House of Commons
Prayers
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Business of the House
(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)
Will the Leader of the House give us the business for next week?
The Leader of the House of Commons (Mr Andrew Lansley)
The business for next week is as follows:
Monday 13 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on health and social care.
Tuesday 14 May—Continuation of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on the cost of living.
Wednesday 15 May—Conclusion of the debate on the Queen’s Speech on economic growth.
Thursday 16 May—General debate on mental health. The subject for this debate has been nominated by the Backbench Business Committee.
The provisional business for the week commencing 20 May will include:
Monday 20 May—Remaining stages of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill (Day 1).
Tuesday 21 May—Conclusion of remaining stages of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill (Day 2), followed by motion to approve a European document relating to Syria.
I should also like to inform the House that the business in Westminster Hall for 16 May will be:
Thursday 16 May—Debate on the seventh report of the Education Select Committee on careers guidance for young people, followed by debate on the seventh report of the Science and Technology Committee on educating tomorrow’s engineers.
Ms Eagle
I thank the Leader of the House for his statement. The next time the Government cannot find their Education Minister and have to bring business questions forward, I wonder whether they might like to give us a little more notice—I am still catching my breath. I also thank him for advance sight of the written ministerial statement he tabled today confirming the Bills announced yesterday. I am sure that you, Mr Speaker, will be as concerned as I am that while he provided Members with one page of information, the Downing street spin machine provided the press with 93 pages of detail on the same Bills. Will he confirm that he will arrange for a copy of that briefing to be placed in the House of Commons Library immediately and that in future he will ensure that Members of this House are accorded the same courtesies as are accorded to the press?
I welcome to the House the new Labour Member, my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell-Buck), the first woman to represent Shields in Parliament. She will be a fighter for her constituents. I also welcome back into the Conservative fold the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries). I wonder whether the Leader of the House is taking bets on how long it will take the Chief Whip to wish she was back in the jungle.
I suspect that last week’s local elections had a more profound impact on the Queen’s Speech than the Leader of the House can let on. They were a disaster across the English shires for the Conservatives, as Labour won in many southern marginals and hordes of true blue voters flocked to the UK Independence party. I followed with interest the Conservative implosion in the Leader of the House’s own backyard of Cambridgeshire, where the Conservatives lost control of the council for the first time in more than 15 years. The Conservative leader of the council even managed to lose his seat—and to a Liberal Democrat. I hope that the Leader of the House has congratulated his deputy, the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), on that success for the Liberal Democrats on his home turf. It is hard to imagine, but the Leader of the House did better in the elections than the Prime Minister, who managed to lose Witney to Labour and see the Conservative candidate beaten into third place by UKIP.
The signs are that the panic is setting in. Lord Lawson is calling for an exit from Europe—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear.”] He has some support on the Government Back Benches, I hear. Lord Tebbit is reported as saying that UKIP’s policies are now closer to the traditional Conservative agenda, and the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is calling for a big, open and comprehensive coalition with Farage. This is a failing Conservative party that cannot even hold on to the Tory shires and whose Members are starting to behave like headless chickens. They are so bad at listening to their own members that this week one of them resorted to taking out a full page advertisement in The Times to tell them how out of touch they are. The irony is that he probably paid for it with his millionaire’s tax cut.
Many of us were shocked by the omission from the Gracious Speech of the promised legislation to ensure plain packaging for cigarettes. The public health Minister, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), publicly supported the proposal, and when the Leader of the House was Secretary of State for Health he said:
“The evidence is clear that packaging helps to recruit smokers, so it makes sense to consider having less attractive packaging. It's wrong that children are being attracted to smoke by glitzy designs on packets.”
Does he stand by that view? Why have the measures on minimum alcohol pricing been dropped, too? After this week’s revelations that the Prime Minister’s election guru, Lynton Crosby, has business links to big tobacco and the drinks industry, can the Leader of the House assure us that no inside lobbying has taken place at No. 10? Or is that why the Government’s proposal to introduce a statutory register of lobbyists has also mysteriously disappeared?
Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech showed that the Government may have legislated for fixed five-year Parliaments but that they have run out of ideas after just three. Instead of new ideas to get our economy growing again, all we get is a thin, cobbled-together legislative programme that is completely lacking in ambition. Our last Session saw parliamentary time unfilled, badly drafted, badly managed Bills, and a U-turn, on average, once every seven sitting days. Yesterday’s Queen’s Speech will give no one confidence that in the coming year we will not see more of the same.
This was the Government’s third Queen’s Speech, and all we have had is three years of failure, with low growth, falling living standards, and rising borrowing. The Government had nothing to say on tackling the crisis in youth unemployment. They had nothing to back small businesses, nothing to boost housing, nothing on rail fares and nothing on growth. This is a tired Government, out of ideas and out of touch. Even Sir Alex Ferguson could not turn this lot into a winning team.
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to the shadow Leader of the House for her response. I am glad that she has sufficient puff, even though the shadow Queen’s Speech she published during the recess seemed to have less steam in it than a decent kettle.
I join the hon. Lady in welcoming the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell-Buck). Although this is a matter for the Chief Whip, I also welcome back my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Nadine Dorries). In this case, however, it is probably more appropriate to say, “Welcome back to the jungle.”
The shadow Leader of the House should not trespass on to trying to interpret last Thursday’s local election results, especially those in South Cambridgeshire. I know about mid-terms; I ran the Conservative party’s European and parliamentary election campaign in 1999, two years before the 2001 general election, when we trounced everybody in sight. Labour Members might like to remember that simple fact. They might also like to remember the simple fact that their party, with their leader, secured less impressive local election results last Thursday than Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock did in mid-term. On the day before the local elections there were six Conservative county councillors in South Cambridgeshire; after the elections there were nine, partly because a sitting UKIP councillor in one division lost his seat to a Conservative. I would like the hon. Lady to get her facts right before she ventures into my constituency.
The hon. Lady asked about standardised packaging. I initiated the consultation on standardised packaging, and I did so, as I said at the time, with an open mind. As my right hon. Friends have made clear, no decision has been made in response to the consultation on that. I think that the hon. Lady will recall that the nature of the Queen’s Speech is to put forward proposals for legislation where the Government have decided what their policy is, not to venture into legislation where no policy decision has taken place. It is completely false to imagine that there was ever a question of including reference to standardised packaging in the Queen’s Speech; there never was, and it would not have been appropriate to do so.
As I said, I have looked at the hon. Lady’s alternative Queen’s Speech. In contrast with ours, there seem to be just six Bills, one of which is a finance Bill. It refers to a consumer’s Bill. There is a draft consumer rights Bill in our proposals. She has a proposal for a jobs Bill. I do not know quite what that means, because I have never yet found out how Labour Members can propose policies that would destroy jobs while guaranteeing people jobs. Where are these jobs supposed to come from? Jobs come from wealth-creating businesses, and that is what this coalition Government have been able to achieve in the past year, with some 500,000 additional jobs. Since the election, 1.2 million extra jobs have been created in the private sector. That is what makes the real difference.
The hon. Lady’s shadow Queen’s Speech refers to a banking Bill. A banking reform Bill is being carried over from the previous Session. She talks about a housing Bill, but as far as I can see her proposals would not get any houses built; we will do that through the Help to Buy scheme and other schemes.
The Labour party’s shadow Queen’s Speech also refers to an immigration Bill. Such a Bill is the centrepiece of our legislative programme, but the Labour party’s version would not impact on net migration numbers at all. It might be reasonable to make sure that migrant workers are not abused, but that is not the issue; the issue is to ensure that we encourage those people who can contribute to this economy, while also ensuring that we are not subject to abuse by those who enter and do not make such a contribution. That is what our immigration Bill will do.
On informing the House on the content of Bills, I remind the hon. Lady that today’s fresh new Order Paper notes that, in addition to the carry-over Bills from the previous Session, the Pensions Bill, the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, the Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill and the Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill will be presented in this House today, while the Care Bill, the Offender Rehabilitation Bill, the Mesothelioma Bill, the Local Audit and Accountability Bill and the Intellectual Property Bill will be presented in another place. The House therefore has a full programme, commencing today.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
The Leader of the House will be aware that the Government’s provisions to enable assets of community value to be listed have already proved useful in saving valued community services such as village shops and public houses from closure. He may, however, share my concern that some of the major public house operators—known as pubcos—are seeking to circumvent the proposals by selling pubs through private contracts with commercial developers without the sale ever being advertised and, therefore, without the community having any notice of what is happening until the pub closes overnight and an application to demolish the premises, often on specious grounds of security costs, is made the next day. This has happened in my constituency, where Enterprise Inns surreptitiously sold the Porcupine public house to Lidl. Will the Leader of the House make time for a debate on this subject?
Mr Speaker
Order. If, when the hon. Gentleman was practising at the Bar, he was paid by the word, I think he now owes us all a drink.
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend is, of course, an asset of considerable value in this House and he played a significant part, through the Localism Act 2011, in securing the much-valued measures. I agree with him. Parishes in my own constituency have seen the value of the assets of community value provisions, which should not be circumvented. I will, of course, ensure that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government hears what my hon. Friend has said, and he might be able to take action.
Graham Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)
May we have a debate on the urgent issue of the right to buy and the Government’s broken promise that there would be one-for-one, like-for-like replacements? According to the Department for Communities and Local Government website, for every nine houses sold only one is replaced. This amounts to a broken promise to those people who desperately need affordable housing but who are not getting it.
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman should first acknowledge that under Labour the number of new social houses being built dropped to its lowest ever level. There is a time lag: the right to buy is of significant value to tenants at the point when they become homeowners, but it also derives a benefit to the housing revenue account, which will enable additional properties to be built in due course.
Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)
I am sure that the House agrees that we must protect our national assets, one of which is fishing quota. Currently, small fishermen are trying to wrestle back—on behalf of the Government in many ways and on behalf of citizens—the fishing quota that has been “appropriated” by other quarters and interests. May we have a debate on this issue as soon as possible?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising what is an important issue, not least in her own constituency. I will, of course, talk to my hon. Friends at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and ensure that they take note of what she says. There may be an opportunity for her to raise the issue and for them to respond at the forthcoming DEFRA Question Time.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
We are a month into the implementation of the bedroom tax and the benefit cap is about to be rolled out across London. Does the Leader of the House not think that it would be good to have a debate between Members and Ministers from the Departments for Communities and Local Government and for Work and Pensions, because there is clearly a gap? Constituents of mine are being issued with letters from housing associations threatening them with eviction as a result of these measures.
