proposals meaning that the new upper House, whatever it is called, will be 100% elected. I suspect that that is wrong, and that the proportion will be 60%, 70% or perhaps 80%—a range of options, just like the previous Government gave the House some years ago.
I have always voted for 100% elected when the opportunity has come along. I have never sought that opportunity, but when it has come along I have always voted for 100% and against anything less than that, and, if the opportunity arises again, I personally—I do not speak on behalf of my party—will oppose anything less than 100% elected, although I would rather not spend any time on the issue at all.
On a related issue, the Chamber that requires more urgent reform than the House of Lords, which after all is just a revising Chamber, is this one. I agree with the earlier comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier), but another problem with this Chamber—to which many references have been made for many years—is that power has flowed from it to Whitehall, Downing street and Brussels for about 40 years or even more.
In conversation a while ago with the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), I mentioned that power had been flowing from the elected Chamber to unelected institutions for the past 40 years, but he said, “It’s been much longer than that. Power has been taken away from the House of Commons since roughly 1880.” I do not know whether he was around in 1880; I certainly was not! I am sure that if he had been he would have told MPs then that their proposals were an absolute outrage and a betrayal of the parliamentary principle, but prior to that Back Benchers dictated all business on the Floor of the House. It never happened again; it was taken away during that period.
In the relatively recent past, we have had the Jopling proposals, in 1994 under John Major’s Government, followed by the more rigid measure of timetabling, which was introduced post 1997 and which, by the way, I also voted against. Those two things—particularly the Jopling proposals—have cemented a relationship between this place and Whitehall which is entirely unbalanced and needs to be brought back into balance.
That leads me on to an incident that occurred when I was an MP previously, for Hornchurch, with Eric Forth, the much missed, late Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, who was a great parliamentarian and a terrific speaker. He was speaking against everything that had happened since 1994, against timetabling and guillotining, and I pointed out from a sedentary position on the Government Benches that he had actually supported the Jopling proposals. I probably used some fairly Anglo-Saxon language when doing so, but Eric’s response was, “Well, I regret it now and wish I had voted against them.” Funnily enough, he was in opposition at the time.
I shall move on to two issues that do concern my constituents. Like many in the Chamber, I have worn myself out over the past few months knocking on doors, and, as everybody else who has spoken today has said, nobody on the doorstep or at street surgeries mentioned House of Lords reform, but two issues that were mentioned day in, day out were, first, housing and the appalling state of accommodation—certainly in my constituency and many others in England, Scotland and Wales—and, secondly, economic insecurity. Those two things were right at the top of the agenda day in, day out during the campaign.
The Queen’s Speech mentions housing in passing, I suppose. It states:
“My Government will strive to improve the lives of children and families.”
The problem is that the lives of children and families in my constituency are not being improved; they are going in the opposite direction. In Leyton and, to some extent, in Leytonstone, both of which are in my constituency, we are seeing almost Victorian levels of overcrowding, with appalling cowboy private landlords treating people terribly, and the waiting list in Waltham Forest, which makes up most of my constituency, is now more than 20,000.
Meg Hillier
I do not know whether my hon. Friend has the same problem in his constituency as I have in mine, but, with the housing benefit cap, many of my constituents, including working families and those with children, are being forced out of their homes and I am not sure where in London they can go to find accommodation at the right level in the private sector. Surely this too is a concern and rather flies in the face of his generous reading of that one line in the Queen’s Speech.
John Cryer
I completely agree, and I see exactly the same experience. Owing also to the acute shortage of public housing in my constituency, people are being told, “You’ll have to move to Walsall,” “You’ll have to move to Derby,”—here, there, right across the country. One woman who was in emergency accommodation and had suffered a bereavement—her husband had died and her daughter was in a terrible state—came to see me, having been told, “You’ve got to move to Walsall, and next Tuesday, by the way.” That was on a Thursday, and she was being told that she had to move to Walsall the following Tuesday. In a civilised society, that is a pretty appalling way to treat somebody.
That brings me on to economic insecurity. Since the general election alone, 70,000 to 80,000 construction jobs have been lost in Britain, and in fact it is probably more than that by now; those are the latest figures I have. The stagnation of the economy is also an enormous worry to an awful lot of my constituents.
On the eurozone, the Government, rather than helping to prop up a currency that is clearly collapsing, should encourage countries such as Greece to leave the euro and get their economies moving again, because that is the best way to stimulate our economy—through exports to eurozone countries, which at the moment do not have the cash or resources to buy goods from this country or others, such as Germany and North America. The idea, which the Prime Minister reiterated this afternoon, that we are not bailing out the eurozone is simply a myth. We are giving increasing amounts of money to the International Monetary Fund, which then hands over increasing amounts of money to the eurozone, so the idea that we are not in one way or another bailing out eurozone countries is an absolute myth. It simply is happening.
There was also a line in the Queen’s Speech that quite disturbed me. It stated:
“My Government will seek the approval of Parliament relating to the agreed financial stability mechanism within the euro area.”
There must be elements of the fiscal compact within that stability mechanism, and as sure as eggs is eggs the fiscal compact will be included in the Bill that this place and the other place will have to pass. In reality, that too will go in the direction of the eurozone, meaning the centralisation of power in Brussels, increased austerity throughout Europe and increased poverty. I find it extraordinary that Governments in western Europe will do almost anything to prop up the euro.
Charlie Elphicke
The hon. Gentleman has long been known in this place for his passion on the matter of Europe. Does he believe that, with the elections in Greece and France and the problems in Spain, the euro is sustainable however much money is now pumped into it?
John Cryer
My own view is that, no, the euro is not sustainable, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, rather than helping to sustain what is effectively a broken system, should encourage countries such as Greece and Spain to find a way out and a way of exerting power over their own economies, because that is how the eurozone more disparately is going to move forward.
I remember listening to an interview with a European Commissioner on the “Today” programme a few months ago, just as Greece was being plunged into the crisis that it is still in. The questioner said that there was increasing unemployment and poverty in Greece—even then, there were reports of malnutrition among Greek children—and asked whether it was fair that the people involved should pay the price for saving the euro. The Commissioner said, “Well, life’s not fair.” That is extraordinary. She expanded on the comment, because she realised that she had made a mistake and let the cat out of the bag, but her initial comment was that life was not fair—in other words, that ordinary people had to pay the price for mistakes made by the wealthy and powerful.
Sadly, our Government are pursuing a slightly less frenetic version of the “Eurosadist” economic policy practised in Greece, Spain, Portugal and one or two other countries. Yet what we are seeing everywhere across Europe is a rebellion against that austerity. The latest example, obviously, is France, where Hollande has specifically rejected the austerity programme. In Greece, the party that came from nowhere to second in the poll has specifically rejected the programme and is now in the process of trying to form a Government.
What people told me continually on the doorsteps during the recent campaign was that those who caused the crisis and who made the decisions years ago—the bankers, the wealthy and the powerful—are getting away with it and that those paying the price are the most vulnerable and least able to pay during this crisis.
Increasingly, I see home repossessions, economic insecurity and less confidence in spending money because of that economic insecurity. Just to make the situation that bit more insecure, the Government now propose to attack rights at work, make it easier to sack people and reduce health and safety inspections at work. That will make people even less confident, because they will be worrying about losing their jobs. It will be easier to sack people and there will be fewer health and safety controls, particularly in the construction industry and other dangerous industries. The result will be an increasing turn in the downward spiral, further into recession—and perhaps, over the next couple of years, even into depression.
What really worries me, although not so much in respect of this country, is that in many countries across western Europe—particularly Greece, Spain and Portugal —we are starting to see the beginnings of the rise of the far right. Take Golden Dawn in Greece, for example. If we think that the British National party and the English Defence League are a dangerous bunch of fascists, we should see what Golden Dawn is like—it is 10 times worse. For the first time ever, Golden Dawn has representation in the Greek Parliament. That is a direct result of the appalling austerity measures unleashed on the Greek people. Unless there is a change of direction in the eurozone and this country, my fear is that right across Europe we will see the rise of the far right.
Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)
It is a delight to be called to speak in this debate on the Gracious Speech. I want to dwell on one or two of its themes that are of great interest to my constituents and on one that is of absolutely no interest to them. Before I do, I should reflect a little on what has been achieved by the Government and where there is still room for improvement.
Like most Members, I came to the House to do good—not as a do-gooder, but to do good for my constituents. I came here as a Conservative in the belief that I would be able to rebalance how hard-working folk in Brigg and Goole, and beyond, are treated. In some respects, the Government have made progress; some of the changes to the benefit system have made work pay, and I support those wholeheartedly, as do my constituents. When they speak to me in the street or I knock on their doors, they generally say that they support the benefit cap and changes to entitlement programmes. Similarly, I am delighted that the Government have been able to freeze council tax, which doubled under the previous Government, for the past two years.
However, there have also been things that I have not felt comfortable with and which I do not think have in any way rebalanced fairness or rewarded those who try hard and want to do the best for themselves and their families. That is why I have voted against a number of measures, although I have voted with the Government on the vast majority of occasions—about 90% of the time. In any other job, I would be a slavish loyalist out for promotion, but in this place if a Government Member votes a couple of per cent. of the time against the Government, they are a serial rebel.
On issues such as the bedroom tax and changes to council house tenancies, I think that the Government got it wrong. Similarly, I do not yet think that the Government have rebalanced things as they should have in favour of hard-working citizens on issues such as immigration and law and order. Some of that, of course, is because we find ourselves in a coalition Government.
The other day, I was asked on Radio Humberside, which I am sure many hon. Members listen to, whether it was right for my colleagues to say that the Government were not Conservative enough. I said that that was right. It is a simple fact. Just as the Government are not Lib Dem enough for Lib Dems, they are not Conservative enough for Conservatives.
I say to Conservative Front Benchers that many of the pitfalls and traps into which we seem to have walked in the past few months—indeed, the past couple of years—have been those that our coalition colleagues have advised us to advance towards. Perhaps the message should be that sometimes we should stick with our gut. I hope that, in so far as anybody in this place listens to speeches from Back Benchers, that message will be taken back to the powers that be in Whitehall and elsewhere.
I welcome much in the Gracious Speech. I mentioned the themes of particular interest to my constituents. I welcome the draft social care Bill. Social care is the biggest challenge facing our country and, like many Members who have spoken, I hope that we will be able to advance on it on a cross-party basis. In my view, there is one opportunity to get the issue right. There are huge pressures, not only on the NHS but on local authorities, and they will only increase. I say to Front Benchers that we must advance in a way that protects those who have tried to make provision for themselves and have worked hard.
Many in my constituency have worked hard, got a private pension and tried incredibly hard during their working lives but now face the prospect of having to sell their homes to pay for care. That absolutely has to be taken into account. Labour Front Benchers have made it clear that the matter should not be kicked into the long grass, and they are right—although I question whether they made any progress on the issue when they were in power. We must not rush, either, because we must get it right.
I look forward to the reforms on special educational needs and support for disabled people. As I know from my previous employment as a schoolteacher, those issues definitely need to be addressed. We have to improve how the statementing process works and that is why I welcome its replacement with the integrated education, health and care plans. If those simplify the process for families and young people, as I hope a single assessment will, that will be all to the better. I also say to Ministers, who I am sure are listening, that we must ensure that those plans are supported with proper statutory obligations across the various agencies involved, including academies and free schools.
I look forward to the changes to access rights for divorced fathers, and I hope that they will provide another opportunity for us to push forward the issue of grandparents’ rights, which are supported on both sides of the House.
What are the most important issues? I have heard a lot from people on my side about what happened in the local elections last week. We did not have any on my patch, but I have heard a great deal about them. People have talked about House of Lords reform and other issues, but such matters are not why the coalition parties did so badly. The people of Brigg and Goole are not worried about House of Lords reform or other matters; they are worried about the economy and job creation, both of which are struggling at the moment.