Mr Lansley
I remind the House and Opposition Members in particular that, as Mr Speaker outlined yesterday, the selection of subjects for the Queen’s Speech debate was made by the Opposition. They could have chosen to debate the Government’s welfare reforms, but they did not. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions will respond to the debate tomorrow. If the hon. Lady wishes to raise the matter then, we will be glad to take part in the debate and to ask why the Labour party, after 13 years of talking about welfare reform that it never delivered, has turned itself into a party that is opposed to the reform of welfare.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Will the Leader of the House arrange a debate or statement on business rates? As he will know, retailers and small retailers in particular have faced incredibly tough trading conditions since 2008, and yet business rates have risen enormously. Businesses across my constituency and particularly those in places such as Saltaire are struggling as a result of the increase in business rates. Given that such businesses are the backbone of our local communities and local economies, the Government should surely do more to alleviate the cost of business rates.
Mr Lansley
I will, of course, talk to my right hon. and hon. Friends at the Department for Communities and Local Government about that matter. My hon. Friend will note that there is an opportunity in the Queen’s Speech debate to discuss such issues. If memory serves, the debate on Tuesday is about the cost of living. Somebody will tell me if I am wrong about that. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government will respond to the debate. I understand my hon. Friend’s point, but due to the growth incentive, which is part of the drive towards the devolution of responsibilities, local authorities now have greater flexibility to offer business rate discounts in particular circumstances.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
May I draw the House’s attention to early-day motion 36, which stands in my name and the names of other Members?
[That this House deplores the Government’s intention to award legal aid franchises to a limited number of contractors, effectively abolishing a client’s right to choose their legal representation; notes that this will reduce the quality of legal representation to the lowest standard possible; further notes the fact that firms currently compete on quality of service and will henceforth be required to compete on the basis of price; regrets the damning effect which this further reform of legal aid is likely to have on high street solicitors firms who are likely to either close or abandon legal aid cases; further notes that this will have a very detrimental effect on the provision of services through the medium of the Welsh language; further notes that this will create vast advice deserts in many rural areas; further regrets the departure from the principle of equality of arms before the law and the rights of all citizens to access to justice; and calls on the Government to abandon this ill-thought through reform immediately.]
The proposals for competitive price tendering of legal aid services are potentially devastating for rural areas and will undoubtedly create advice deserts, threaten the independence of the Bar and undermine Welsh language provision. To cap it all, the Government, when they conclude their discussions, will try to push the proposals through in secondary legislation. We should have a debate on the Floor of the House. This is a potentially devastating move and it should be reconsidered. It is an example of dogma taking precedence over common sense.
Mr Lansley
I have, of course, looked at the early-day motion. The right hon. Gentleman will recall the debates on the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012. Parliament decided what the regime for statutory instruments should be under that legislation. Although I will convey to my hon. Friends the points that he makes, he should recognise that we had a very generous legal aid system, the cost of which far exceeded that in pretty much every other jurisdiction. To that extent, the coalition Government had to take some difficult decisions.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
My constituents in Kettering want ours to be a national health service, not an international health service. They are very keen on the Government’s proposals to stop foreign national health tourists abusing our free health care without contributing to our health system. In which Bill will those proposals be contained? Will the Leader of the House make time available for that Bill at the earliest opportunity? If it is a big Bill with lots of provisions, will he give thought to creating a stand-alone Bill so that these measures can be fast-tracked through Parliament?
Mr Lansley
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. I think that many people across the country would agree with him.
Notwithstanding what I read in the newspapers this morning, in my experience it is often general practitioners who say that the situation is absurd. I recall a GP speaking to me—forgive me, Mr Speaker, if I tell a little story—about the American and Japanese students who registered at her practice. After a while, they would go to see her when they were leaving and say, “Shall I talk to the receptionist about payment?” She had to say, “There is no payment.” They looked at her as if we were mad because at home they would have paid and they had insurance and were willing to pay. However, because of the structure of the legislation, the national health service said, “You are ordinarily resident here so it is free. End of story.” That is absurd. The students did not expect it and we should not have got into that position. We need to deal with that. The issue is not always abuse. This is a system that should be tightened up.
I anticipate that the measures to which my hon. Friend refers will be part of an immigration Bill later in the Session.
John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)
It is humiliating for the Leader of the House to have to defend such a light legislative programme and a coalition Government who have all but run out of road on which they can agree to travel together. He will know that for more than a year I have highlighted a problem for the Nursing and Midwifery Council, which does not have the same powers as other professional regulators to review and revise its disciplinary decisions. Given that there is so little legislation before the House this year, will he help find time for a small but important legal change to deal with that problem?
Mr Lansley
I was trying to examine to what extent legislation was brought forward when the right hon. Gentleman was a member of the previous Government, although there is nothing intrinsically good about the number of Bills being brought forward. Fifteen Bills were mentioned in the Gracious Speech yesterday, the same number as in 2012. That is, of course, fewer Bills than in 2010, which was a two-year Session, but more than in 2008 or 2007 and the latter part of the Government of which he was a member.
I would say that the Bills being presented are incomparably more substantial, bold and radical. The right hon. Gentleman should look at what is being presented today on the rehabilitation of offenders—my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice will say more about that in a statement later; at the pensions Bill and what it will mean for removing the absurd and perverse anomaly whereby people were incentivised not to save, and not given reassurance that the state pension would stand behind them so that their savings could add to that without detracting from it; and at the care Bill. I feel proud that we are addressing the reform of social care—something that signally failed under the previous Labour Government —and providing important protections for the carers of those in need. It is a bold and ambitious Bill from a coalition Government who, notwithstanding the difficult decisions we have had to make, have themselves been bold, ambitious and radical.
Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
I am sure the Leader of the House will join me in congratulating Portsmouth News and the Solent local enterprise partnership, which have worked together to introduce a successful “bridging the gap” scheme and used a £2.1 million regional growth fund bid to help generate local growth and boost local business. May we have a debate in the House to celebrate such successful, innovative business growth schemes, and share other innovative ideas for promoting local growth?
Mr Lansley
I do indeed join my hon. Friend in welcoming the “bridging the gap” scheme and those who have supported it in her constituency and around Portsmouth and the Solent. It shows how, by working closely with local authorities and businesses, local enterprise partnerships are able to deliver schemes that make sense locally, not least because they are rooted in their local communities and not part of a bureaucracy, which regional development agencies used to be. My hon. Friend draws on a good example of that.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
There was nothing in the Budget or the Queen’s Speech about flood insurance. We are in the final weeks of the statement of principles and my constituents are worried about getting flood insurance come July. May we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on exactly what is happening and why getting a coherent policy from July for my constituents is such a shambles?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Lady will know—I have said this in the House, as has my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State—that we are in negotiations with the Association of British Insurers. She will have noted in the Queen’s Speech the intention to introduce legislation relating to the water industry. The Government are clear that we will take the necessary legislative provisions in this Session not only to support reform of the water industry, but to give it greater resilience, promote competition and provide the framework for flood insurance in the future.
Mr Brooks Newmark (Braintree) (Con)
The Government are to be congratulated on a number of the large infrastructure projects that they are proposing, but a number of choke points on the road transport network, including one on the A120 between Braintree and Marks Tey, stop the flow of traffic. The choke points cost time and, as we know, time is money. There are a number of choke points throughout the country. If we want to improve the flow of traffic, it would be worth the Government’s time to listen to Members of the House on where those choke points are. Perhaps the Transport Minister can come to the House to make a statement on how he will address them.
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend reminds me that debates in the House are a good opportunity for Members to make those points, not least through Adjournment debates. I recall that my first Adjournment debate in the House in 1997 related to the rebuilding of the A14, which, as he and I know because it is in our region, is as yet unfinished. I hope the coalition Government will finally make that happen, but I know perfectly well the road connection to which he refers. I have no doubt that the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chelmsford (Mr Burns), understands the problem very well, even if decisions on it might be led more locally through the local enterprise partnership.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
Last month, Scottish Coal went into liquidation; this week, it looks very much as if UK Coal will be wound up by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. That could close Kellingley and Thornley collieries, and six other open-cast mines, at the cost of 2,000-plus jobs. May we have an urgent debate on the future of the British coal mining industry to ensure that the Government’s promises to protect the people at Daw Mill colliery are kept and that the future of the remaining collieries in the UK is secure?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman will appreciate that I am not in a position to speculate on the position of limited companies, but he will know that the Minister without Portfolio, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), the previous Minister of State, Department for Energy and Climate Change, and the current Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Michael Fallon), have both given time and energy to working on the issues at Daw Mill colliery and across the UK coal industry. The hon. Gentleman and other Members on both sides of the House who have an interest might consider whether they want to take the matter forward with the Backbench Business Committee in due course—there would be interest on both sides of the House.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
My constituent, Douglas Mann, is a hard-working carer. Like 40,000 other carers, he is concerned that the increase in the minimum wage will take him 96p over the threshold for carer’s allowance, which will make him £60 a week worse off. Will the Leader of the House make time for a statement so we can ensure that we maintain the vital principle that people will always be better off in work?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes a good point on behalf of his constituent. He will be aware that the Government’s increase of the minimum wage will tip some carers over the earnings limit for carer’s allowance. Therefore, the Government are in the process of considering whether an increase in the earnings threshold is warranted and affordable. However, it should be kept in mind—my hon. Friend will know this and be advising his constituent of it—that the earnings limit for carer’s allowance is net of tax, national insurance contributions and certain other allowable expenses, which means that carers can earn significantly more than £100 a week and still get the carer’s allowance.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
May we have a statement on the impact of cuts to youth services such as those being carried out by Conservative-controlled North Lincolnshire council in the Scunthorpe area on young people and their prospects?