As I have watched this debate in my office and in the Chamber, I have been surprised by some of the comments from Labour Members about what they left to this country. I know that they will attempt to gloss over their record, but given the area that I represent—the Humber, east Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire; only two or three Members representing that area were born and bred there—I do not recognise the glory days of the previous Administration. During their time in power, the Humber lost manufacturing jobs and the number of private sector jobs was lower in 2010, when they left office, than it was in 1997. We also faced the prospect of Labour’s dreaded ports tax, which would have killed jobs in our successful ports such as Goole, Immingham and Hull. We also saw no action regarding the Humber bridge, which, since its creation, has divided our sub-regional economy. Now this Government have acted to halve the tolls on the Humber bridge.
Ministers are absolutely right to tell us that they want to prioritise jobs and economic growth, and I hope that they will continue do so. I have two warnings for them from my region, one of which they will have heard plenty about recently—the prospect of the caravan tax. Some 90% of manufacturing in this industry is located in east Yorkshire, and thousands of jobs are involved. Many of the people working in that industry are already on three-day weeks. The Government’s own projections for the impact of the tax suggest a further 30% reduction in static caravan sales. This is a successful industry, most of which is deployed in the United Kingdom. The supply chain is almost wholly within the UK, and there are thousands of jobs on caravan parks up and down the country. I hope that the Government will listen to what is being said about this, and I think that they are starting to do so.
I completely support a lot of the changes that have been made in the public sector, including on pensions. I would be happy to defend those to my former colleagues, some of whom are probably not too keen to drink with me these days as they see the proposed changes to teachers’ pensions. I defend all those changes, because it is clear that in the past few years the state became too big and the gap between public sector pensions and private sector pensions became too wide. However, the Government need to proceed extremely carefully on regional pay. In the Humber, we have struggled to attract people into teaching. When I was a local councillor in Hull, we had to come up with the so-called Hull offer whereby we had to pay people more to come and teach in local schools. A few weeks ago, when my hon. Friend the Member for Cleethorpes (Martin Vickers), the hon. Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell), the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin) and I were at a meeting with our local hospital trust, we were told that the trust was unable to attract doctors to come and work in our NHS trust area and would possibly have to consider paying more as a consequence.
Some people in the public sector understandably feel that they are being targeted at the moment. There is undoubtedly an issue with pay in the south-east of England, but it would be morally wrong to take money from public sector workers in the north of England to solve a problem that exists in the south. Taking money out of the public sector in an area such as Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire, which is very reliant on it, can only have a knock-on effect on the private sector. Ministers need to be very careful as they move forward on this issue. I do not rule the policy out completely, but we need to see more detail. When the previous Government introduced academies, they conceded the principle of allowing schools to set their own pay and conditions, and they introduced that in HM Courts and Tribunals Service.
House of Lords reform is one issue in the Gracious Speech that is of absolutely no interest to my constituents. I have not been regularly stopped while doing my shopping in Goole and elsewhere by people saying, “But Andrew, what we really want is for you to get on and reform the House of Lords.” As it happens, I think that the Government are right to raise the issue, as I support reform of the House of Lords. When I came here, I was told that it was packed full of talent and the debates were wonderful. Doubtless there are some very good people in there, but there are also people who have absolutely no legitimacy and no right to sit there, and are perhaps not necessarily as in touch with the country as it is today as they should be. However, by reforming something one can make it a lot worse. The Government’s proposals for 15-year non-renewable terms would do nothing to inject democracy into the House of Lords. I would like a 90% to 100% elected Chamber with those elections taking place at the same time as the general election and people serving five-year terms. I say that as a history teacher and somebody who does not like to see traditions swept aside lightly. Indeed, were it not for the House of Lords in these past few months, the Government might not have seen sense on matters such as the chief coroner and, recently, on mesothelioma.
I understand the important role that the House of Lords plays in our democracy, but the Government’s proposals do not stand up to much scrutiny and would not do much to inject democracy. They should press ahead with having a debate on the issue, but the current proposals would not enjoy my support, especially as they involve using a voting system—the single transferable vote—on which the public have had no say. I think that we can safely say after last year’s referendum on the alternative vote that the public have voted against moving to a more proportional system and want to retain first past the post; certainly, that was their choice.
I look forward to many of the proposals in the Queen’s Speech, which has three policy areas of which I am particularly supportive. I commend the Government for prioritising jobs and the economy. I also commend them for taking the action that we have already seen in the Humber, where in many areas they have done an awful lot of good—although there is a risk that that could be undone by the caravan tax and regional pay. Broadly speaking, I welcome this Gracious Speech and look forward to the forthcoming debates.
Geraint Davies (Swansea West) (Lab/Co-op)
I was interested to listen to the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), whose speech was remarkable for one thing, as has been the case with so many speeches. We are currently seeing a fundamental clash in Europe between democracy and austerity that has been reflected in the polls in France and Greece, and indeed in Britain in the local government elections, with a choice between growth and making cuts to get down the deficit. There seems to be no acknowledgement of the fact that we are hurtling towards a fundamental change that will mean the end of the euro and perhaps the end of Europe as we know it. We need to focus on the need for proactive growth to invest in the capacity for productivity across Europe and to change course while we see the emergence of the far-right-wing parties that have been mentioned by my colleagues. Instead, however, the main preoccupation is still with the House of Lords.
I am sure that people like to talk about the intricacies of the House of Lords—about whether having someone elected for 15 years without re-election is really democracy, whether there will be a clash of democracies between the different Chambers and so on—but I think we all know that this is a very difficult issue, and that this is not the time to confront it when we are facing such severe economic issues on our doorsteps and such fundamental changes in the nature of Europe and our exporting prospects.
Andrew Percy
I am not sure whether my accent was the problem, but I think I made it very clear that House of Lords reform was a completely marginal issue of absolutely no interest to my constituents. As I said time and again, my constituents expect that the economy and growth should be the priority.
Geraint Davies
I am not talking about whether the hon. Gentleman and others referenced growth, but whether they took any notice at all of the fact that across Europe we are seeing these fundamental changes. The economic orthodoxy wants to ignore the wishes of people who are being downtrodden by these austerity measures, and we are facing a real challenge as regards the future of democracy in parts of Europe, the future of the euro, and the future of the European Community. In this year of her diamond jubilee, the Queen should have been given the opportunity to demonstrate that the Government are showing greater leadership by example in developing a proper, coherent strategy for delivering growth instead of cuts to get the deficit down. Instead, we have had the same old medicine with the familiar side effects of less money being spent in the public sector, leading to less money in the private sector and a downward spiral of unemployment and poverty. We have seen that across Europe.
What we need in the UK and Europe is a combination of fiscal stimulus and co-ordinated investment. The party with the best record on growth is of course the Labour party. Between 1997 and 2008 there was unprecedented and continuous growth that we had not seen since the war. In 2008, of course, we faced the financial tsunami, and to the credit of my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) and Barack Obama, the introduction of the fiscal stimulus enabled the world to avoid depression and deliver shallow growth into 2010. Then the Conservatives took over a deficit that was two-thirds caused by financial institutions and one-third caused by the Labour party investing beyond earnings to continue growth. Their immediate response was to announce half a million job cuts, which deflated consumer demand and led to negative growth. Indeed, the deficit projection is up by £150 billion.
Mr Geoffrey Cox (Torridge and West Devon) (Con)
Does the hon. Gentleman think an 11% annual budget deficit was sustainable?
Geraint Davies
No, of course not. The question is what is the most effective way of reducing the deficit is and what the balance should be between growth and cuts. By way of a simple example, I spoke to a business person in Uplands in Swansea, and he said, “I run a business. If I were to make a loss and I sold my tools and laid off all my workers, I’d have no business. I need to tighten up my costs and focus on developing more products and selling them in the marketplace”. The idea that we can solve the deficit just through making cuts is barmy. The focus should be on balancing the books through jobs and growth.
Let us examine the situation in Greece. Given the draconian cuts to pensions and jobs, it is no surprise that people cannot see any obvious upside. The money that is being put into Greece is being used to pay down the debt rather than to invest in productive infrastructure that can generate growth. I am not saying that there should be extra money for Greece, but we must consider the balance between the two.
The EU could invest in solar forests in Greece to generate energy for the rest of Europe, in connectivity such as railways and roads to boost the holiday industry, in infrastructure in the holiday industry, or in broadband across Greece. At the moment, the £13 billion a year that the EU spends on research and innovation is all spent in the north of Europe. The centres of excellence in Germany, at Oxford and Cambridge and the like get the money, and Greece is regarded as having under-developed academic resources. Such policies need changing, because we are a community, not just a market. The way through for Greece is to negotiate a settlement in which debt reduction is balanced by investment in productive infrastructure that can deliver growth and help Greece pay its way. It is not for the EU simply to say, “You are poor, you’ve spent too much, we’ll make you poorer”.
Britain should take a lead and invest in growth in our own backyard and in team GB. We should work together to provide coherence about economic growth. In my area, I am instrumental in bringing together stakeholders from the Swansea bay city region. Swansea council, Neath Port Talbot council, which is next door, and Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire have made a joint submission to the Welsh Government saying that they want to work together within a city region of some 750,000 people rather than operate independently. They want to have joint marketing and inward investment strategies and put more pressure on the Government to provide the infrastructure to deliver growth.
The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) mentioned that if Wales had the £1.9 billion that is equivalent to what is being spent on High Speed 2, it could invest in, for example, the electrification of the railway to Swansea or reducing the toll on the Severn bridge, as the Government have done on the Humber bridge. That would stimulate trade coming into south Wales and enable a coherent, joined-up approach to economic development, working in tandem with industry and academia to move economic growth forward. Alongside a fiscal stimulus, such joining up of the economic capabilities of councils across Britain, targeting emerging consumer markets, is the basis of a coherent growth plan that can move us forward. That is better than the Conservative party’s preoccupation with savage cuts affecting the most vulnerable, which are also happening in Greece.
I hope that there is a golden future for the Swansea bay city region. Increasingly, people will realise that it is a great location to go to. It has environmental beauty, and the roll-out of broadband means that people can move out there. The costs of setting up a business are much lower than in London, and I hope that Swansea’s premier division status—it has the premier football team in Wales—will help us move forward. I say that with no disrespect to Cardiff, who I know did not get into the premier league, so there is just one premier league team in Wales.
The region is a cultural centre. It was the birthplace of Dylan Thomas, whose centenary will be acclaimed in 2014. It is a centre for tourism and for sport, so there is a package of activity that makes people want to visit the Swansea bay city region, invest in it and move there. The future is bright. We ask the Government for a bit more support for infrastructure, as part of a growth plan, so that we can work together to create jobs and wealth. That is the only real solution to getting the deficit down, rather than simply cutting again and again.
What we need now is to follow the example given in 2008 by Obama and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, who averted a depression. We must have a co-ordinated approach across Europe so that we can move forward together before it is too late. We all know the adage: give a man a fish—I should say give a person a fish, or in this case give Greece a fish—and he can eat for a day, but give him a rod and he can eat for a year. Now, we are cutting the fish in half so that he is hungry by lunchtime. We need to get the balance right between investment in infrastructure and cuts. I would have liked at the centre of the Queen’s Speech bold new initiatives for Britain that could provide leadership for Europe and help us move forward in the world.
Charlie Elphicke (Dover) (Con)
It is a pleasure, as ever, to follow the hon. Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies), who gave a particular view of economic theory and how to get economies growing. He will not be surprised to know that I completely disagree with most of his prescriptions.
Charlie Elphicke
Yes, and no doubt five different views could be advanced.
We all agree about the key point of the Queen’s Speech and the challenge facing this country. When I talk to my constituents in Dover and Deal and ask, “What is your priority?”, they say, “It’s the economy, stupid”—President Clinton made much of that point in his first election campaign. The economy is the heartland, and it is essential that we have more jobs and money in Britain. We have had a very difficult time for the past four years, and the situation is challenging for many families in my constituency, who are struggling to get by and have not had a pay rise for a very long time. They are struggling to keep hold of a job while we seek to rebuild out of the mess that went before. I therefore particularly welcome the fact that the Government’s first priority is to reduce the deficit and restore economic stability.
The hon. Member for Swansea West has a prescription along the lines of saying that if we did not cut so far and so fast, all would be fine. The difficulty with that is that we would need to borrow more money. If we did that, we would threaten our economic credibility, which would mean rising interest rates on Government debt. If that happened, interest rates would increase for businesses and home owners.
We have been lucky because we have the same level of deficit as Greece, but the markets trust our economic policy and our cracking down on and reducing the deficit. That means that our interest rates are similar to those in Germany, while we still have a deficit the size of Greece’s, albeit one that is falling.
Andrew Percy
There is another point to be made. The Opposition position is almost like telling someone with a £10,000 credit card bill, “Go and get another £5,000 on the credit card because you’ll feel a bit better today.” However, at some time in the future, the credit card company will come knocking. The Labour party wants us to increase the £120 million in debt interest every day by borrowing even more, which would mean that we had even less to invest in the public services that our constituents want and deserve.
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend is right. One does not fix a debt crisis by borrowing more money—it makes no sense. It is the economics of the madhouse, because we would have more debt to service over the long term. It would take us longer to pay it, thereby mortgaging our children’s futures for longer, and interest rates would rise. Under the Government, interest rates have fallen, and that has done much to ensure that we have more money to invest in public services than would have been the case under the previous Government.
Geraint Davies
Does not the hon. Gentleman accept that, because we do not have growth, deficit projections have risen by £150 billion? Secondly, interest rates are the same as those inherited from Labour. Under the previous Tory Government, they were 15%. The hon. Gentleman’s comments are simply factually untrue.
Charlie Elphicke
The hon. Gentleman supposes that if the previous Government’s economic policies had continued, the markets would have played along, and the music would have kept playing. Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy are evidence against that. We are very lucky that we had a change of Government. We had a close shave, but we have managed so far, goodness willing, to escape the position into which we would otherwise have fallen. Without a shadow of a doubt, the previous Government would have taken us the way of Greece and we would have been plunged into serious economic chaos. We would not be talking about a technical double-dip recession, but a minus 5 or minus 6 double-dip recession, of the sort and on the scale that is happening in Greece. I hope that when the Office for National Statistics reviews the figures in a few months, we will see that we skirted recession, but were not in recession. Many of us feel that confidence is already rebuilding. From other surveys, many of us suspect that the ONS figures will be revised upwards, and we will find that we did not go into recession and that we may just be starting to recover.
I hope that that is the case, because our constituents have had and are having a difficult time trying to keep hold of their jobs, get a pay rise and pay their bills, which have been increasing ever faster. The Government’s policies, which focus on the economy like a laser beam, are right. We need a more flexible labour market—not a right-wing, “Let’s have the ability to hire and fire at will” policy. The OECD growth project investigated the matter at length and in detail and concluded that a flexible labour market was a key driver of economic growth. It identified another key driver as lower corporation taxes, which the Government are delivering. It also said that a certain and credible financial services and competition regulation regime, which we are rebuilding, was another key driver.
I think that the House accepts that the Financial Services Authority system—the tripartite regulation system—was an unmitigated disaster. The brainchild of the former Prime Minister and the shadow Chancellor, when it was put to the test, it was found entirely wanting. The Bank of England managed to save the secondary banking system and our general banking system in the 1970s, but this time, we had to have massive state-funded bail-outs, which cost the taxpayer a fortune. That need not and would not have happened had the FSA and the tripartite regulatory regime not been in place.
The OECD growth project is also clear that increased competition to promote enterprise and fair markets is also important. Promoting competition, free enterprise, fair markets and a level playing field for market entrants is vital. We have pro-growth policies on all those. I make no bones about the fact that I should like the Government to be more pro-growth to get the economy moving even quicker. I should like them to lever in more private investment sooner so that we can grow more quickly. However, I recognise that all government is a negotiation, and it is clearly a challenge in a coalition to have everything that we would like. From a Conservative point of view, I would like a more pro-growth policy so that we grow the economy even more quickly.
I am realistic about what we can do, but I think that we are doing a lot, and as much as we can. I can look my constituents in the eye and say that we are trying to get the economy growing as quickly as possible, that we are focused on it and that nothing matters to us more than jobs and money.
It is real cheek for the Opposition to talk about youth unemployment, for two reasons. First, it rose massively under the previous Government. Although it has increased under this Government, it has done so at a much slower rate than in the previous Parliament. Secondly, when I knock on the doors in Dover and ask people what their key concern is, they reply, “Immigration and I want my kid to have a future.” They are furious that the open borders policy that the previous Government pursued means that their children are finding it harder to get a job.
Andrew Percy
When my hon. Friend talked about youth unemployment figures rising under the previous Government, he failed to mention that they increased when unemployment generally was falling. For youth unemployment to be increasing now is bad enough, but for it to rise when unemployment generally is falling is a national tragedy. We have heard no apology for that.
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend is right. Not only that, but if we examine the figures for job creation since the early 2000s, we see that people from the EU accession eight countries had a massive increase in the number of jobs, that that also applied among foreign nationals—people born overseas—but that employment hardly increased at all for those born in the UK.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that one of the previous Government’s biggest failures was to address the skills deficit in this country, and that they also failed to tackle apprenticeships? Is it therefore any wonder that, at the time, the jobs were not going to British-born workers?
Charlie Elphicke
I agree with my hon. Friend. That is the central point, which I was about to address. Employers’ difficulty is finding the right person with the skills for the job. It is incumbent on the Government to create a framework whereby people—particularly our young people—can get the skills so that they qualify and are eligible for a job, and that they have the skills that employers need. Instead of dealing with the skills deficit in our population, the previous Government thought it was easier to put a sticking plaster on it and have an open borders policy to enable employers to take people with the skills that they wanted from anywhere, rather than ensuring that our children and young people had the skills for the labour market and therefore a better future.
It is important to have stronger border control in the UK. It is also important to skill up our children because the previous Government sold us a pass on the hopes and aspirations of our young people and people who do not have great skills to get a job, promotion, more money and more skills. The Government’s emphasis on apprenticeships is essential. That is what I hear on the doorsteps in Dover. For many in the House and in the metropolitan elite, that is a difficult message, but the opinion polls show that unemployment and immigration are linked, and we should be honest about that. We should be honest with people, and tell them that we understand their concerns and are acting on them. One of the greatest things about the Government is that we have taken such strong action on apprenticeships to ensure that our people have the skills to have a job and do well in life.
The Government are nothing if they are not about aspiration, but they are also about understanding the pressures of utility bills and the costs of modern life. One really important policy in that respect is the proposed reform of the electricity market to deliver clean, secure and affordable electricity and ensure that prices are fair. The Leader of the Opposition chooses these days to forget that he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and that he planned, with the renewable heat initiative, to load £193 on to the bills of every household in this country. He chooses to forget that, with the electricity renewable energy obligation to which he signed up, he was going to increase our power prices by 20%, and those of businesses by 30%. He goes on about the costs of living and the pressure on households, and yet chooses to forget that the responsibility for much of the increase in the cost of living lies at his door, because when he was Secretary of State, he loaded bills and balanced our carbon commitments on the backs of the poor, which was a disgusting and disgraceful thing to have done.
We cannot balance our carbon commitments on the backs of the poor, as the Labour Government wanted. We need to ensure that our carbon commitments are executed in the most cost-effective way. That means not that we should back winners or favour this or that technology, but that we should favour technologies that reduce carbon emissions at the most effective and best possible price, regardless of whether we happen to like or dislike them. That is what we owe the least well-off in our communities, and our hard-pressed families and electors.
From the detailed list of Bills in the Queen’s Speech, I want to pick out the children and families Bill, which contains an acceptance of the important principle I proposed in a ten-minute rule Bill last year: that children have the right to know, and have a relationship with, both their parents following separation. I believe that that is right and in the interests of the child and their welfare, but let me explain why. The Bill does not set out with complete clarity reasons for that provision or for the shared parental leave provision, but they are linked, because families have changed. There is a new norm, and we need to accept modern families.
Let me set out how families have changed. One can have an “olde worlde” image of the family—a bloke goes to work while the mother bounces the child on her knee or does the washing up at home. That is perhaps how it was in the 1950s, but things have not been like that for a very long time. Just about everyone I know from my generation joint works. I looked at the figures, because many of our policies seem to be aimed at people who live that kind of traditional family life, rather than at families who joint work, which is the reality.
Some things jump out from the figures on parental employment rates. Back in 1986, half of partnered mothers were in the workplace; today, 71% of them are. Whereas 25 years ago five out of 10 partnered mothers went to work; seven out of 10 now do so. The overwhelming majority of couples with children under the age of 16 both work, which has led to a wider change in respect of juggling the work-life balance.
It is not just that there are more mothers in the workplace. What about the number of men who work part time? Some people go around saying, “Only women ever look after children,” but that is also old fashioned and archaic. Things have been changing. Notably, the number of all parents in part-time work has changed, which is basically accounted for by the fact that the number of men in part-time work has risen. Official statistics from the Office for National Statistics show that 25 years ago, 696,000 men were in part-time work. That number has risen nearly fourfold to more than 2 million today. To my mind, that indicates that parents are increasingly juggling work and child care, and that there has been something of a seismic shift.
Many think, “Mothers go back to work when the child is a bit older,” but let us look at the figures. When do people go back to work? Do they wait until the child is about five and going to school, or do they go back before that? Twenty-five years ago, 27% of partnered women went back to work when the youngest child was under three years of age. In other words, two thirds of women stayed at home and brought up the child until they were at least three, and then considered going back to work. That position has reversed. Now, 63% of partnered women go back to work when the youngest child is under three.
There has been a massive social change, and we need to understand modern families and how they live. If most women are going back to work when the child is pre-school age, there is a lot of juggling and work-life balancing. Who takes the kid to school or nursery? Who collects the kid? Who looks after the child? Who takes primary responsibility in the workplace and in the home? Increasingly, most people whose children are grown up will know from their children’s lives that there is much more of a juggle and a balance of work and life.
The rate of increase of lone parents has been very great. In 1986, 15% of lone parents went back to work when their child was under three; by 2011, that had doubled to 32%. We can therefore see substantial change in families, which has consequences for family policy. The flexible parental leave provision in the children and families Bill is justified because it is necessary. It is a recognition that families juggle work and child care. It is not just a case of saying, “The mother has a baby, therefore she has maternity leave.” The situation is much more complicated, and provision should be balanced so that men and women in a family can balance that equation.
More work needs to be done on child care, for two reasons. First, the number of child care places has been broadly static for years. In 2001, there were more than 300,000 places with child minders and about 300,000 day nursery places—about 600,000 places in total. The number of places with child minders stayed static, but the number of nursery places—full day care—increased to about 600,000. In 2001, there were 600,000 places in total, but in 2008, there were around 900,000 places. The number has remained static since.
What does it mean if there are now 900,000 places? Are we catering for all the children in the country who are in need of child care? I did some back-of-the envelope calculations, and it struck me that there is potentially a shortage of child care places. There are about 13 million children in the UK, of whom roughly 3 million are pre-school age. The numbers indicate that 55% of children at pre-school have parents who both work. In other words, about 2 million children need child care, but there are only 900,000 child care places. What is happening to the other 1 million children? Who is looking after them? Is it grandparents or neighbours? There is a kind of child care apartheid. On the one hand, there is a system of nurseries that are so heavily regulated that most people cannot afford them, and on the other hand there is a system of child care for the other half that is completely unregulated. We know nothing about what is going on in that half. The right balance would be to reduce the regulation on our nurseries, increase the number of places and bring the cost of child care down so that more people can access it, because one of the biggest pressures on modern families is affording the cost of child care for pre-school children. It is an absolute nightmare—
Andrew Percy
My hon. Friend questions whether grandparents are doing the caring and, as I said a few moments ago, they are increasingly involved in families and are the unsung heroes of child care. Does he share my hope that additional rights for grandparents will be introduced in the next Session?
Charlie Elphicke
My hon. Friend is a passionate campaigner on behalf of grandparents. When grandparents are constructive, they can make a powerful contribution, but a balance inevitably needs to be struck. Some grandparents like to interfere and meddle, and they can be really annoying. All parents know that some grandparents are not quite the saints that my hon. Friend suggests. Nevertheless, if grandparents play a constructive role in a child’s life, there is a lot to be said for them. My hon. Friend has been a passionate and trenchant campaigner in the cause of constructive grandparents—as opposed to destructive grandparents, who we could all do without. We all know people who know them—I hope my hon. Friend understands where I am coming from on that point.