Mr Lansley
I cannot offer the hon. Gentleman a statement on that, which is a matter of his local authority making decisions. However, he will find that I have announced a debate in Westminster Hall on Thursday 16 May on the Education Committee report on careers guidance for young people, which is relevant to his point. He might wish to contribute to that debate.
Mr Shailesh Vara (North West Cambridgeshire) (Con)
In the Leader of the House’s opening comments, he mentioned a forthcoming debate on mental health. He will be aware that one of the biggest mental health issues is the associated social stigma. Will he ensure that, when the Minister replies to the debate, he specifically addresses social stigma, so that hon. Members can ensure that many more people who suffer from mental health problems come forward for treatment rather than shy away?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend will, of course, recall the important debate on mental health some 18 months ago. I hope that next Thursday’s debate will follow up on that and embrace other mental health issues. He is right to say that social stigma has been addressed previously, and we need to continue to tackle it. He will recall that Cambridgeshire was a pilot area in the campaign against social stigma associated with mental health diagnoses. That was very important and I hope the debate will afford the opportunity to which he refers.
Ms Margaret Ritchie (South Down) (SDLP)
Will the Leader of the House arrange for a debate on the economy of Northern Ireland, with particular reference to the peace dividend, which was promised by Downing street some years ago to underpin devolution arrangements but as yet has not been realised?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Lady may wish to take the opportunity to raise this issue in next Wednesday’s debate on economic growth. My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and others are absolutely committed to supporting Northern Ireland and the Government of Northern Ireland in promoting economic growth and, in particular, rebalancing the economy further, so that Northern Ireland can participate in the private sector employment and wealth creation that, happily, has characterised the success of the coalition Government.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
Earlier this year, I had the privilege of opening a new manufacturing plant facility at Vent-Axia in my constituency. May we have a debate on the importance of manufacturing in the UK, and, as with this case, on bringing jobs back from China and other countries to the British work force?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend makes an important point, which will be appropriate to raise in tomorrow’s debate on jobs and business and in Wednesday’s debate on economic growth. I hope that when the Opposition make their case they will start by acknowledging their failure in allowing the economy to become increasingly unbalanced under their tenure, and recognise the loss of so many manufacturing jobs when they were in government and the necessity now of ensuring that we support manufacturing, as the Government are doing.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)
May we have a debate on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s city of culture 2017 initiative? I am sure that the Leader of the House is backing Leicester’s bid. A debate would allow Members on both sides of the House to express their support for Leicester’s overwhelming claim.
Mr Lansley
As Leader of the House, it is probably best that I do not back anybody’s claim. I cannot promise a debate, but I think the hon. Gentleman raises an interesting issue and I hope there will be an opportunity to hear more about it. It would make a good occasion if Members were able to come and present the competing, positive claims of many cities across the country.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
I wonder whether we could have a debate on the future of our town centres, which would enable us to highlight the fact that there is some good news, such as the proposal announced today of a £20 million extension to Rugby’s Clock Towers shopping centre. That will secure our town centre and provide an extra 132,000 square feet, a new department store, food and drink outlets and a nine-screen cinema.
Mr Lansley
I am delighted to hear what my hon. Friend says about the development of Rugby town centre. He knows that the coalition Government provide considerable support through high-street initiatives. At the heart of that is supporting wealth creation and giving local authorities and local enterprise partnerships, through the growth incentive, the opportunity to reinvest in their town centres.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Community sentences were meant for low-level offences, not serious offences. May we have a debate and a proper explanation from a Minister on why more than 10,000 domestic violence, knife crime and serious assault offences last year resulted only in community resolutions?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Gentleman will be aware that today’s debate on the Queen’s Speech will focus on home affairs, so rather than detain the House in response to his question, I invite him to participate in that debate. I am sure that he would get a very good answer from Home Office Ministers.
Mr Lee Scott (Ilford North) (Con)
May we have a debate on the wonderful work that hospices, such as St Peter’s in my constituency, do across our country?
Mr Lansley
I hope that my hon. Friend will be able to raise that issue during the health and social care debate on Monday. I know that he is a devoted supporter of the hospice serving his constituency and even skydived on its behalf, which was commendable and courageous—although I think the Whips would encourage him to be very careful. I think that hospices do a wonderful job. From my many visits to hospices, I am familiar with what they do. During the course of this Parliament, the coalition Government will be putting in place per-patient funding schemes to enable hospices to provide more holistic services to patients so that the NHS can support them to a more appropriate degree.
Heidi Alexander (Lewisham East) (Lab)
There was much hype yesterday over the Government’s immigration Bill. Will the Leader of House make it clear when the Bill will be published and, in advance of that, how the check scheme for private landlords will work and be enforced?
Mr Lansley
The hon. Lady can of course ask about those issues during the debate on the Queen’s Speech, but as I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), the immigration Bill will be published later in the Session.
Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)
During yesterday’s excellent Gracious Speech, reference was made to a Bill to make changes to the electoral arrangements in Wales. Given that changes to electoral arrangements in devolved regions are hugely important right across the United Kingdom, will my right hon. Friend ensure that, despite the full legislative programme this Session, adequate time is provided for all Members to make a contribution to the debate about changes to Welsh arrangements?
Mr Lansley
My hon. Friend rightly refers to the reference in the Queen’s Speech to a draft Wales Bill. I am grateful for his question, because it gives me the opportunity to make it clear that more than half of the 17 Bills referred to in my written ministerial statement this morning are the subject, either in whole or in part, of pre-legislative scrutiny. That will ensure, I hope, that the issue that he quite properly raises—about the important debate on electoral and constitutional legislation—will be fully scrutinised this Session before the Bill is introduced.
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
Further to the point raised by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) about the statement of principles for flood insurance, the current set of principles expires next month, so could we have a statement from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs as soon as possible about the principles that will be renewed? This matters to flood-prone constituencies such as mine.
Mr Lansley
I, along with Members across the House and the Government, share my hon. Friend’s sense of urgency about ensuring that the flood insurance arrangements are in place in the long term. That was exactly the point made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson). I reiterate that we took an important step forward yesterday in setting out in the Queen’s Speech our intention to introduce legislation on the water industry, which I hope not least will give a spur to the Association of British Insurers, together with the Government, to finalise the arrangements.
Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
Will the Leader of the House arrange for either the Justice Secretary or a Ministry of Justice Minister to make a statement about the arrangements for the re-interment of Richard III? As he will know—the hon. Member for Leicester South (Jonathan Ashworth) will know this too—the university of Leicester was given a licence by the MOJ to make arrangements for the re-interment of the remains of Richard III by next autumn, but the Plantagenet Alliance—
Mr Speaker
Order. I think the hon. and learned Gentleman wants a statement on the matter. We are deeply obliged to him.
Mr Lansley
My hon. and learned Friend makes an important point. He, like other Members, will recall the debate in Westminster Hall on his issue, during which Ministers set out, very fairly, the legal position under the licence issued by the MOJ. I do not think that there is anything further to add.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
I and many of my constituents are supporters of Coventry City football club—which some people may think an encumbrance, although we think it is a wonderful thing. The supporters of the club are dismayed at the suggestion by its owners that they might want to relocate it from the city of Coventry to another town. Could we therefore have a debate on the community value of football clubs and football governance in this country?
Mr Lansley
I rather admire the Ricoh stadium—I went there to see one of the Olympic events that it hosted at the start of the games. It is a fine stadium and I was impressed by the support that the community in Coventry gave to that event. If I may, I will not trespass on local decisions about the location of the stadium for the future, other than to say that I know that football clubs rightly attract enormous loyalty, which is something that should be taken into account.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
Could the Leader of the House arrange for a statement by the Deputy Prime Minister next week regarding the emblems on ballot papers? I understand that the law has been changed, so that two emblems—for instance, Labour and Co-operative—can be put on the ballot paper next to a candidate. Perhaps it was also thought that there might be Conservative and Liberal candidates, or was the Deputy Prime Minister being far-sighted, having realised that there would be Conservative and UKIP candidates at the next election?
Mr Lansley
I cannot offer my hon. Friend the immediate prospect of a statement, not least because the issue was resolved and Parliament legislated for it. He is quite right: I recall that the motivation rested more with Labour and Co-op candidates than with any of the more speculative suggestions that he made in his question. However, in response to his request, I fear that I cannot offer a statement.
Mr Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady is rising, but she has already asked her question. I am sure that she has not forgotten that she asked her question, and we have not forgotten the answer either.
Child-care Ratios
(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
This information is provided by Parallel Parliament and does not comprise part of the offical record
Stephen Twigg (Liverpool, West Derby) (Lab/Co-op)
(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Education to make a statement on the Government’s plans for changes to statutory regulations for child-care ratios.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Elizabeth Truss)
The Government announced in January, in the “More great childcare” document, the intention to give nurseries more flexibility over staff-child ratios where they employ suitably qualified staff. We have consulted on what those qualifications should be. The consultation closed at the end of March. We are now considering the responses and will make further announcements in due course.
The current system of child care is not working for parents. Too many parents in the UK are struggling to juggle their work and child care arrangements. Families in England pay some of the highest costs in the world, with 27% of their income going on child care, compared with 11% in countries such as France. We also know that this Government spend more than £5 billion on child care, which is twice the OECD average, and as much as countries such as France and more than countries such as Germany. As well as our new schemes, such as tax-free child care, we need to ensure that we get better value for money for the investment that the Government put in, so we are looking at other countries, such as France, Ireland, Holland and Germany, which manage to combine high quality and affordability in their child care provision.
At present, we have the tightest ratios in Europe for children under three. We also have the lowest staff salaries. Nursery staff here earn £6.60 an hour on average, which is barely above the minimum wage. Annual earnings are £13,000, which is well below the averages of £16,000 in France, £20,000 in Denmark and £22,000 in Sweden. The ratio for two-year-olds in England is 4:1, whereas it is 6:1 in Ireland, 6:1 in Germany and 8:1 in France, while in Denmark and Sweden—countries that the shadow Secretary of State has explicitly advocated—there are no national staff ratios at all.
Our proposals will allow nurseries that hire high-quality staff to exercise professional judgment. This is exactly the same concept that we have used in academies, giving high-quality institutions the autonomy to make decisions for themselves and to exercise professional judgment. The ratios are not compulsory. This is about professionals in the child care sector being able to exercise their judgment and to deliver an affordable, high-quality service to parents. Our evidence suggests that—[Interruption.] Well, the Department for Education economists have looked at this in detail, and our evidence suggests that nurseries will be able to pay higher staff salaries and reduce costs to parents.
Let us remember the legacy of the previous Labour Government. The real cost of child care, which every family in this country faces, has risen by 77% in real terms since 2003, and child care inflation is going up by 6% every year. If we do not do something about this by reforming the supply of child care, it will become prohibitively expensive and many parents will not be able to afford to go out to work. We also want to encourage more providers to use the higher ratios for three and four-year-olds and to hire high-quality staff. All the international evidence from organisations such as the OECD suggests that the higher the quality of the staff, the better the outcomes for children. The previous Labour Government have admitted that, during their period of office, they got this wrong. The number of childminders halved, child care costs doubled, and Beverley Hughes, the former children’s Minister, admitted that Labour had got it wrong.
Stephen Twigg
Well, yesterday we were told that the Government were pushing ahead with their plans to weaken child-care ratios despite widespread opposition. Late last night, however, the ink was not even dry on the Gracious Speech when we learned that the Government might in fact be U-turning on their policy. Is not this yet another example of chaos and incompetence at the heart of Government policy making?
When the Minister came to the House in January to announce this policy, we told her that she was threatening the quality of child care, doing nothing to address the spiralling costs of child care and dismissing the advice of her own experts. Since then, the—[Interruption.]
Mr Speaker
Order. The shadow Secretary of State is trying to make his points, yet there is a quite separate exchange being conducted at the same time. That should not be happening, and I say to the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), whom it is always a delight to see in the Chamber, that she arrived late for the urgent question. She cannot therefore participate in it on her feet, and she certainly should not do so from her seat.
Stephen Twigg
Since that announcement in January, the scale of public opposition to the Minister’s plans has been overwhelming. The Government’s own adviser on childcare, Professor Cathy Nutbrown, has said that the ratio plans make “no sense at all”. Today, the Minister has said that all the evidence demonstrates that what she is doing is right, but who supports her proposals? Is not this yet another episode of bad policy making by the Education Secretary? First we had the fiasco of shutting down school sport partnerships. Then we had the disastrous attempt to bring back CSEs and O-levels. Now we have a child care policy that is rejected by parents, nursery providers and the Government’s own experts. Will she think again and rule out this damaging policy once and for all? What lessons will she and her Secretary of State learn from this latest shambles? Does not this show once again that this Government have no plan for hard-working families?
Elizabeth Truss
I have already outlined what our plans are; we announced them in our “More great childcare” proposal. Our plans have the support of Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector, who commented on them in a recent speech. He has accepted the principle of higher-qualified staff having more professional autonomy. Andreas Schleicher of the OECD also supports our plans. Of course opinion is divided within the British academic establishment, as it is on many education issues. I would point out to the hon. Gentleman however that these policies are alive and well in France, Ireland, Holland and Germany. There is not a single country, including Scotland, where the ratios as are low as they are here in England. Furthermore, he has not come up with any response on what he plans to do about the appallingly low wages in the child care sector or the high levels of staff turnover, or with any ideas about how he is going to reduce costs. Is this another spending commitment that he is pledging when his party has already pledged many more spending commitments than it has the money to pay for?
Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
I am so pleased that the Minister is looking at ways to bring down the cost of child care for hard-working families. In her consultation, did she hear from the childminder who has four children who stay until 1 o’clock but who, because of these very inflexible regulations, has to say no the parent who wants to drop off an additional child at 12.30?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Many childminders—I recently held a round table meeting with them—told me that they welcome the additional flexibility that they will have under our rules. They also welcome the increased level of trust that we are placing in child care professionals. Rather than dictating from Whitehall what they should be doing, we have a strong inspection regime, we are recruiting new Her Majesty’s inspectors into the sector and we are giving more professional responsibility to people on the ground.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
I have been struck by the number of people in my constituency raising with me their concerns about these proposals. They are concerned that they are rushed and ill thought through. Will the Minister apologise for the manner in which this proposal has been debated in the country, and will she commit to listen properly to people like my mum who have spent their lives in child care?
Elizabeth Truss
Our policy is all about giving the hon. Lady’s mum more say over how she runs her own child care. It is a very important principle that no nursery care assistant or childminder is going to be forced to look after more children. What we are doing is allowing them to exercise professional responsibility. We are also doing something about the exorbitant costs that Labour created in our child care system. How on earth can Labour Members be proud of a record of having the highest child care costs in Europe?
John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) (LD)
May I first refer the House to my interest as the father of a nine-month-old baby who will be going to nursery in September? I ask the Minister to listen carefully to the representations of those who are concerned about the ratios, particularly for very young children and believe that those ratios should be very low.
Elizabeth Truss
Of course, there will be different requirements for different children, depending on their age and their level of development. Our policies are about increasing the level of professional judgment that child care workers are able to exercise to cater for the different ages and the different stages of development of the children they are looking after. I would point out to my hon. Friend that many parents in other countries where more flexibility is given to local providers are extremely happy with the quality of care they receive—in fact, they are happier than parents here.
Tom Blenkinsop (Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland) (Lab)
Obviously, whoever was babysitting the Deputy Prime Minister this morning did not do a very good job, as on LBC this morning, he apparently insisted that the Government’s child care policy will be reversed. Is the Minister sure that this policy will be implemented?
Elizabeth Truss
As I said, we have outlined our policy in “More great childcare”, and we are currently consulting on the level of qualifications required to put those ratios in place.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
Many parents sending their child to a childminder simply want somewhere that is safe and where their child will be happy while they go out to work. Is it really necessary for childminders to be turned into mini schools for very young children, where those children will be judged on educational attainment rather than on how happy and safe they are?
Elizabeth Truss
I thank my hon. Friend for his question. Our policies are all about giving parents more choice over the type of child care they receive. I, like him, am very supportive of childminders. Their number halved under the previous Government because of the additional rules and regulations that were put in place and how they were managed.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
The Minister was piling them so high and wanting to teach them so cheap that things were bound to come crashing down at some point. She cited economists in favour of the proposals, and she cited the head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, as being in favour of better qualifications—but not, I note, in favour of higher ratios—but what about parents and child carers themselves? Can the Minister tell us which parents and child carers supported her proposals?
Elizabeth Truss
The whole point of our proposals is that they give parents more choice. If parents want their child to attend a nursery that is more structured and that is teacher-led with larger groups, they should be able to have that choice. The excellent écoles maternelles and nurseries available in France simply could not run in this country because of the regulations we have at the moment. If parents would rather have a smaller group size and a less well-qualified staff member, that is entirely up to them—it is about choice.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that the current rigid child-to-staff ratio holds back opportunities for staff and the salaries that they can earn, and that that is why we need a more flexible system?
Elizabeth Truss
I completely agree with my hon. Friend. Interestingly, there is a much larger gap between what primary school staff and nursery staff are paid in this country compared with countries such as Denmark, Sweden and France, where those working in early-years are highly respected and allowed much more professional judgment; they are treated as professionals. That is not what happened in this country under the previous Government. Salaries are £6.60 an hour, on average. I really do not understand how that can be justified.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
Last month, I met childminders and nursery providers in my constituency specifically to ask their views on the Government’s proposals, and I must tell the Minister that they were unanimously opposed to them. [Interruption.] I am sorry that the hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) doubts that, but I met them specifically to discuss the proposals and that was their response. I cannot go back on my undertaking to bring what they told me to the Minister’s attention, and that is what I am doing. One reason why child-care costs are very high in this country is the cost of premises, yet childminders told me that one reason for not being able to take on more children was that they would not have the space to do so. What will the Minister do to increase the supply of suitable space?
Elizabeth Truss
I am sure that the hon. Lady is aware that the cost of staff represents 70% of the average cost of a nursery, and that the cost of premises is only a small part of the overheads that account for the remaining 30%. Staff cost is the major driver of the cost of child-care places. The ratios hold down staff costs and staff salaries, which makes it difficult to attract people to the profession and means higher costs for parents.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
There are many excellent child-care providers in Kettering, but there are not enough. Is not one of the problems faced by nurseries and child-care providers that there are more than 400 early-years qualifications and child-care providers find it difficult to assess whether those qualifications are the best that should be available?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend makes a good point. We are introducing an early-years educator qualification, which will be the only criteria for judging whether someone should have a qualification at level 3. In order to get that qualification, someone will be required to have an English and maths grade C at GCSE, which will ensure that we get higher quality in the profession. We are also introducing early-year teachers, which, again, will involve a single qualification at graduate level.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
The Minister referred to trusting the judgment of the professionals, but the professionals in my constituency who met me to discuss the proposals are unanimously against them. Why will she not listen to them and stop confusing the need to improve qualifications in early years with the ratios? However many qualifications someone has, it does not give them an extra pair of hands to look after the number of toddlers the Minister is suggesting.
Elizabeth Truss
It is interesting that nobody on the Opposition Benches has addressed the issue that these ratios are operating in Ireland, France and Germany. Are Opposition Members saying that the quality of child care in those countries is not good enough? Are they saying that high-quality providers from those countries should not be able to operate in this country? As for the hon. Lady’s point about the nurseries in her constituency, they are absolutely free to carry on operating as they operate now. This policy is about giving parents the ability to make different choices and the kind of choices that parents have in other countries, where they pay a lot less for child care and they receive high-quality care.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
Child care is often provided by small businesses, which have to adapt when staff are away for training or because of sickness. Can the Minister confirm what effect staff absence will have on child-adult ratios?
Elizabeth Truss
I thank my hon. Friend for his question; he makes the very good point that at the moment there is no flexibility for nurseries if staff are absent. Either they must not take a particular child or they have to find additional staff at a cost, and we know that many nurseries are struggling to be sustainable. The ratios offer flexibility for different situations: for example, at the time of day when children might be sleeping, when less supervision is required, or when parents come to pick up their children. Our proposals are about allowing nurseries to exercise professional judgment and flexibility in how they staff them.