We need more availability of nursery places and deregulation of the system. The figures show that dads are more involved in children’s lives than ever before. Father is no longer sitting behind a newspaper at the breakfast table, oblivious to the world: instead, dads are deeply engaged in children’s lives. So when it comes to separation, the question is what is in the interests of the children. What best serves the child’s welfare? I think that it is stability and the continuation of what they have known. So if a parent who has been heavily involved in the child’s life—as they are in the overwhelming majority of families—suddenly disappears off a cliff edge, it makes no sense. That is why the Government are right to enshrine in legislation the principle that children have the right to know and have a relationship with their parents. The way in which modern families live indicates strongly that that is what best serves child welfare.
I recognise that the judiciary and the legal system are, as always, about 30 years out of date and are astonishingly weak-kneed when it comes to ensuring the rights of children to know both their parents. That is wrong, and we need to send a clear legislative message, not just to anti-dad social workers but to the court system, that society has changed. We in Parliament get that society has changed. We get that we need stability for our children and that child welfare is best served by having minimum disturbance to that which they have been used to. If we send that message, real and positive change could be made.
Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)
The hon. Gentleman mentioned that in some way the status quo might be maintained. Does he agree that in fact there is evidence that one parent is often excluded from the life of the child by the parent with care, and that therefore the status quo may become a pattern of one-parent family life as opposed to two-parent? Does he therefore agree that the Government should say that children have an absolute right to life with both their parents unless that is unsafe?
Charlie Elphicke
Yes, I do. If I understand her correctly, the hon. Lady refers to the concept of shared parenting. I am personally a fan of that, but it is a difficult argument to advance at the moment because the Norgrove report looked into what happens in Australia and managed to become completely and utterly muddled about the difference between quantity of time and quality of time. Every parent knows that quality of time is what counts. In Australia, it seems to have become an issue of quantity of time and an insistence on 50:50 time, but that misses the point altogether and, therefore, misled the entire Norgrove report. Before the report was published, I spent an hour putting that case passionately to members of the panel, but they published it anyway. It will therefore be difficult to persuade the legislature that shared parenting is the right way to go, but the social changes in modern families will mean that it is almost certain to end up that way in five years’ time.
For now, the best win that can be had is to ensure that children have the right to know, and a right of access to, both their parents. If the parent with care tries to subvert that, they are not having a go at the parent without care but undermining their child and attacking the rights that their child should have. If we frame it that way, parents with care will more quickly understand that they need to think about their children, rather than themselves.
Tessa Munt
Does the hon. Gentleman agree, therefore, that the courts have the ultimate solution in that, if a parent with care prevents a child from accessing his or her other parent, the care can be taken up by the parent who is excluded, and that that is the ultimate sanction and might encourage parents to stick to the rules and ensure that their children have absolute access to both parents?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. May I remind the hon. Lady of Mr Speaker’s announcement at the beginning of the debate about parliamentary convention for this Session and the need for interventions to be brief, not substantive speeches or long points, interesting as they may be?
Charlie Elphicke
I thank the hon. Lady for her interesting intervention. The full tool box needs to be available to the court system, but the legislature also needs to send a strong message to the court system, social workers and everyone involved in child care and child care access about what we expect it to look like, which is that people who stand in the way of their children’s rights should have the book thrown at them and should not be allowed to do so anymore.
I want to make a brief point about the education of children with special educational needs. These children have been badly let down for too long. They find it very hard to access the right school. I chaired a summit recently to which, I am delighted to say, came the leader of Kent county council, a cabinet member for Kent county council and a group of parents of children with severe special educational needs—many of them high on the autistic and Asperger spectrums—who have had a very difficult time. It is wrong in principle that parents facing the significant challenges of looking after a child with special educational needs should, on top of that, have to battle the education system to get the right education for their child. It is wrong in principle that, in many cases, it has taken two or three years for those parents to find the right school for their children.
Several things became clear to me during the summit. The statementing process is too slow and cumbersome. That is wrong. It should be more fast-tracked, efficient and effective in looking at children’s needs and diagnosing them correctly. Once that is done, each county council or education authority needs to maintain a decent database of which schools in their authority area can cater for which needs. Too often, it seems, there is muddle and confusion in the bureaucracy over which schools can cater for which needs. The whole system should be fast-tracked so that parents are offered schools appropriate to their child’s needs, rather than schools that are not appropriate. That happens in many education authorities. Everyone knows that. It is wrong and needs to be dealt with.
Furthermore, on special educational needs, there must not be an apartheid between the state sector and the private sector. We need to put the children first. If a private, independent school caters best for the special needs of children, parents should be offered that school and not just told that a maintained school has to take yet more pupils because the education rules and laws are such that pupils can be shoved into a school, whether the school likes it or not or does not have enough places. In my constituency, there is the perverse situation in which one independent school catering brilliantly for special educational needs has 20 spare places, while another special needs school doing an outstanding job in the maintained sector needs a portakabin in the playground to cater for the number of special educational needs children, because it has been told by the education authority to take yet more children. We need to strike the right balance: we need to give parents much greater say and choice, use the places available in the system most appropriately and ensure that the statementing process is as quick as it can be. In education, when it comes to looking after our children, we need to put the parents first. We need to ensure that they can make the decisions that are right for their children, because, broadly, they know best because they know their children best of all.
I am delighted to support the Queen’s Speech. It focuses on the economy, on utility bills, on the cost of living and on helping hard-pressed families. It focuses on families and children, and on helping families to bring forward the next generation.
Mr Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke). I enjoyed his speech very much—even the more provocative parts. I suspect that many of our constituents who have children with special needs will empathise with his comments. I confess that I did not understand his reference to grandparents occasionally being annoying, but perhaps that is Conservative party code for something else. I also empathised with his description of many of his constituents not having had a pay rise for years and struggling to keep their jobs. I therefore say gently to him that I do not understand how he can say with a straight face that the Budget was good for those families. Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to his speech.
Two years into the coalition, it is striking that the Queen’s Speech has so little to offer to solve the challenges that our country faces. Its measures show that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor did not listen to the anger of Britain’s citizens last week and that they are ignoring the now considerable economic evidence that a new direction is needed. Equally clearly, the confident communities that our constituents want to live in will seem further away than ever, with declining levels of social capital, public services under greater pressure than ever, and the opportunity to have real influence over how key services are run at local level growing ever more distant.
My constituents tell me that they are now seeing fewer police officers than for a long time. The fact that the Government are announcing legislation to set up the new National Crime Agency when police numbers are dropping, and that the Metropolitan police want to close all the cells at Harrow police station with little notice and even less discussion, suggests that Ministers are out of touch with what is happening at the grass roots to the services that our constituents depend on.
Given the present Home Secretary’s now notorious description of the Conservative party, it is perhaps appropriate to wonder, in the light of the Queen’s Speech and the Budget, whether the “nasty party” is very much back in evidence. Over the next 12 months, we will see more cuts that will once again hit the most vulnerable and those least able to help themselves. If the measure in the Queen’s Speech goes through, it will become easier to sack the strivers, the hard workers, those who speak out, those who blow the whistle on bad practice and those who, for just one period in their lives, are at their most vulnerable through illness, if their face does not fit.
There has also been a tax cut for millionaires, which hard-working families and pensioners are being made to pay for. To cap it all, the Conservative party is agonising once again about all things foreign. It is again anti-European in tone, and predominantly anti-aid, too. Above all, it is on the economy that the Prime Minister needs to tell the Chancellor to change course. Bank lending continues to fall as businesses continue to struggle. Year on year, net lending to businesses has now fallen in every single month since the coalition came to power. How many times have we heard the Prime Minister promise to get the banks lending? Despite all the hype that Project Merlin and, then, banking reform were the answer, bank lending continues to fall; it was down 3.5% last year alone.
My right hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench have consistently warned that the Government’s austerity plan was self-defeating, and that cutting spending too far and too fast at the same time as putting up taxes such as VAT would backfire. America, and indeed a series of countries in Europe, have taken a far more balanced approach to reducing their deficits, with strong plans to produce jobs and deliver economic growth. Why could the Chancellor and Prime Minister not have listened to and looked at what is happening in those countries? As a result of their mistakes, my constituents are suffering. Their bills are up because Ministers will not really challenge the big energy companies. There is certainly a Bill to introduce electricity market reform, but it will come far too late in this Parliament to make a real difference to the size of the bills my constituents will have to pay.
In many cases, mortgage rates are rising, while tube fares have never been so expensive. In Harrow town centre in the heart of my constituency, I have never seen as many empty shops as there are now—a daily demonstration of a recession that has been made in Downing street. Harrow council, told by the Mayor of London to plan for a huge increase in housing units over the next decade or so—half in Wealdstone and Harrow-on-the Hill—is seeking to use this open door policy for developers to try to redesign, reinvigorate and redevelop the heart of our borough, despite the recession. It is, however, striking how difficult it is at the moment to persuade developers to put affordable housing at the centre of their plans—for example, on the Kodak site, set to be home to a potential 3,000 housing units. For those in Harrow who want to get on the housing ladder, the prospect of being able to buy their first home in the Harrow community where they grew up seems ever further away.
The next generation, hammered by the high cost of tuition fees from October this year, will wonder why there is so little to help them in this Queen’s Speech. There is nothing to make the cost of going to university easier—just cuts in the funding that their university is receiving. They face higher living costs while they are at university, and now there is the possibility, as announced in the Budget, of a tax give-away for private universities, many of which are run by hedge funds.
Equally striking is the recent absence of “big society” language from the rhetoric of the Prime Minister’s speeches. Community groups that were championed when the Conservatives were in opposition are now left very much on the sidelines. Huge cuts in funding that began to hit hard last year will hit even harder this year. Last week, the head of Volunteering England warned that the network of volunteer centres across the country is beginning to fragment, with a number set to close this year. Why, at a time when we need national renewal, are we set to make it harder for people to give something back through volunteering? The National Children’s Bureau has warned that 25% of the charities it contacted that help young people and children believed that they might have to close next year. Charities that were promised Government contracts will now know that they were hollow words when Ministers spoke them.
The Work programme, run by the Department for Work and Pensions, has seen the private sector winning 90% of the prime contracts. Charities that were told that they would get 35% to 40% of the referrals under the Work programme are seeing at best half that—fewer than under the future jobs fund. More than 100 charities have lost confidence and walked away, yet there is nothing in the Queen’s Speech to seek to address those problems. Indeed, an independent audit published by Civil Exchange and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust at the weekend argued that there is
“an implicit bias towards the private sector in tendering”
and that
“it is particularly hard for small, local voluntary organisations to compete for contracts.”
I suggest that this is the Serco society, not the big society, so it is hardly surprising that some 70% of charity chief executives did not think that the Government respected or valued their sector.
Arguably, the most fundamental challenge identified by the audit is how to extend social action to a younger population and across socio-economic groups. The core, it says, of those who provide the majority of volunteering are more likely to be middle-aged, to have higher educational qualifications, to practise their religion actively and to have lived in the same neighbourhood. There is nothing in the Queen’s Speech to suggest that the Government understand how to get more people enrolled in their communities or even the desire to do so.
Where, indeed, is the co-ops Bill that the Prime Minister once promised? This comes on the back of no serious effort to remutualise Northern Rock over the past 12 months, no serious interest in encouraging more energy co-ops to emerge, no sustained effort to encourage real involvement in the running of football clubs by football fans through football supporters’ co-operatives, and no requirement to promote a diverse market in financial services for the Financial Services Authority or its replacement to help financial mutuals. Sadly, the Queen’s Speech confirms that once again the Government have walked away from the real practical measures that could have helped the co-op and mutual movement to grow.
One of the Bills that will be before the House during this Session will be a crime and courts Bill, the details of which I shall examine especially carefully. As I made clear earlier, my constituents will be sceptical about the benefits of such a top-down change when they are seeing fewer police officers on the ground. I recently organised meetings between constituents who are experiencing challenging antisocial behaviour problems near the Racecourse estate in Northolt, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) will know particularly well—
Mr Thomas
It also occurs in south Harrow. What frustrated those residents was the lack of visibility, at key times, of police officers who could have moved on local troublemakers, and, indeed, could have deterred them from gathering in the first place. Constables are routinely deployed away from their wards, and are rarely available for standard safer neighbourhood team duties in those areas.