Mr William Bain (Glasgow North East) (Lab)
Does the shambles in this Government’s child-care policy not also extend to what they are doing with the tax and benefits system? Is the Minister aware that her colleague, the Economic Secretary, gave me information in a written answer last month that shows that more than half of all families will not benefit at all from the tax break or universal credit plans?
Mr Speaker
Order. The disadvantage of that question is that it does not relate to the terms of the urgent question, so we will leave it there.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
Are there not two key issues? First, the question of ratios is linked to high-quality staff, which itself has a cost. Secondly, the reforms are enabling, not compulsory, and parents can continue to choose the right setting for their child.
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Labour Members have not come up with any answers as to how they would incentivise nurseries to improve quality and staff salaries or how they would reduce costs in the system that they created, which is now one of the most expensive in the world.
Jonathan Ashworth (Leicester South) (Lab)
I am aware that the Minister has long championed the policy of loosening the child-care ratios. Indeed, before she joined the Front-Bench team she was writing pamphlets about it. However, if she is so convinced of the merits of the policy, why will she not publish the Penn report, which her Department commissioned, and why has the Deputy Prime Minister let it be known in the past 24 hours that he does not support her pet policy?
Elizabeth Truss
We will be publishing research when we publish the results of the Childcare Commission in due course.
Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)
Does the Minister agree that there are two kinds of help with nursery schools? There are those who advocate socialism—that is, they want there to be expensive nursery places, but very few of them—and there are those who make decisions for themselves. They can stand on their own feet and make their own decisions about what they want for their children.
Elizabeth Truss
I thank my hon. Friend for his question, and he is absolutely right. What the Opposition are effectively saying is that a lot of parents should be priced out of the market and should not have the opportunities of parents in other countries to access high-quality and affordable child care. The previous Labour Minister, Beverley Hughes, admitted that Labour had got it wrong on child care, so perhaps the Opposition need to think again.
Nic Dakin (Scunthorpe) (Lab)
The Minister explicitly mentioned Sir Michael Wilshaw. Can she say whether he supports her ratios or not?
Elizabeth Truss
I can; Sir Michael Wilshaw wrote an article in Nursery World where he said that he supported the idea of higher qualifications for—[Interruption.] Let me finish my point. He supported higher qualifications for higher ratios for three and four-year-olds and he agreed that that should be extended down the age range.
John Howell (Henley) (Con)
Is this not a debate about the quality of the staff, rather than the number of the staff? Will affecting the ratios not improve the status and professionalism of the profession?
Elizabeth Truss
I completely agree. As with so many of their policies, the previous Government focused on inputs and targets, not outcomes. A third of children now entering primary school do not have the requisite communications and language skills, despite the fact that we have 96% uptake in our early-years places. It is about quality, outcomes and allowing autonomy and professional judgment.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
Has the Minister had any other advice from the Deputy Prime Minister about child care? Which part of the schools or social care budget will be cut to fill the huge void in resources to deliver the provision that the Minister has promised, while maintaining the adult-child ratios required by parents and the Deputy Prime Minister?
Elizabeth Truss
As I outlined earlier, we as a Government are spending more than £5 billion on early-years education and child care, which is equivalent to countries such as France and Germany, where parents pay a lot less. The reason that it is so expensive is that we have a hugely cumbersome system with many different funding streams. I am very pleased that my hon. Friend the Economic Secretary is here today. He announced tax-free child care, which will be a much simpler scheme than the voucher scheme under the previous Government. We are reforming the system to get better value for money and better quality and affordability for parents.
Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)
Has my hon. Friend noticed that, in his keenness to ask his question, the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), seems to have overlooked his comments of just two weeks ago, when he said:
“I visited Sweden last year and saw for myself how supporting the supply of quality childcare gives parents choice, affordability and good quality places?”,
Yet the Swedes have no mandatory child-staff ratios at all. Does that not demonstrate that the only shambles is in the thinking of the shadow Secretary of State?
Elizabeth Truss
Absolutely; I could not have put it better myself. Salaries in Sweden for child-care workers are £22,000. I would be very interested to understand how the shadow Secretary of State thinks he is going to get that money and where it will come from.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
With the Deputy Prime Minister rubbishing the proposals, is not the policy dead in the water and another example of the shambles of this Government?
Elizabeth Truss
As I said, we announced our policy in “More great childcare” in January. We are consulting on the level of qualifications required to fulfil the ratios.
Mr Marcus Jones (Nuneaton) (Con)
Helping working parents and creating small businesses are two very important parts of the Government’s programme. Does my hon. Friend agree that her proposals will make it more attractive to child-care professionals to set up as childminders, and at the same time improve the access to child-care provision in many areas across the country where at present it is sadly lacking?
Elizabeth Truss
My hon. Friend is right. We are taking other steps, including reforming the role of the local authority so that there is no duplication among local authorities and Ofsted, and improving the clarity of qualifications so that it will be easier for people to set up high-quality child-care businesses and be focused on the outcomes for children, in contrast to the very prescriptive regulations which have pushed up costs and held down salaries.
Mr Peter Bone (Wellingborough) (Con)
May I thank the shadow Secretary of State for asking the urgent question? He has allowed our excellent Minister to expound a good Tory policy. It is always good when we look at the European Union and copy what is good in it. There is one serious point here. If the Deputy Prime Minister wants to comment—if he does not want to run away from something that he has agreed on—he should be in the House making that comment, not on a radio programme. I suggest that we press on with the policy and ignore the Liberal Democrats.
Elizabeth Truss
I thank my hon. Friend for his support for our policy. He is absolutely right. We should look to other countries that have done better. Rather than harking back to their failure in office, the Opposition should be seeking inspiration from countries such as Sweden, Denmark and France and looking at what goes well there. I would like to know whether any Labour Members have been to see French provision for the under- twos and seen how good it is. I bet they have not.
Rehabilitation of Offenders
(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Chris Grayling)
With your permission, Mr Speaker, I would like to make a statement about the Government's plans for transforming the rehabilitation of offenders.
Reoffending rates in this country have been too high for too long. Last year, around 600,000 crimes were committed by people who had broken the law before. Almost half the number of offenders released from our prisons offend again within a year. That goes up to a staggering 58% for the group with the most prolific reoffending rates: those sentenced to prison terms of less than 12 months. This depressing merry-go-round of crime has a dreadful impact on the lives of law-abiding, hard-working people.
Reoffending has a devastating impact on the victims of crime, but it is also terrible value for the taxpayer. We spend more than £4 billion a year on prisons and probation, and despite significant increases in spending under the previous Government, overall reoffending rates have barely changed over the last decade and are now rising again. The status quo cannot continue; we cannot go on doing the same things, seeing the same faces come back through the system time and again, just hoping to get a different outcome. This has got to change.
Those who break the law need to be punished. In yesterday's Queen's Speech, we set out how we are going to clamp down on those who persist in the low-level crime that blights our communities, and for serious offenders it is absolutely right that they get a custodial sentence. I want to ensure that they are punished, and I want to send the strongest possible signal that offenders will not get away with their crimes. However, I also want to see them get their lives back on track, and that requires a thorough and thoughtful approach. Such offenders have a host of complex problems—a shocking number of them will have been through the care system, and many have come from broken homes and are addicted to drugs and alcohol. At the moment, prisoners serving sentences of less than 12 months are simply released on to the streets with £46 in their pockets and little else.
In the coalition agreement, the Government promised to bring about a rehabilitation revolution to tackle the unacceptable cycle of reoffending. Today I am publishing our “Transforming Rehabilitation: A Strategy for Reform” which sets out concrete plans to extend and enhance rehabilitation both in custody and in the community.
Probably the biggest failing of the current system is that those with the highest reoffending rates get the least rehabilitation. Our plans put that right. Today we are introducing legislation so that, for the first time in recent history, every offender released from custody will receive at least a year of supervision and rehabilitation in the community. The Bill will extend statutory rehabilitation to all 50,000 of the most prolific reoffenders—those sentenced to under 12 months in custody. By guaranteeing this support in law, we ensure that probation providers are working with those who are hardest to reach and most likely to reoffend.
However, it is not enough just to ensure that everyone who needs rehabilitation gets it. We heard during the consultation that there is often a disconnect between what happens in prisons, and what happens on the outside. Too many offenders are falling through that gap. Therefore, in addition to extending rehabilitation to more offenders, we will create a genuine through-the-gate service. That has been paid lip-service in the past, so this time we will do it differently. I have ordered the wholesale realignment of our prison estate to designate new resettlement prisons, where the same providers who will be working with offenders in the community will work with them for three months before release too. Combined with the reforms to the prison regime that we announced last month to incentivise engagement in rehabilitation, this is a significant change. We are, for the first time, creating real continuity between custody and community, bridging the gap which right now just leads many offenders back to a life of crime.
Our reforms will also open up rehabilitation services to a diverse range of new providers, ensuring that we bring together the best of the public, voluntary and private sectors, at local as well as at national level. These providers will have the freedom to innovate and to focus on turning around the lives of offenders. Our plans will also use competition to drive greater efficiency, which is vital to free up the resources we need so that we can extend rehabilitation to a wider group of offenders.
A cornerstone of our reforms is payment by results, which will focus providers relentlessly on rehabilitating offenders and actually driving reoffending down. We will give those providers the flexibility to do what works and free them from Whitehall bureaucracy, but the deal will be that they get paid in full only for real reductions in reoffending and crime.
Breaking the cycle of crime will mean fewer victims in the long term, but we cannot and will not forget our primary responsibility for public safety. Therefore, we are creating a new national probation service, working to protect the public and building on the expertise and professionalism that are already in place. Probation staff make a vital contribution to protecting the public from the most dangerous offenders and will continue to do so. Under the new system, every offender who poses a high risk of serious harm to the public will be managed by the public sector probation service. We also know that risk levels can change, which is why the public sector will have the right to review cases where risk is more volatile or where circumstances have changed.
We cannot just carry on with the status quo and hope that things improve. These reforms may be challenging, but they are essential none the less. They are part of a radical programme of reform across the whole justice system, making it ready to meet the challenges of the future, reforming offenders, delivering value for the taxpayer and protecting victims and communities. My aim is to deliver year-on-year reductions in reoffending.
That would be the right thing to do at any time, but at a time of tough financial constraints it becomes even more important. We need to ensure that the taxpayers’ money we spend on rehabilitating offenders actually makes a difference. The plans we are publishing today will ensure that all those sentenced to prison or community sentences are properly punished but that they also get the support they need to turn their backs on crime for good. Transforming rehabilitation will mean lower crime, fewer victims and safer communities. I commend this statement to the House.
Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of his statement—it is generous of him to share his thoughts with the House on this important subject so soon after briefing the national media. He is right that one of the best ways to cut crime, the number of victims and the cost of our criminal justice system is by tackling reoffending. It is disappointing that it has taken the Government three wasted years to reach that conclusion, but we welcome the intent of today’s announcement.
Reoffending rates are too high. We started to reduce them when we were in government—especially the rate of youth offending, which breaks the cycle of reoffending at an early point—but much more needs to be done. This is an ambitious programme. Unfortunately, it is based on fewer resources, on untried and untested methods and on putting faith in exactly those private sector organisations that have failed to deliver other major public sector contracts.
Let us take the proposal for support for everyone leaving prison—an extra 45,000 offenders on the Secretary of State’s figures. Can he explain to the House whether that is an uncosted demand for more resource or whether existing moneys will be spread much more thinly to deliver it? Resettlement prisons, as he said, represent a major restructuring of the prison system. What is the cost of that restructuring and what additional resources will go into preparing offenders for release? He knows that the prison estate is still chronically overcrowded and understaffed, so does he seriously think that a reorganisation can take place against such a backdrop? In London there is a major shortage of prison places, which means that offenders from London often end up housed hundreds of miles away from home and family, so how is resettlement to work here?
On release, even those who have served the shortest sentences are promised a year’s supervision and support with addiction, housing and employment. Who will pay for that at a time when drug treatment centres are closing? Housing is perhaps the most expensive item for newly released prisoners. On the “Today” programme, the Secretary of State speculated that housing associations would help out, so during the worst housing shortage for a generation are ex-offenders to get priority for social housing?
Who will fund the army of mentors, and who will vet them to ensure that the right people mentor offenders? The probation service has been cut by almost 10% so far and those cuts will continue. The service, which received an award for excellence two years ago, is by definition not to blame for rising reoffending by short-sentence prisoners, because they are currently unsupervised. However, it is not probation officers who will now undertake 70% of the supervision. The Justice Secretary places a great deal of faith in reformed old lags helping out, but he admitted on the “Today” programme that they will have to be paid. Professional probation officers sacked and replaced with ex-offenders: is this the Justice Secretary’s brave new world?
In reality, it is the Secretary of State’s old friends Serco, G4S and the rest of the cartel who will profit from today’s announcements. The 21 contracts are too large for smaller providers. An extra £500 million of public contracts are going to the people who gave us the Work programme and security at the Olympics. Now he is to impose his untested and untried payment-by-results methods on probation. Perhaps most seriously, a dangerous chasm will open up between public and private providers on the basis of an offender’s risk level, taking no account of the fact that in 25% of all cases offenders move between risk levels. Therefore, contrary to his assurance, private firms will be in charge of the most serious criminals, and we genuinely fear that that will put the public at risk. Failures in delivering probation services even to medium-risk offenders will mean that those guilty of domestic violence, burglary, robbery, sexual offences and gang activity will walk our streets unsupervised. Regardless of whether private sector providers deliver, they will still get paid at least 90% of the money. Do they have the incentive or the skills to supervise dangerous and violent people in the community?
Reducing reoffending while maintaining public safety should be our twin priorities. A focus on reoffending is to be welcomed, but the Government’s ill-thought-out policies and total reliance on payment by results are putting at risk the safety of communities up and down the country.
Chris Grayling
I plead guilty to having done a couple of media interviews this morning, but I am at least in the House right now. My opposite number, the right hon. Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan), also gave some media interviews this morning but has not made it to the House, which is rather a surprise to me.
We learned an important lesson in opposition, which is that sometimes when one aspires to be a Government it is necessary to accept that something is the right thing to do. That is a lesson that today’s Opposition have not learned. I do not understand why they are coming out with this faux anger about what we are doing when the legislative foundations that enable us to push through these reforms were passed by the previous Labour Government. If they supported the concept then, why do they not support it now?
The hon. Gentleman asked about costs. That highlights an important difference between us and the previous Government. They believed that a problem would be solved by throwing money at it, and they ended up with an over-bureaucratic, over-complex system which simply did not deliver. Thanks to the work done by the Select Committee, we know that probation officers spend only about a quarter of their time at work on supervising offenders, while about 40% of their time is spent on providing support services. Are the Opposition really saying that it is not possible to run that system more efficiently and deliver support where it is needed to the offenders who are most likely to reoffend when they leave prison? Again, there is a divide between us and them. They think it is a question of spending more taxpayers’ money and having higher taxes; we want to get better value from the taxes that we already raise.
On resettlement prisons, again, it is about making our system work more effectively. At the moment, we move far too many prisoners all over the country in a fairly haphazard way. Over the past few months we have worked with prison governors and prison officer teams to work out a better way so that short-sentence offenders will almost always stay in one place and longer-sentence offenders will go to a prison close to where they will be released to ensure that when they are released we can deliver continuity of support through the prison gate. The Opposition should welcome that. It is the right thing to do and it should have been done years ago.
The hon. Gentleman asked about the past three years. It is only a few months since the Opposition were attacking me for not undertaking pilots on this issue. In fact, for the past few years we have been looking at how such a system would work, in Peterborough prison and in Doncaster prison. The work that has been done there is first-rate. It has also shown how effective older prisoners who are turning their lives around can be in supporting and mentoring younger offenders who have yet to do so. The hon. Gentleman needs to go out and look at what is happening, not in the world of big businesses, which his party’s Government contracted with regularly, but in the voluntary sector with some of our first-rate charities, where there are living examples of former offenders who have gone straight and who are now helping to turn around the lives of the next generation of offenders. I want to capture those skills in helping to bring down reoffending.
The hon. Gentleman questioned payment by results, but why is it such a bad thing in the eyes of the Opposition? They want to pay a whole-contract fee, but I believe that we should pay part of a fee based on whether the taxpayer gets a good deal or not. We should pay not unconditionally, but conditionally, and that is what we will do under these contracts. I want to pay for real results that bring down reoffending and crime.
Under the previous Government, reoffending barely changed. We ended up with a situation in which people were going round and round the system. We finally have a set of proposals that will start to change that. It is shame that this did not happen, not three years ago, but 13 years ago, when the Labour party was in power.
Sir Alan Beith (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (LD)
If this reform can be carried through in such difficult financial circumstances, it will be one of the most valuable and important things this Government do. Does the Lord Chancellor agree that the system must be tailored so that charities and voluntary organisations can viably play their full part, and that the creation of a national probation service must not be allowed to undermine the local co-operation between agencies, which is vital to reducing reoffending?
Chris Grayling
I can give assurance on both those points. The national probation service will continue to have local delivery units operating at a local authority level with local agencies, which is essential, and multi-agency supervision will and should continue for the most serious offenders.
On charitable groups, I am clear that quality and the likelihood of delivering success in reducing reoffending will be crucial in the contracting process. This is not simply a money-saving exercise; it is about easing pressure on the system by reducing reoffending. That is what it is all about and the bidding process will ensure that quality rises to the top.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
Breaking the cycle of crime means breaking the dependency on drugs. I welcome the Government’s decision for mandatory drug testing. Will the Secretary of State confirm that it extends to those who go in and out of prison as well as to those under 12-month supervision, and will he be very careful when choosing drug rehabilitation providers? A group such as G4S has expertise in tagging—it is obviously good at that—but it does not have expertise in drug rehabilitation.
Chris Grayling
The right hon. Gentleman makes an important point. It is always good to hear him make a thoughtful and measured contribution, which is not always true of the rest of his party. We have to be absolutely certain that the organisations we recruit to do the work have the expertise we need, particularly in the field of drug rehabilitation. I reassure him that I have no intention whatever to contract with organisations that cannot demonstrate that they have genuine expertise in delivering the solutions we need.
Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his statement. I wrote about these proposals in a November 2007 paper called “Prisons with a Purpose”, and the previous Government should have done the very things under discussion a long time ago. May I urge my right hon. Friend to ensure that not just the big companies, but the smaller providers, such as charities and individuals, can carry people from prison out into the community so that there is no gap between incarceration and coming out into society? Will he also urge the people he deals with to ensure that people are able to read when they leave prison? The average prisoner has the reading age of an 11-year-old and it is not possible for them to get a job if they cannot read.
Chris Grayling
I agree with my hon. and learned Friend. One of the elements of the new contracts will be to combine resettlement services in prisons with post-prison support, so it is a genuinely joined-up service. His point about reading is of great importance. One of the encouraging things I saw in Peterborough is the way in which older, more experienced offenders who have gone through a longer process of rehabilitation in prison are starting to provide proactive help to the younger generation. I want to see those prisoners who can read teaching those who cannot to do so.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
Can I be helpful to the Secretary of State? The cohort who have been reoffending badly are those who have been in jail for a short period. Why not extend the duties of professional probation officers to deal with them? That would be one simple answer.
As I have asked the Secretary of State before, what happens when the untrained privateer wants to breach the offender? Who then makes the decision and on what evidence will it be based? He has said today that he cannot leave matters in abeyance and hope that things will improve, but instead he is just stepping out into the dark—and hoping that things will improve.
Chris Grayling
Breach will be a matter for the public probation service. May I take advantage of the fact the right hon. Gentleman is a Welsh Member to pay tribute to the leaders of the probation trust in Wales, who have been enormously helpful in shaping the proposals? Their work on plotting a new path for probation has been very influential. I also say to the people of Wales that we envisage there being a distinct entity for Wales within the new national probation service, as there should be.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
The target must be to have fewer crimes committed by fewer people and for criminals to continue committing crimes for a shorter period.
Will my right hon. Friend see whether figures can be published every six months on the number of people who have committed a serious criminal offence for the first time, the proxy for which will be those who have been convicted? I believe that the figure is about 1,800 a week.