What is most worrying, however, is the threat to close the custody suite at Harrow police station. With no consultation, the Metropolitan police have decided to shut the custody suite, which consists of 13 cells, in mid-September. There will then be no more cell capacity in Harrow. All those who are arrested will have to be transported to out-of borough police stations—to Kilburn and Wembley—by a minimum of two officers, more if there is a possibility that the prisoners could turn violent. Given the number of annual visits to Harrow’s cells by alleged criminals—an average of 5,000, I believe—and given the time that it takes to travel from my constituency to Kilburn and Wembley, that represents a loss of between 10,000 and 20,000 police officer hours. Officers will be wasting time by acting as transport couriers for alleged criminals when they could be investigating, detecting and, better still, preventing crime in Harrow.
Stephen Pound
I do not want to hijack the Queen’s Speech into matters of custody accommodation in west London, but is my hon. Friend as surprised as I was to learn that a place called Polar Point has opened at Heathrow airport to receive those who used to be in custody in Harrow and Ealing, and that the decision was made by a company called Emerald, which is apparently the privatised cell provider and which doubtless refers to the prisoners as “customers”?
Mr Thomas
I am indeed very surprised by that information. One is always grateful when additional cell capacity is provided elsewhere in London, but it is hugely disappointing that there is still a threat of closure of the custody suite in Harrow.
I have not received any formal explanation from the Metropolitan police of why they think that the closure is necessary, let alone been consulted. Given that CID officers tend to be based where custody suites are housed, and given that space is to be set aside at Wembley police station for Harrow CID officers, it does not look good for the future of borough-based policing in Harrow, and it certainly does not look good for the long-term future of the 110 CID officers who are currently based there. Almost a third of our own police officers will have to spend some of their time out of the borough if the cells shut. Let me ask this question of the Metropolitan police, and indeed of Ministers: why should my constituents have any confidence that those 110 CID officers will continue to be based in Harrow in the long term? I hope that, even at this late stage, the Home Secretary will encourage the Metropolitan police to think again.
This Gracious Speech is striking in that it does not include a Bill to fulfil the commitment that 0.7% of our national income should be spent on development assistance. The three major parties all committed to legislating on that. Indeed, before the last general election, I had the honour of taking such a Bill through the pre-legislative scrutiny process. There is a strong case for Britain continuing to set an example on the provision of international aid for people in less well-off countries. We should think of the current west Africa food crisis and the huge numbers of people at risk of dying of hunger there, and of the considerable remaining health challenges in respect of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
The lack of action by the Government parties in respect of the ancient, yet still very important, United Nations commitment that every rich country should give 0.7% of its income to help the world’s poorest is a huge missed opportunity. In the forthcoming debate on the Gracious Speech, I look forward to hearing the Secretary of State for International Development give a clear and detailed explanation as to why he has failed to convince his colleagues to introduce legislation to that effect.
Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)
It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas). I listened to his speech with great interest.
I shall focus on three specific sets of proposals in the Queen’s Speech that build on many of the strong reforms the Government introduced in the previous Session: the measures on children and families—which my hon. Friend the Member for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) has already touched on—crime and the courts, and enterprise and regulatory reform.
As a Conservative, I believe in stronger families forming the foundation of a stronger society, so I welcome the measures to support families. As my hon. Friend said, arranging child care is one of the biggest challenges working parents face. Those of us who daily do the school run know all about the pressures of juggling child care commitments with work. For households in which both parents are working, that can be a great struggle. Whether in respect of babysitting toddlers, looking after unwell children, doing the school run or attending school assembly, it can be very difficult for working mums and dads, especially those in traditional working arrangements, to support their children fully and meet their needs. We must not forget that young children—whether attending nursery, pre-school or school—have active lives and social lives, too, and that there are therefore also other commitments such as taking kids to after-school activities
Many households now need two parents to be working and bringing in full-time incomes in order to pay the bills because—let us face it—life is tough at the moment and the cost of living is high and is rising. Many Members have spoken about the rising utilities and fuel bills.
Suitable child care provision in this country is incredibly costly. Many of us could give examples of the average bill for sending a child to nursery in normal working hours exceeding £800 a month. That is equivalent to a monthly mortgage repayment in some households, so is it any wonder that two parents have to go out to work to cover child care costs in addition to the cost of living?
The Government are to be congratulated on recognising the challenges families face and the barriers to family life in this country, but more needs to be done across government and all the political parties. We must take a pragmatic and rational approach and introduce some positive, proactive measures to alleviate the struggles and challenges families face and to remove the barriers that are often in place in respect of child care and employment.
I know that many households across the country, and certainly in my constituency, will welcome the proposals outlined today. We need to give parents more flexibility over working time and over maternity and paternity leave, too. I can only speak from my own personal experience, but I was one of those parents who went back to work three weeks after having my son and, quite frankly, had I had the opportunity to swap with my husband, that really would have been great.
The Government should be commended for considering relationships between children and both parents. Fathers should absolutely have equal, fair and the right kind of access to their children when the family relationship has broken down. In my time as a Member of Parliament thus far, brief though it has been, many fathers have come to me who feel that their children are being used in the court system as an emotional and financial weapon, which is unacceptable. We need to bring some sanity back to the situation. Shared parenting is absolutely the right thing and, if nothing else, we have to start putting the rights of children first, not the rights of warring parents or warring mothers against warring fathers. Children come first and children’s rights are key.
That brings me on to adoption. In my view, the Government should be congratulated on their commitment to supporting the adoption process. I personally feel that it is nothing short of scandalous that the number of adoptions last year totalled just 60 when thousands of children are going through the care system in local authorities up and down the country. That is simply wrong. They deserve loving families and loving homes and hundreds of loving families want to provide good, stable homes for children. It is a shame on our society and on the system that red tape and bureaucracy get in the way and prevent children from being put into loving families. I welcome the change and hope that the Government will ensure that we can start to address the scandal and start to put children into proper loving homes.
My hon. Friend the Member for Dover talked about bureaucracy and red tape and I welcome the steps being taken to support children with special educational needs. As a local MP I have met dozens of families who have been let down by the system. Those mums and dads naturally want the best for their children but all too often bureaucracy, officialdom and, sometimes, bad practice in schools and local authorities let them down and damage the prospects of their children. They are left fighting hard, going through assessment after assessment, just to get the extra help that their children need. More often than not, in many cases, the needs of their children are recorded or summarised through some sort of tick-box process. The real understanding of the emotional or physical needs of the child is often ignored.
One school in my constituency has a very poor record on special educational needs provision and is the source of many complaints from parents to me. Rather than helping an autistic child, the school has classified him as having average communication skills. It is completely failing that poor child and failing to understand his needs because the school does not want to be seen to have too many children with special educational needs on its books, which is wrong and appalling. I would like more to be done to empower parents and I welcome the proposals to do that and to simplify the assessment process with the introduction of the single assessment process and education, health and care plans.
We also need to encourage the spread of best practice to get good results in the running of special educational needs services in other schools. A very positive example of that in my constituency is set by the inspirational head teacher, Jane Bass, at Powers Hall junior school in Witham. She sets a good leadership example and works tirelessly to help children with learning difficulties and special educational needs. I think she should be commended for her work. She has a strong track record of supporting children who have come to her school with very challenging problems and seeing them through their time there so that they leave with more skills and greater independence. That is good for the children and is genuine relief for their parents. Importantly, the parents know that their children’s needs are being met. In taking through the relevant Bill that will be introduced this Session, we should learn from schools that have a good track record of working with children and their parents to understand how to meet a child’s needs and relate that to the legislation. We need more head teachers like Jane Bass and I am optimistic that the legislative programme can deliver positive changes to special educational needs provision.
I welcome the Government’s tough stance on drug drivers, which I hope will lead to robust legislation. It is shameful that our criminal justice system sentences perpetrators for these offences—people who have taken away lives and ruined the lives of victims’ families—to just a few weeks behind prison bars instead of the lengthy spells in prison totalling many years that they should receive. I know that Ministers have listened closely to people’s concerns about this issue. Indeed, my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister today spoke about the many representations from families that he has listened to and the campaigns fought by victims’ families. Clearly, the Government have responded positively to those representations, but many more victims of other crimes have been excluded by the criminal justice system. Ministers need to listen to their concerns and introduce positive changes.
Victims and the public are being put in danger by a criminal justice system that, from the top down, sets free far too many offenders so that they end up roaming our streets and committing more crimes. There are more than 250 offenders with more than 100 convictions, more than 3,500 with 50 or more convictions and more than 2,000 offenders who have served 25 or more separate spells in prison. In addition, there are rapists and sex offenders who are never sentenced to serve a day behind bars. That should change. Some 20,000 offenders who are let off with community orders are out on the streets committing 50 crimes a day, including offences against children. The Government’s reforms to community sentences are a positive step forward, but there are tens of thousands of offenders on our streets for whom prison is the best place. Importantly, if they are in prison the public will know that they are being kept safe. Keeping the public safe should be fundamental to any criminal justice reforms we make in this Session.
We should also do more to support the victims of crime. I have seen from the work I have done with victims—let me refer hon. Members to my private Member’s Bill in the previous Session on championing victims’ rights—that victims are fed up with seeing policy makers and the courts focusing their efforts on appeasing offenders instead of helping victims to get through the horrific experiences they have faced. The former victims commissioner, Louise Casey, did a good job of highlighting this issue alongside charities such as Victim Support, the National Victims Association and Support After Murder and Manslaughter Abroad. The Government’s response to the consultation on its “Getting it right for victims and witnesses” strategy is due later this year, and I very much hope that they will recognise where the proposals need beefing up and that they will show some flexibility and deliver the new and improved services that victims of crime need. At the moment, my constituent Marie Heath and her family are being subjected to the horrendous ordeal of travelling to Germany every week for the ongoing trial of the defendants alleged to have brutally murdered her son. The family face huge logistical challenges and thousands of pounds in costs. The Government are aware of that case and I hope that in the Bill they will learn from the experience of the Heaths and many other victims of crime.
Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful point about people’s need to feel secure, to feel that sentencing is appropriate and to feel that those who should be behind bars are behind bars. Does she, like me, want the Government to take steps to ensure that sentences mean that if someone is sentenced to four years, for example, they serve those four years as opposed to perhaps just two?
Priti Patel
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We are talking about public confidence in the criminal justice system, which should do what it says on the tin. If an offender is sentenced to four years, the public do not want them released within 18 months or a shorter time. They want to know that the full sentence will be served. This is a good opportunity for the Government to restore public confidence in our criminal justice system.
I welcome the proposals the Government have outlined to free up businesses and scrap costly and unnecessary burdens on them. I refer to regulation. As the daughter of a small shopkeeper, I have recognised throughout my adult and teenage working life how important small businesses are for jobs and economic growth. I have also become very aware of regulation. As shopkeepers, my parents have owned a range of small shops—post offices, supermarkets and newsagents. We have been through many iterations of health and safety legislation, business and small shop regulation, Sunday trading, opening hours and particularly employment legislation. You name it, Madam Deputy Speaker, and we have been there, seen it and done it.
Small and medium-sized enterprises are the bedrock of our economy. We were once described as a nation of shopkeepers, but we do not feel like that any more, as small and independent retailers are decimated in our high streets. More needs to be done. SMEs support two thirds of jobs throughout the country. In my constituency, the figure rises to 83%, which is high and I should like it to be higher. With greater economic liberalisation and less regulation I am sure that will happen.
The ability of business owners and entrepreneurs to create even more jobs has been compromised by the unrelenting growth of regulation from both Whitehall and Brussels. In 2011, 84% of businesses reported that they spent more time dealing with legislation than in 2009. The annual cost to SMEs of that compliance is about £17 billion, which is equivalent to the cost of Crossrail, and 12 times the Government’s budget for apprenticeships.