Will he try to obtain a report every now and again on the people who have been released from jail that week who have a home, a worthwhile activity such as a job or training, and some kind of champion to help them go straight?
Chris Grayling
I am happy to look at what we can provide for my hon. Friend. He is right that we need to have the best possible understanding of what happens to people post-prison. We are putting in place a justice databank so that voluntary organisations that work in the area can understand the impact of their work. I will do my best to provide as much information to the House as possible about the issues that he raises.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
The stress on rehabilitation is welcomed across the House, but is it correct that the public sector will not able to bid for the payment-by-results contracts? How can it be good to exclude some of the people with the most expertise and professional training in these matters?
Chris Grayling
No, that is not correct. I hope that we can pray in aid the spirit of the co-operative movement, which has played a great role in this country over the past 200 years. We are actively encouraging and supporting members of our probation teams who want to form mutual organisations to bid for the contracts, and I hope that they will do so.
Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)
The figures from my right hon. Friend’s Department make it perfectly clear that the longer people spend in prison, the less likely they are to reoffend. That is largely because they have time to do things such as learn how to read before they are released. What weight does he place on the use of longer prison sentences to reduce reoffending? The Department is also clear that indeterminate sentences for public protection have the lowest reoffending rate of all sentences. Given that reducing reoffending is so important, why on earth have the Government got rid of the thing that had the lowest reoffending rate of all?
Chris Grayling
Let me reassure my hon. Friend that the length of time that people are spending in prison has been increasing, not decreasing. I agree that we need to take advantage of the opportunity to turn people’s lives around in prison. Those who say that short sentences do not work and should not happen always miss the point that 80% of the people who arrive in our prisons have been through a community sentence that has not worked. On sentencing, we have introduced extended determinate sentences, which means that people will probably spend more time in prison for serious offences than would previously have been the case.
John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)
With such a major reform, it is important that the right hon. Gentleman takes the existing staff with him. Will he clarify what consultations will take place with the trade unions in prisons and probation services? On prisons, the redesignation of individual prisons means that there may well be a reassessment of the number of staff who are needed and of the skills and training that are required. On probation, morale is precarious and there are concerns about the failure to allocate the supervision of medium-risk prisoners because of the potential risk to the general public.
Chris Grayling
With a major reform such as this, it is always important to do everything that we can to take staff with us. The Under-Secretary of State for Justice, my hon. Friend the Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), who is responsible for prisons and probation, will meet the unions today. We have regular contact with staff organisations across the Department and that will continue.
I hope that probation staff will look on today’s proposals as an opportunity. I have talked about the potential for a co-operative approach in some areas, about greater professionalisation in the probation service and about a highly skilled public probation service. The strategy is not about getting rid of people who work with front-line offenders; it is about extending the system and making it more efficient so that we can provide more support to the people who need it.
Dame Angela Watkinson (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)
One of the biggest stumbling blocks for repeat offenders who want to turn their lives around and be productive and law-abiding is finding paid employment. Has my right hon. Friend held any discussions with potential employers in the private or public sector who would be willing to take that risk and offer employment to people with criminal records?
Chris Grayling
We are working hard to increase links with employers. The amount of work done in prisons has increased dramatically, and much of that takes place with potential post-prison employers—I pay tribute to the rail industry, for example, and the work it is doing. As we roll out these reforms, I want Jobcentre Plus and Work programme providers to be more closely involved with prisons, and to do everything we can to ensure that people flow from prison into employment. If we talk to most prisoners about what they would like to do when they leave, the answer is get a job. We must help them do so.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
The Secretary of State said that payment in full would be dependent on results. Can he say what proportion of payment will be dependent on success, and what proportion will take the form of an up-front fee?
Chris Grayling
The answer to that is: as of yet, not exactly, because there will be a bidding process. I emphasise again, however, that that will not be simply about cost, and that quality will be at least as important as cost and the proportion of the contract put at risk. It will not be 100% payment by results because we must pay for orders of the court. I intend the providers to have some of their money at risk so that they have every incentive to perform on our behalf.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
My constituents in Kettering are fed up with repeat offenders, but incensed when those people are foreign nationals. The best way to have fewer crimes committed by fewer people is to ensure that foreign nationals cannot reoffend because after their first offence they are sent home.
Chris Grayling
I rather agree with my hon. Friend. He and I both sit on the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative party, but one thing I welcome within the confines of the European Union is the prisoner transfer agreement. That is being ratified across the EU, and I hope it will soon allow us to send quite a lot of the people he is talking about back to their home countries where they belong.
Derek Twigg (Halton) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman cannot avoid the fact that under the previous Labour Government, reoffending rates fell. I have a specific question that he keeps avoiding. One key determining factor in stopping people reoffending is getting a job and housing. Given that thousands of people in my constituency who are not offenders and have not been to prison cannot get a job or housing, what practical measures will he put in place to provide better access to jobs and housing for offenders?
Chris Grayling
We want to try to ensure that everyone gets a job and is housed. Everyone in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency has a vested interest in ensuring we bring down reoffending, because otherwise there will be more victims of crime. One thing I expect to see—this is already happening in parts of the provider community —is housing capabilities being part of the bids, and we already have partnerships between voluntary sector organisations and housing organisations to deliver better support for offenders. I want closer ties between Jobcentre Plus, Work programme providers and those delivering rehabilitation. We must ensure that we get as many offenders as possible back on the straight and narrow when they leave prison, to avoid having more victims of crime than we have today.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
I warmly welcome the proposals outlined by the Secretary of State, and he will know that they have evolved and been trialled with organisations, charities and voluntary groups such as the St Giles Trust. Will he ensure that as the programme is rolled out, smaller organisations that drive much of the innovation and change, and many of the good ideas, will have a fair crack at getting their talents recognised in partnerships with larger primes, as well as a bid process that is not too cumbersome?
Chris Grayling
That latter point is important and we will try to ensure that the bid process is as simple as possible for smaller organisations, and that it is as simple as possible for partnerships to be formed. I am not attracted by simply having a universal prime and subcontractor model. In Peterborough and Doncaster, for example, partnerships are already being formed between the private and voluntary sectors in a way that can make a real difference. Such partnerships are to be welcomed.
Ian Lucas (Wrexham) (Lab)
In a parliamentary answer, the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Jeremy Wright), stated that
“public sector entities will not be able to bid”
for probation contracts
“as they will not be able to carry the financial risk.”—[Official Report, 25 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 955W.]
Will the Secretary of State confirm that public sector contracts cannot be awarded to probation trusts?
Chris Grayling
Self-evidently, the existing structure of public probation trusts cannot take risk on behalf of the taxpayer, but staff are welcome—they are being helped actively—to establish co-operative movements and social enterprises that bid for the business. That is to be welcomed. I am not sure whether the hon. Gentleman is a Labour and Co-operative Member, but he sits with many who are. Surely he welcomes that approach.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
I congratulate the Justice Secretary on his statement. Rehabilitation is a long-held Liberal Democrat value. We need to focus on reoffending rather than engage in a competition as to who can be the most draconian and pose about it. He is right to highlight short-term prison sentences and to provide probation support. He knows that such sentences are expensive but not effective. Does he agree that spending more money on rehabilitation and on better community sentencing might be a better way of using it?
Chris Grayling
I can reassure my hon. Friend that the issue unites the coalition—there has been a lot of talk of the coalition parties having differences on policy, but let us champion a policy on which we are united on the need for change. As hon. Members will see when they read the document, one thing that is different in the package I have announced is that we are building rehabilitation support into community sentences. Clearly, the aim is to ensure that people do not get to prison in the first place. My goal is to see prison numbers fall steadily not because we want to close prisons for its own sake, but because fewer people reoffend, and we therefore do not need to put them in jail in future.
Karl Turner (Kingston upon Hull East) (Lab)
When probation officers dared to criticise the Secretary of State’s bonkers plans, he put a gagging order on them. When the chairman of the Criminal Bar Association criticised the Secretary of State’s bonkers ideas for criminal legal aid, he refused to meet him. Is it criticism he cannot stand, or engaging with the professions within the justice system?
Chris Grayling
The hon. Gentleman needs to stop believing everything he reads in the papers.
Chris Grayling
My ministerial and I colleagues have regular meetings with leading figures in the legal profession and with leading probation staff, and will continue to do so. I most recently had meetings with both the Bar Council and the Law Society within the past couple of weeks.
Mr Speaker
Order. I heard that last sedentary interjection, which was an imputation of dishonesty. I know the hon. Gentleman will want to withdraw that.
Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)
I welcome the measures announced by my right hon. Friend to help young offenders. Does he agree that we can provide help through smaller charitable and voluntary organisations, such as Action Acton in my constituency, which does excellent work? Does he also recognise that some smaller organisations find that waiting a long time for payment by results stretches their resources to breaking point?
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend makes an important point. We intend to ensure that any passing of risk down a supply chain is done in a transparent way. We will do everything we can to protect the interests of smaller organisations, but they must take advantage of that protection and not simply sign up to deals that they cannot afford.
Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)
There is no doubt in my mind that the proposals are simply the privatisation of a highly valuable, well performing public service—the probation service. Despite a cut of more than £1.8 million last year, the Northumbria Probation Trust in my area is one of four trusts graded excellent performers. Why does the Justice Secretary not just admit it and come clean that the statement is not about reoffenders or the general public, but about the prize of privatisation, political dogma and ideology?
Chris Grayling
I understand full well where the hon. Gentleman comes from politically. The problem with his argument is that the legislation that enables me to make these proposals was passed by the Labour Government.
John Glen (Salisbury) (Con)
I welcome the statement and the Justice Secretary’s sense of mission and purpose. However, on payment for results, I ask him to be cautious of creating perverse incentives to meet targets, and to ensure that the measures are sufficiently nuanced to take account of the behavioural challenges in getting difficult categories of offenders fully clear of reoffending. The measures must be sophisticated enough to deal with such complexity.