The Government are committed to the red tape challenge; they have already identified more than 600 regulations to be scrapped or overhauled. The sooner the process begins, the better. Freeing business from the costs imposed by regulation will allow them, importantly, to invest in more jobs and economic growth.
I urge the Government to take more robust action on EU red tape. For me as a new Member of Parliament, one of the most disappointing aspects of EU regulation was the enforcement in the previous Session of the agency workers regulations, which unfortunately the Government could do nothing about because the previous Government had done the deal. That has cost business £1.5 billion. Such regulations do far more to create unemployment and block job creation than they do to support workers’ rights.
In my constituency and throughout Essex, more people are prepared to take risks and set up their own business. As many Members may have seen in the news over the past 24 hours, there has been a great deal of political focus on Essex; one might argue that the only way is up in Essex. It is indeed a county of dynamic entrepreneurs. Many of my constituents are prepared to go out on a limb and do the right thing, which is to take risks and set up a business. In the county of entrepreneurs, there are 6,000 new enterprise births a year. The figure is high, and I hope that it will grow higher.
As the Prime Minister saw on his visit yesterday, those wealth creators will be key to the future economic success not just of the county of Essex but of our country. By taking steps to empower them to create more wealth, jobs and prosperity, we can once again restore dynamism and strength in the British economy, and as a country we shall start to regain our rightful place in the world economic league tables. That is why I support the Queen’s Speech and everything the Government are doing on economic and regulatory reform.
Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)
It is an honour, although a daunting one, to follow that excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), who speaks with a wealth of expertise as both a parent of young children, a job she juggles very well with her other abilities, and an excellent parliamentarian. She spoke about businesses in Essex, again with a wealth of expertise as the daughter of shopkeepers, and gave a thorough going over of the Queen’s Speech.
It feels odd to speak on the first day of a parliamentary Session. It reminds me of when I turned up here in the previous Session hoping to make my maiden speech. I wanted to make it as soon as possible so that I could get into the cut and thrust of debate, so I put in and waited to make it on several occasions. I will never forget my first moment in Parliament. I was sitting in the corner of the Chamber and waiting, and new Members on both sides bobbed up and down to say how beautiful their constituencies were—it was funny how that theme kept coming up. I waited from half-past 2, without having a drink of water or going to the toilet, until half-past 10. I sat there for eight hours, so afterwards I went over to the Chairman of Ways and Means and explained that I had hoped to be called that day. “Oh no”, he replied, “You weren’t going to be called at all. You should have come and seen me and I could have told you that you were never going to make it today.” That was the first lesson I learnt here.
Chris Skidmore
Absolutely. There is a lot of waiting going on here, but we do not have to wait long for the contents of the Queen’s Speech, which I will come to shortly.
To continue with my anecdote for a moment, I remember still wanting to make my maiden speech as soon as possible, and sitting in the Tea Room looking through the draft of what I hoped to say when a more senior Conservative Member came over and asked, “Oh boy, you’re looking to make your maiden speech, are you?” I replied that I was and explained that I had waited to be called for eight hours the day before. “Oh well, there’s only one piece of advice I can give you about making your maiden speech,” he said. I was a young newbie and so asked what it was. “Well, just don’t muck it up,” he said, before wandering off laughing. He actually used stronger language, but I will not use it in the Chamber—[Interruption.] Yes, indeed, it rhymes with muck.
Chris Skidmore
Oh dear; hopefully the Hansard reporters can delete that for me—
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. To help the hon. Gentleman, I think that his colleague was telling him, “Good luck in making your maiden speech.”
Chris Skidmore
Indeed, and I wish the hon. Member for Ealing North (Stephen Pound) the best of luck in contributing to this excellent debate on the Queen’s Speech.
The first line of the Queen’s Speech refers to the importance of growth in the economy, but one of the sectors in which we know there will certainly be growth is social care, because we have an ageing population. We used to say that there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. We now know that our population is getting ever older; by 2030 the number of 85-year-olds will double and 11% of the population living today will reach 100. Therefore, we have an enormous cost—not a burden—that society will face as a result of the population getting older, which is inevitably a good thing. The Queen’s Speech recognises this, importantly, by proposing a draft Bill that will seek to modernise adult social care and support, which I absolutely welcome, but it is worth reflecting on the word “modernise” and on what we need to do to modernise adult social care and support.
The Government recognise that tackling social care is not just an issue of tackling the funding of social care, important though that is. The Health Committee, of which I am a member, has already produced a report on the Dilnot commission and recommended it to the Government, and I hope that the Government will look at it in the forthcoming White Paper and that we will have proposals on the table. I know that there is cross-party support for looking at the Dilnot commission proposals and that we had a Backbench Business debate on that in the previous Session. Members from across the House, regardless of their party colours, are passionate about tackling this issue and the impending crisis.
Chris Skidmore
The Dilnot issue, which is one of presentation, is that the Government commissioned a report that addressed the specific question, “How do we fund social care as it currently stands?” That is why I want to turn to the issue of modernisation, but we have to remember the important tenet that Dilnot does not cover all forms of social care. It does not cover domiciliary care or living costs, so it is not a panacea, and we as parliamentarians must ensure that we work together and at the same time—Dilnot was very strict on this—come up with a proper system by which we can inform not only elderly people now but the elderly people of tomorrow that they need to begin to save. Only by developing a savings culture and a culture of contribution, which I shall turn to also in my speech, will Dilnot work and will we ensure that the social care system works tomorrow as well as today—although today it is beginning to fail, as I shall explain.
In modernising social care, we need to recognise that the current system is not working on several levels. Personally, I feel that local authorities are becoming not the best places in which to deliver social care. Last week I published a report on local authorities and their delivery of social care, demonstrating from a series of freedom of information requests to every local authority in the country that local authorities have already written off £400 million of debts owed to them by families—and are still owed more than £1 billion.
Put simply, we have a system in which local authorities are not only struggling to provide care, but for financial reasons have lowered the bar and reduced their eligibility criteria. They have done so principally because they have to juggle social care with the services on which people really want to focus when they pay their council tax. For instance, people want their bins emptied or potholes filled, and that, for democratically elected local authorities, can take priority over those citizens who are most vulnerable but who, unfortunately for them, form a small minority. So roads and bins take precedence over social care. That should not be the case, but at the same time local authorities are deeply mired in debt because of their services, and we desperately need them to break out of that.
The current system also does not work because the failure of social care ends up rebounding in only one place: the NHS. We need to make the point strongly that the NHS and social care are two sides of the same coin, and that if there is a crisis in social care there will soon be a crisis in the NHS. Even the IMF has produced figures on how the NHS will look by 2050 if we do not manage our ageing population and work out ways of prevention. We must also look not only at how elderly people can be given the life and dignity that they deserve, but at early intervention. If any problems that they may have, such as diabetes or a disability, are dealt with soon enough, it costs the NHS less. The IMF predicts that the NHS will end up costing £230 billion by 2050, and that is completely unaffordable. It means that the NHS will go broke unless we solve the social care crisis now.
Dr Coffey
Does my hon. Friend agree that cross-party consensus on the draft social care Bill is critical? That is why a draft Bill is appropriate. Does he agree also that, as long as somebody is in hospital the NHS pays for them, so the draft Bill needs to tackle the key issue whereby local authorities sometimes delay a person’s exit from hospital so that they do not have to pick up the bill in the interim?
Chris Skidmore
That is an interesting point. Obviously, one of the first moves that the Government made when they came into office was to create an output measure of 30 days’ discharge from hospital. Although that was created in August 2011, it is already controversial because we are seeing the scale of the problem. The problem is not new; it has always been there, but the Government are for the first time providing the figures on how many people are leaving hospital and rebounding back into hospital. We should have solved that problem sooner.
My hon. Friend argued for a cross-party approach, and I entirely agree. We must achieve cross-party support on social care. We are talking about a settlement that must last decades, so it cannot be a patchwork solution or a plaster over a wound that might open up in several years’ time. We need to come up with a binding compact on social care. I hope that the draft Bill will aspire to that.
I have talked about the relationship between the NHS and social care. The Government have recognised that the future of saving the NHS will come through a consideration of social care. We focus very much on the NHS, and the Health and Social Care Bill of the previous Session tried to address the matter. Funds were placed in the hands of GPs; for the first time, GPs are taking responsibility for patients. Rather than sending patients directly to hospital, GPs have to look at what preventive measures they must take to cure illness or disability. Over the past three years, the number of over-80-year-olds who have been admitted into A and E has risen by about 40%. We know that 65% of unplanned NHS bed admission stays involve the elderly. If we can solve that, we will solve a huge issue within the NHS.
I am a member of the Health Committee, which recently wrote a report on social care. We visited Torbay, which was instructive. The authorities there have ensured complete integration between social care and health care services. They have done that by pooling budgets; when they have team meetings, there is no empire building in which people say, “This is my budget for the primary care trust, this is mine for the GPs and this is mine for the hospital.” People sit down and consider their overall budget. They have in mind an 85-year-old lady called Mrs Smith, and they ask what treatment pathway they could create to ensure that Mrs Smith gets the best possible care.
The authorities in Torbay recognise that social and community care is the best way to prevent unplanned admissions to NHS hospitals. The result is that Torbay has the fastest-decreasing and lowest number of unplanned hospital bed day admissions in the country. The approach there clearly works, so the modernisation of social care must also be about proper, true integration between social care and health care.
We also need to recognise that to modernise social care is not to speak of the elderly as some homogenous group. Above all, senior citizens are individuals with individual needs. Each will have their own particular pathway through the later years in life. As a Government, we must recognise that to ensure that the individual has the best possible life in old age, we must give them a chance to lead their life as they would like to.
To do that, the Government have built on the work of the previous Government in introducing personalised services. Above all, we have seen the rise of personal budgets. In England, their uptake doubled, from April 2010 to March 2011, to almost 340,000 service users. That is still only about 35% of eligible users and carers. Although the increase in personal budgets is welcome, it has come in the form of local authority managed budgets, rather than individual direct payments, which make up only 26% of that 340,000—that is, 26% of the 35% of eligible users.
Although there has been an increase in personalisation, there has not been a proper increase in individuals being given freedom in how they would like to use their budgets. In other words, councils are offering a menu to choose from but they are not offering a choice of restaurants.
Key to the modernisation of social care will be the introduction of direct cash payments. At present, individual budgets cannot be paid to a spouse or partner to provide care, and that limits uptake and entrenches the difficulty that millions of people have in wanting to care for a loved one in their old age. If we look across to the continent, we see that places such as Germany have a far more liberalised social care system. In Germany, people are assessed as needing care at one of three levels, and they are then offered a choice between an individual budget cash payment with services in kind, including residential care, and a tailored combination of the two. Interestingly, the individual budget cash payment is of significantly lower value than the social care package. In 2007, people who needed considerable care, or care level 1, received €384 per month; those in need of intensive care, or level 2, received €921 per month; and those in need of highly intensive care, or level 3, received €1,432 per month. They were also offered the choice of claiming direct individual budget cash payments that were about two thirds lower than the payments in the social care package, which meant that people at care level 1 received €205 per month, those at care level 2 received €410 per month and those at care level 3 received €665 per month.
One might have expected the population to opt for the higher payment, given that the social care package seems to be more sophisticated and pays more in euros, but in fact 49% of Germans decided instead to opt for the direct cash payment, which gave them greater choice and freedom in how they spent the money, or spent it for their relative. That control is every bit as valuable to individuals as money. It gives them the opportunity to stay in their own home and receive informal care from relatives. They can purchase the service they need without an additional layer of bureaucracy getting in the way. We can learn from what Germany did in modernising social care. Local authorities have traditionally focused on a one-size-fits-all response, in effect acting as a single, inflexible state supplier that cannot hope to offer the choice that people approaching their old age nowadays—baby boomers who have lived their lives having choice—will want equally as they get older.
What would happen if we introduced such a system in this country? In 2009-10, local authorities spent £3.4 billion on residential elderly care. On that basis, if the same thing happened here as in Germany, with half this group opting instead for cash payments and staying at home, we would save £1.14 billion a year, with people receiving £566 million instead of £1.7 billion. We could free up £1.1 billion or £1.2 billion a year, which could go a significant way towards producing the money that might then implement Dilnot.
Above all, the way in which people contribute to their care must be something that they can control rather than something that is done to them. We need to ensure that in modernising social care we make the best possible services available. People will not put up with paying for the current levels of services if they do not think that they are good enough. If we are going to expect people to pay more for their social care in old age, knowing, as we do, that it has never been free of charge—it is a bit of a nasty shock for some people when they find out that it is not provided free—then they need to have the best possible services for their money, and that, essentially, means choice.
With choice comes competition. We must ensure that there is thriving competition between social care providers. We must not only introduce direct cash budget payments but ensure that agencies are available to guarantee a level playing field. The Good Care Guide website is a fantastic resource, but we should be looking to introduce a TripAdvisor-type service into social care so that people can analyse which are the best care homes and write about their own experiences of what they are like. We should trust the people to make those judgments.
I want to end by reflecting on this year. Many Members have spoken about it being the year of the diamond jubilee, but it is also 70 years since William Beveridge published the Beveridge report on 1 December 1942. On that day, there were queues at the shops to purchase the report, and in the first week 600,000 people did so. The report set out what the welfare state would look like for most of the 20th century.
In many ways, Beveridge still casts a shadow over us. The NHS and pensions were established, but when Beveridge wrote his report the average life expectancy was 69. When people received their pension at 65, their pensionable age was only meant to last an average of four years. Beveridge never gave any thought to how we should care for the elderly. It was assumed that families would look after their elderly loved ones. Somewhere along the line, we have gone wrong. I am not blaming any one political party, but why is it that in many countries it is a mark of honour for people to look after those who have brought them into this world? Why do we pay people child benefit in recognition of being parents but not focus on rewarding carers who look after their parents? There is an imbalance, and I hope that by focusing on social care, as all parties must in this Parliament, we can try to redress the balance.
I wish to end with a quote from Beveridge. The odd thing is, the Beveridge report cannot be found online, but I managed to dig out from the Library a copy of the original 1942 report. Everyone remembers the five giants—Idleness, Squalor, Want, Ignorance and Disease—but in the passage after that famous part Beveridge stated that
“social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.”
Beveridge understood 70 years ago that we needed a contributory principle in our public services. Somewhere along the line, that has been lost. Only through individuals making contributions towards their elderly care will we achieve the best social care services. I hope that as we consider how to modernise social care, the draft Bill that will be published as a result of the Queen’s Speech will focus on all the matters that I have mentioned.
Much of the media’s focus has been on the other place, which we might call a retirement home for rather successful eminent politicians, but what we actually need to focus on, and what our constituents want to focus on, is retirement homes for the elderly population as a whole and what is happening to them. We would do well to remember that. I recognise that I have spoken only about one specific point in the Queen’s Speech, but I believe it was possibly the most important one.
Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(James Duddridge.)
Debate to be resumed tomorrow.
Universal Credit
(12 years, 6 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)
May I say what a lucky honour it is to have the first Adjournment debate of the new Session?
In October 2013, we will see one of the biggest changes to the welfare benefits system since the second world war with the introduction of the new universal credit. The Welfare Reform Act 2012 has gone through, and there was a lot of focus on the fairness and unfairness of various benefit changes, but there was not much focus on the administrative changes involved in the move to universal credit—the changes to the process of applying for benefits and being assessed for them. We should all welcome to some extent the rationalisation of a series of disparate benefits that have grown up over the decade. The administrative components of universal credit will include the tax credit system, housing benefit, income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, employment and support allowance and so on.
Tonight, we are not debating the principle of universal credit, but considering the roll-out of the administration for the new arrangement and, of course, the massive consequences for our constituents. If it goes well—hopefully, it will—they may not notice anything untoward, but there are massive risks if the administrative transition is not handled competently and carefully. That is essentially the purpose of my set of questions for the Under-Secretary in the short time available today. I sent a list of the issues that I broadly wanted to raise to her private office earlier today because some of the questions are technical. I hope that we can get a little more on the record because there has not been that much opportunity to debate those issues so far, and we are talking about a change that will affect a million people in the first six months of the roll-out of universal credit from October 2013.
One of the most interesting facets of universal credit is the Government’s decision that it should be digital by default: in other words, they are working on the assumption that the vast majority of claimants will access their claims online. I think that the Government’s assessment is that 80% of those claims will be made online. My first question therefore is whether the Under-Secretary can reaffirm that that figure still represents the Government’s assumption. Could she perhaps also give us a logical explanation of how that beautifully neat and round figure of 80% was reached?
Many people who apply for universal credit are not exactly frequent internet users: 15% of council tenants have no access to the internet; one in six adults generally have never used it—that figure is as high as one in four in Northern Ireland, and one in five in the north-east and in Wales—and 4 million disabled people have never used it. Consumer Focus research shows that 69% of people want the ability to have face-to-face transactions for benefit claims at post offices and so on. I therefore want to get a sense from the Under-Secretary of her contingency plan if the 80% target is missed. How will we move towards such a major shift in the way in which people apply for their benefits? We are considering the livelihoods of many people.
Universal credit will be a household, not an individual benefit. It will be assessed on a whole household, so a vast amount of supporting documentation will have to be processed when individuals change their entitlements. Again, how can that supporting documentation be assessed online? How will it be assessed centrally, given that we will move away from the localisation of many applications? That online assumption must be tested significantly.
As a corollary, the next issue is the extent to which the Government commit resources for the minority, who they accept will struggle with applying online. What resources will be available for face-to-face advice and support for claimants who cannot go down the digital route? I understand that the Department is planning some sort of 0845 hotline numbers, but they are expensive, especially for people with mobile phones. However, I am particularly interested in knowing how much money has been put aside for the face-to-face service.
A recent survey of the many district councils in England and Wales suggests that they believe that 50% of people coming through their doors and applying, for example, for housing benefit, need to do that face to face. Obviously, that is at odds with the Government assessment of presumably only 20% needing some sort of support other than the online arrangement. Investing so much in the online arrangement is clearly a dangerous ambition. I understand the logic of wanting greater take-up of digital applications, but I am anxious that the target is so high, and I want to get a sense of the scenario planning and the arrangements that the Government have considered if it is simply not deliverable.
We should cast our minds back to the difficulties with online tax credit arrangements. There was significant fraud, which had to be addressed and meant the arrangements had to be changed. Will the Minister say on the record that she is happy with the anti-fraud measures and the robustness and security of the new online universal credit system? Clearly, it would be a tragedy if so many people were directed to an online system that had to be scaled back at the last minute because individuals found a way of fraudulently fleecing it because it was not secure or robust.
Will the Minister give an assurance—her noble Friend Lord Freud was unable to do so during the passage of the Welfare Reform Act 2012—that the Government’s intention to move to a monthly payment arrangement will have a degree of flexibility? In theory, it is desirable for everybody to plan their budgets and household expenditure on a monthly basis, to mimic in-work salary arrangements, but the trouble is that it is not the experience to date of many people. Many of my constituents in Nottingham, who have suffered a great deal of deprivation or who are not on significant amounts of money take the parcels of money that come in housing benefit or other benefits and hypothecate them for rent, bills or other things. We are asking a great deal of people, sometimes later on in their lives, to change their habits and take payments at the beginning of the month and ensure that they budget so that their rent is fully paid for the rest of the period and beyond.
The danger that people will accumulate increasing arrears to pay for the roof over their head worries me significantly, never mind local authorities, which already say that they have concerns about the collection of rent payments. Currently, housing benefit can be paid directly to the landlord, the local authority or the housing association, but that is ending, so there is a great deal of anxiety about the continuity of housing entitlement.
As I have said, 15% of council tenants do not have access to the internet. In fact, 15% have no access to a bank account and a further 15% have only a basic post office account with limited functionality. Therefore, nearly a third of social tenants might not have mainstream banking capabilities available to them, yet we expect them to move in fairly short order to that monthly budgeting arrangement. Hundreds of thousands of people up and down the country, particularly those who do not have bank accounts, are massively mistrustful of the banking system—they are fearful of the overdraft charges that can hit them if they are unable to plan or manage their cash flow over that monthly period.
It is with those points in mind that I ask the Minister this: is there any flexibility in the roll-out of universal credit to allow weekly or fortnightly payments for those who absolutely need them, or is she absolutely firmly sticking to monthly payments for everybody? That is a crucial question and I would be grateful if the Minister addressed it.
It would also help if the Minister could give us a better sense of the dates for transition to the central system as we move away from local authority administration. There are currently 380 localised IT systems in local authorities up and down the country, largely to deal with housing benefit. They will be phased out as we move towards a central system, with one IT system at the Department for Work and Pensions and one at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. What resources have been available for the transition for councils that have a residual responsibility for some activities over the period—it will be 2017 before full roll-out?
We are starting the process of passing over responsibility to the DWP in October 2013, but some councils will process housing benefit until April 2014, and full migration will not happen until 2017. How will councils be able to do this? It will remain a significant burden for local government, and local council tax payers need to know whether Ministers will meet those costs. It is not necessarily as big an issue in my area as Nottingham city council is a unitary metropolitan authority that has several different functions, but for some district councils housing benefit is 25% of their turnover, so it is a somewhat mission-critical activity. They need to know to what extent they will still be in the business of such administration. What really is the commitment of the Government to a local roll-out of universal credit? Will it still be a local service or will they shift in short order to that central arrangement?
As I read through the documentation, several secondary issues arose. What about pensioners? Many are still reliant on housing benefit, but universal credit is an in-work benefit, so who will be responsible for the administration of housing benefit to pensioners? That is a specific question and I would be grateful for the Minister’s clarification. Obviously, if local authorities are no longer involved in the administration of housing benefit, how will pensioners continue to receive it?
There will be two vast centralised computer systems, and the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office are already voicing anxieties about these arrangements. The DWP is moving to the “Agile” methodology, and Computer Weekly had a report recently in which it said that a leaked report from the Cabinet Office major projects authority suggested that the
“Agile methodology remains unproven at this scale”.
An amber risk rating was attached. Is that the case? What is the Government’s assessment of the risks of the change to this system by the DWP? The HMRC computer system will take a real-time approach to the PAYE process, but again reports suggest that the time scale has slipped beyond the April 2013 target. Can the Minister say whether that is true?
If we are to contract out much of this activity, will it be sent offshore? Will the work under these new arrangements be done in the UK, or will much of the IT or contact centre work be done in India or other countries? That would be another helpful clarification.
Another important issue has to be the many thousands of staff who currently work on housing benefit in local authorities up and down the country. Unison and other representatives of the work force have also asked about this. I gather that the Government have decided that TUPE will not apply to those who work in housing benefit administration in local authorities. So there will be a massive redundancy programme in local authorities and no take-up of those staff in the new, centralised arrangements. If that is the case, how will the Government respond to the massive redundancy costs involved? Will the Government compensate local authorities for those costs? Can the Minister say how much that will cost and how many staff will be affected? A lump of money was set aside at the beginning of the spending review period for the transition to universal credit. Have the assumptions behind that sum stayed the same or have they changed?
As the Minister will know, the Opposition have spotted that she and many of her colleagues are under the shadow of the omnishambles and that the Government’s record on competence has already been questioned. When it comes to universal credit, their reputation for competence is definitely on the line, and it has to be proven that they can fulfil their promises. This is a major risk not only to the Government’s reputation but to all our constituents, especially the most needy.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Maria Miller)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) on securing this debate. He is fortunate to have secured such an important debate.
It is fitting that the first Adjournment debate of the Session is on universal credit, because the Gracious Speech today underlined the Government’s commitment to building a fairer, more responsible society, to supporting families to do the right thing, to making work pay and to ending the something-for-nothing culture that gained a foothold in this country for too long under the previous Administration. Universal credit is at the heart of delivering on that commitment.
Universal credit will deliver a simpler and fairer system, and our reforms will put work, whether full time, part time or for just a few hours a week, at the centre of the welfare system. As such, it will extend a ladder of opportunity to those previously excluded or marginalised from the world of work. The current system has an array of 30 different benefits, each with its own rules and criteria and characterised by overlaps, duplication and complication. We all know from our constituency surgeries how bewildering that can be for many individuals.
Claimants need to submit several claims to different agencies to get the support they need and are required to communicate changes in their personal and financial circumstances time and time again. Universal credit will create a much simpler system, by reducing the number of benefits and agencies people have to work with, smoothing their transition into work and making it easier to understand the available support. From 2013, universal credit will provide a new single system of means-tested support for working-age people, whether in or out of work, and will include housing, children, child care costs and additions for disabled people and carers.
As I set out, the main purpose is to help people into work. The new system will remove the distinction between in-work support for those working 16 hours a week or more and out-of-work support for those working fewer than 16 hours a week, eliminating some of those problems we have seen in our constituencies and the need to claim a different set of benefits when starting or ending a job, or when changing working hours.
How a benefit is paid to claimants is important because it will encourage people to manage their budgets in the same way as households. Claimants should be treated as they would if they were experiencing working life. The greater the difference between being out of work and in work, the greater the barrier to returning to work. Universal credit will therefore be administered in one single monthly payment, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. We will be able to administer the payment on a more frequent basis, where necessary, but we will work closely with the people advising claimants to ensure that the support is there to keep this sort of atypical payment to a minimum. I think he would accept that that is important.
The greater simplicity of universal credit will result in a substantial increase in the take-up of currently unclaimed benefits, with the greatest impact being on poorer families. As I am sure Members know, the combined impact of this increased take-up will lift 900,000 individuals out of poverty, including more than 350,000 children and about 550,000 working-age adults.
The hon. Gentleman did not touch on one child care issue that I would like to bring to the attention of the House. I am sure he will know that child care costs can often be a significant issue for people trying to remain close to the workplace. Universal credit will introduce a new way of supporting families. An extra 80,000 extra families will be eligible to receive support for the first time, because people who are working shorter hours will be able to claim child care support.
The hon. Member for Nottingham East rightly talked about the importance of the digital process—
Maria Miller
As I was saying, the hon. Gentleman rightly picked up on the importance of the online aspect of universal credit. It is designed to be an online service, providing access and support to claimants 24 hours a day. Importantly, it will also provide the service where constituents are, as opposed to where jobcentres are.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
I thank the Minister for giving way, and I apologise for not being here for the beginning of the debate. I was at another engagement down below, and I did not realise that the Adjournment debate had started.
I feel that certain people in the middle class are going to fall into the child poverty bracket as a result of the introduction of universal credit. What assurance can the Minister give me that such people will not be adversely affected by the changes that the Government are proposing?
Maria Miller
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s intervention. At the point of transition to universal credit, we want to ensure that people will continue to receive the support that they were receiving before, if there have been no changes to their circumstances. It is important for everyone to understand that, as a result of universal credit, we will be making work pay. We will ensure that more people can stay close to the labour market, which will help them not only to get out of poverty but to stay out of it. We all know that families can cycle in and out of poverty; it does not affect a static group of people. It is therefore important that we have that support in place.
I want to get back to the digital nature of universal credit. We make no apology for the fact that this is designed to be an online service. It is designed to be available 24 hours a day, and to be available where claimants are and when it is most convenient for them to use it. The hon. Member for Nottingham East is right to say that that will not be the right approach for absolutely everyone, but let me stay with the group for which it will be the right approach. Estimates show that about 80% of individuals are already accessing services in an online scenario. We are not assuming that 80% will use the online service at the outset; we have always recognised that not everyone will be able to claim online. However, we expect that the proportion who do so will grow over time. We will supplement all of that with a face-to-face and telephone service that will always be available, for just the kinds of groups of people whom the hon. Gentleman referred to.
To ensure that we resolve any issues in advance of the system going live, and that we have the right kind of support in place, we are already working with local authorities on a number of pilot schemes. I urge the hon. Gentleman to look at the work that we are doing with the Local Government Association. We have also recently issued a joint prospectus calling on local authorities to deliver pilots to support residents in preparation for the introduction of universal credit in 2013. The pilots are expected to start in the autumn of this year and to end by September 2013. We will focus on delivering the kind of face-to-face support that individuals might need when claiming universal credit. I hope that he will agree that we will have a wide range of support available. It will be available online, as well as face to face and on the telephone.
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that it is important to get the IT right for this, and we are well under way in our designs and in testing the system to ensure that universal credit is introduced in 2013. Our ambition will, of course, always be to move the majority of people on to use of the online system, and we are working closely with other Government Departments and beyond to ensure that the best possible support is there to enable access to the internet for many people, supporting claimants to get even more value from being online.
The hon. Gentleman expressed an interest in the issue of fraud and the work being done to ensure that safeguards are in place. It will come as no surprise to him to hear that we take the issue of fraud very seriously indeed. Its prevention has been built into the heart of all policy and service design development. Universal credit will be protected by comprehensive and sophisticated cyber-defence and counter-fraud systems, which are currently under development with leading suppliers. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will want to stay close to the sorts of issues that we are dealing with, but he will understand if I do not go into the details of those systems, as they are sensitive and not for open discussion.
The hon. Gentleman raised the issue of monthly payments, which I have touched on a little already. To be absolutely clear, we believe it important for universal credit to reflect what people experience in the workplace when they are working full time. For the most part, that means being able to budget around a monthly payment, a monthly salary or a monthly amount of money coming in. We will ensure that there is flexibility in the system for those who find that exceptionally difficult, but we believe that this will be an exception and not the rule.
Jim Shannon
I can see the logic behind the change to monthly payments, but it is clear that some who get weekly payments are not knowledgeable enough to know how to manage their moneys. Will the Government give any help to those who will depend on single weekly payments to start with, who will then have to manage on monthly payments, on how best to manage their money?
Maria Miller
The hon. Gentleman will be reassured to know that my noble Friend Lord Freud is looking at exactly those issues. We know that changing people’s behaviour cannot happen overnight. People need support and we will make sure that we understand the sort of support that will prove the most effective, as the hon. Gentleman would expect us to do.
The hon. Member for Nottingham East talked about the importance of banking in this process. Direct payments to bank accounts are an important part of helping people to prepare for work. We will encourage claimants to use bank accounts, and we are discussing this very issue with the British Bankers Association. We recognise, however, that it will not be suitable for everybody, so we expect to continue to pay rent directly to landlords in some cases and we will continue to ensure that suitable payment arrangements are in place for everybody. The hon. Gentleman is right that we need that nuanced approach for some individuals. The bulk of individuals, we believe, should be able to cope with the sort of monthly payments that I mentioned earlier.
Chris Leslie
I am sorry to intervene, as I know we are getting short of time. The analysis of the support needs of an individual, either face to face at the first point of application or subsequently in recognition of exceptions such as weekly payments or direct payments for landlords, is a key point. How will it be done? Will it be a local service? Is it assumed that predominantly local authorities will pick up those responsibilities? I want to gain a sense of who will be dealing with these things, as the Department for Work and Pensions in Whitehall will not be doing the face-to-face work.
Maria Miller
I think the hon. Gentleman is right, and in the pilots we shall pick up some of those issues, particularly the sorts of support that local authorities could provide. Jobcentre Plus will also be involved from the launch of universal credit as an on-site, readily available resource. The hon. Gentleman is right that we have to make sure that the appropriate support is there for the people who might need it, and we want to ensure that such systems are available so that universal credit becomes the success we know it will be.
The hon. Gentleman spoke of the importance of understanding the phased migration fully. We recognise that the move from one welfare system to another needs to be managed carefully, so that no one is left without the support that they need. The transition from the old benefit system to universal credit will therefore take place in three phases over four years, ending in 2017 when between 12 million and 13 million benefit and tax credit claims will become 8 million universal credit claims.
In the first phase, beginning in October 2013, all new claims to the current benefits and credits will be phased out by April 2014, with new claims to housing benefits and tax credits being the last to end in that month. Natural migrations to universal credit as a result of a significant change of circumstances will also be taken from October 2013.
In the second phase, which will begin in April 2014, existing claimants whose circumstances have not changed will start to be transferred to universal credit through managed change. It is expected that, as most of the households whose members are actively seeking work will have been moved through the new claims or natural changes route by April 2014, the households involved in that phase will generally be those with people in part-time work and those that are economically inactive. Priority will be given to households the nature of whose work makes them most likely to benefit from universal credit.
In the third and final phase, from the end of 2015 until the end of 2017, the remaining households will be moved into the new system. Local circumstances, such as staffing turnover, contractual obligations and demography, will be taken into account. The households will be moved on to universal credit in good time before housing benefit loads become too small to be viable. Within those parameters, the focus on work and poverty will be retained. That should allow local authorities to plan with more certainty over the medium term.
The hon. Gentleman rightly sought clarification of the important issue of housing benefit for pensioners. Following the abolition of housing benefit, help with rent and child costs will be provided through pension credit, and will broadly follow the existing rules.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned a number of information technology issues. I am not sure that I can cover all of them today, but I can assure him categorically that there will be no offshore outsourcing of the administration of universal credit, that the Department will send no existing British jobs overseas, and that no personal data are held or can be accessed outside the United Kingdom. Many sub-contractors started using overseas staff under the last Government. We are considering how jobs that used to be sent offshore could be moved back to the UK in the future. I hope that the hon. Gentleman would welcome such a move.
I do not think that the hon. Gentleman raised the issue of real-time information, but I shall bring him up to date in case he is interested. Real-time information is being introduced in HMRC to improve the operation of the pay-as-you-earn system, which will make it easier for employers and HMRC to share information. Under universal credit, entitlement for people who pay tax on their earnings through PAYE will correspond directly with earnings information received through HMRC’s automatic real-time information PAYE data transfer.
HMRC began pilot-testing RTI in April, and has already introduced 10 employer schemes representing a range of sizes with the aim of ironing out any wrinkles. I understand that the initial pilot stage has gone well, and that a further 310 employers joined the pilot yesterday. We are working closely with HMRC to ensure that systems are in place for the introduction of universal credit.
The hon. Gentleman rightly mentioned the important role of local authorities. They have been, and will continue to be, integral to the development of universal credit. We have undertaken extensive work with authorities to ensure that they help us to develop universal credit, and to tap into their expertise. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the local authorities associations of England, Scotland and Wales for their constructive engagement with us, especially those authorities that have already committed time and resources to helping to make universal credit a success.
On 21 March the permanent secretaries of my Department and the Department for Communities and Local Government wrote to chief executives informing them that local authorities will be expected to provide face-to-face support for certain universal credit claimants who will need more intensive help to access the new benefit.
The hon. Gentleman raised the important issue of staff. Local authorities will want to ensure that they deal with that issue correctly. When universal credit comes into force in October 2013, local authorities will have an important role to play, and that role will begin to change, too, so they will go through a period of transition. They will need to make sure they continue to work with us through this process. The Local Government Association and the DWP recently issued a joint prospectus calling on local authorities to work on the pilots I have mentioned. We recognise that costs will be associated with that process and the wind-down of housing benefit, and we will discuss that with DCLG and the local authorities in due course.
Chris Leslie
The Minister says that there will be a negotiation and that she will discuss this matter with local authorities, but she has to accept that central Government have decided to introduce the universal credit, and that a number of housing benefit and local authority staff will be made redundant. In a sense, the Government are forcing local authorities to make their staff redundant. The Minister has to accept that they must be compensated by central Government for that.
Maria Miller
The hon. Gentleman has made a number of assumptions. As I have outlined, the introduction of universal credit will take place over a number of years. Local authorities already know it is coming, so it would be prudent of them to be planning for the changes and to make sure that they cause as little disruption as possible to their staff. Local authorities will have an important role to play in the future, whether in respect of their staff or of minimising any costs associated with the change. I urge the hon. Gentleman not to make assumptions as to how local authorities will deal with this process. I think most of them will want to plan the transfer sensibly and avoid any unnecessary costs.
I hope I have covered the majority of the points the hon. Gentleman raised. This debate has provided us with a tremendous opportunity to discuss an important part of the Government’s reform agenda, which is based on making sure that work pays, and that we have a strong and robust benefit system that supports families in the right way in order to make sure they can lift themselves out of poverty and that people, both disabled and non-disabled, have the opportunity to go to work. These reforms are a central plank of Government policy.
Question put and agreed to.