Chris Grayling
That is a very important point. We took careful heed of the responses to our consultation on this matter. The mechanism for payment by results will contain two elements: an overall reduction in the reoffending rate of a cohort of offenders referred to a provider, and a measure for the overall reduction in the number of crimes committed by that cohort. That will mean that a prolific offender cannot simply be parked in the corner and ignored: there will be a financial incentive for a provider to work with every offender.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)
During the 12 months of support I understand that there will be cannabis testing and that individuals will be required to attend drug treatment services. Will the Minister explain how that will be costed, and which of the new NHS bodies will be responsible for providing and commissioning those services?
Chris Grayling
There are already drug testing services in place for offenders who are on licence and who are believed to have a drug issue. We are simply extending the testing from class A to class B drugs, and taking the power to do that testing through the 12-month period. That will be dealt with within the costing of the package as a whole.
Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)
Financial capability also plays a vital part in rehabilitation. Will the Secretary of State encourage partners in through-the-gate support to look carefully at the pilot programmes undertaken by some banks and in particular by credit unions, to help people to budget, save and participate fully in the legitimate economy?
Chris Grayling
That is a fair point. A range of different issues affect reoffending. I expect our providers to provide a glue between the different organisations that can play a role in reducing reoffending, with help on debt advice, housing options, rehab support and so on. Providing that central support, help and encouragement for the individual will be of fundamental importance.
Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
May I echo the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull East (Karl Turner) on the perceived lack of engagement with those in the legal profession on some of the proposals, particularly those relating to criminal legal aid? They do feel that they are not being listened to. Given that payment by results is at the cornerstone of the proposals, if the Secretary of State cannot say now whether it will be 25% up front and 75% payment by results—or 50:50, 75:25 or 90:10—will he indicate when he can outline the proposals with more clarity? A number of excellent third sector providers will want to engage with this process and they need to have that information sooner rather than later.
Chris Grayling
The whole point of the bidding process is to look at quality, price and the proportion that individual organisations will be able to put at risk. We will publish a detailed tender document in due course, and that will give indicators of options and parameters within which they can work. I intend to publish that document for the House at the appropriate time. On meeting the legal profession, hardly a week goes by at the moment without a member of my ministerial team or myself having a detailed discussion with senior figures of representative groups in the legal profession. The last such meeting I held was yesterday.
Mr David Burrowes (Enfield, Southgate) (Con)
Given the drive across government to support the recovery of those addicted to drugs and alcohol, can the Justice Secretary assure me that offenders will not be released without planning— they are often released on a Friday night, into the hands of dealers sitting on the streets—but will be met by rehabilitation experts, those who provide a network of recovery champions referred to by my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) and those who know best how to enable people to go straight?
Chris Grayling
I can give that assurance. First, I am looking hard at the issue of Friday night releases. Secondly, the through-the-gate structure will ensure that whenever someone leaves prison they will be met at the gate by an organisation that will take immediate care over their lives. Thirdly, Members will see in the document that a joint project between the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Health will be trialled to measure the impact of a more substantial through-the-gate rehabilitation treatment service, with a view to extending it more broadly as and when we know the results.
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
I welcome today’s statement for two reasons: first, its focus on reoffending, which is exactly the right thing to do; and secondly, the emphasis on continuity between being in prison and going out beyond prison, which is critical. Will the Lord Chancellor bear in mind, however, the importance of education during the rehabilitation process? In particular, young people who cannot read or communicate properly are at a disadvantage, and the process he envisages could well help in that field.
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend is right that basic skills are fundamental to helping somebody get a job. I hope and expect that we will now have a much greater connection between resettlement services and education courses post-prison. I want somebody who cannot read properly and might have started training in prison to come straight out of prison and into the local college to continue that work. With the kind of support we will be providing, that will be much more likely to happen.
Robert Neill (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con)
I warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. From my 30 years’ experience as a practitioner at the Bar of the criminal courts of this country, I know that the disconnect to which he refers has existed for many years, but has not previously been acted on.
On the specific steps, can my right hon. Friend reassure me that the proposed local partnership arrangements will fully involve local authorities in that process and respect the work being done on community budgeting? Furthermore, does he agree that the work of those in the voluntary and charitable sector, which turns these people’s lives around, is one of the most powerful means of getting messages through to ex-offenders and that their work deserves rather more respect than it appears to be given by the cavalier comments from the Opposition Front Bench?
Chris Grayling
I rather agree with my hon. Friend. I can certainly reassure him that we will be looking for organisations that can demonstrate the ability to maintain partnerships where they are necessary. I am at a loss as to why the Labour party does not seem to think that using the expertise of the former offender gone straight to help turn around the life of a younger offender is anything but a very good idea. I ask them to get out of Westminster a bit and visit some of the charities where it is already happening to see the impact. It is substantial and we should make more of it.
Gareth Johnson (Dartford) (Con)
Does the Secretary of State agree that behind every short term of imprisonment is a reason for offending, yet the lack of a system prevents us from getting to the root of that reason? We need the probation service or any other provider to ensure that we work and assist these offenders in the longer term, because if we get this right, it provides the best opportunity in a generation to turn these offenders away from a life of crime.
Chris Grayling
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. We have chosen an extended one-year period of supervision even for people who receive very short sentences, because those who go to prison for a few weeks are those in danger of going back to prison again and again and for longer and longer. If we can stop them doing so early on, ideally before they get to prison in the first place, by providing rehabilitation support for those on a community sentence, we can stop the cycle of reoffending that he is right to say is damaging.
Speaker’s Statement
Mr Speaker
In accordance with Standing Order No. 122D, I will now announce the arrangements for the election of the Chair of the Backbench Business Committee for the new Session.
If there is more than one candidate, the ballot will be held in Committee Room 16 from 11 am to 1 pm on Thursday 16 May.
Nominations must be submitted in the lower Table Office between 10 am and 5 pm on the day before the ballot.
In accordance with the Standing Order, only Members who do not belong to a party represented in Her Majesty’s Government may be candidates in the election.
A briefing note with more details about the election will be made available to Members and published on the intranet.
Bills Presented
Finance Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80B)
Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary Vince Cable, Mr Secretary Duncan Smith, Mr Secretary Pickles, Danny Alexander, Greg Clark, Mr David Gauke and Sajid Javid, presented a Bill to grant certain duties, to alter other duties, and to amend the law relating to the National Debt and the Public Revenue, and to make further provision in connection with finance.
Bill read the First and Second time, clauses 1, 3, 16, 183, 184 and 200 to 212 and schedules 3 and 41 as reported from a Committee of the whole House were laid upon the Table without Question put, and the Bill stood committed to a Public Bill Committee in respect of clauses 6 to 15, 17 to 182, 185 to 199 and 213 to 232 and schedules 1, 2, 4 to 40 and 42 to 49 (Standing Order No. 80B and Order, 15 April); and to be printed (Bill 1).
Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary Vince Cable, Danny Alexander, Greg Clark, Mr David Gauke and Sajid Javid, presented a Bill to make further provision about banking and other financial services, including provision about the Financial Services Compensation Scheme; to make provision for the amounts owed in respect of certain deposits to be treated as a preferential debt on insolvency; to make provision about the accounts of the Bank of England and its wholly owned subsidiaries; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No. 80A and Order, 11 March); to be considered tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 2) with explanatory notes (Bill 2-EN).
Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Secretary Maria Miller, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mrs Secretary May, Secretary Michael Gove, Mr Secretary Pickles, Hugh Robertson, Lynne Featherstone, Mrs Helen Grant and Jo Swinson, presented a Bill to make provision for the marriage of same sex couples in England and Wales, about gender change by married persons and civil partners, about consular functions in relation to marriage, for the marriage of armed forces personnel overseas, and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No. 80A and Order, 5 February); to be considered tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 3) with explanatory notes (Bill 3-EN).
Energy Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Secretary Edward Davey, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Secretary Hague, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Secretary Hammond, Secretary Vince Cable, Mr Secretary Pickles, Mr Secretary Paterson, Mr Oliver Letwin, Gregory Barker and Michael Fallon, presented a Bill to make provision for the setting of a decarbonisation target range and duties in relation to it; for or in connection with reforming the electricity market for purposes of encouraging low carbon electricity generation or ensuring security of supply; for the establishment and functions of the Office for Nuclear Regulation; about the government pipe-line and storage system and rights exercisable in relation to it; about the designation of a strategy and policy statement; about domestic supplies of gas and electricity; for extending categories of activities for which energy licences are required; for the making of orders requiring regulated persons to provide redress to consumers of gas or electricity; about offshore transmission of electricity during a commissioning period; for imposing fees in connection with certain costs incurred by the Secretary of State; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No. 80A and Order, 19 December); to be considered tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 4) with explanatory notes (Bill 4-EN).
Children and Families Bill
Presentation and resumption of proceedings (Standing Order No. 80A)
Secretary Michael Gove, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary Vince Cable, Secretary Chris Grayling, Mr Secretary Hunt, Steve Webb, Mr Edward Timpson, Jo Swinson and Elizabeth Truss, presented a Bill to make provision about children, families, and people with special educational needs; to make provision about the right to request flexible working; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First and Second time without Question put (Standing Order No. 80A and Order, 25 February); to be considered tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 5) with explanatory notes (Bill 5-EN).
Pensions Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Mr Secretary Duncan Smith, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Danny Alexander, Secretary Vince Cable, Mr Oliver Letwin and Steve Webb, presented a Bill to make provision about pensions and about benefits payable to people in connection with bereavement; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 6) with explanatory notes (Bill 6-EN).
Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Mrs Secretary May, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Secretary Chris Grayling, Mr Secretary Pickles, Mr Secretary Paterson, the Attorney-General and Mr Jeremy Browne, presented a Bill to make provision about anti-social behaviour, crime and disorder, including provision about recovery of possession of dwelling-houses; to make provision amending the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, Schedules 7 and 8 to the Terrorism Act 2000 and the Extradition Act 2003; to make provision about firearms and about forced marriage; to make provision about the police, the Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Serious Fraud Office; to make provision about criminal justice and court fees; and for connected purposes.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 7) with explanatory notes (Bill 7-EN).
Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Secretary Maria Miller, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Secretary Pickles, Mr Secretary Hunt, Mrs Secretary Villiers, Danny Alexander and Hugh Robertson, presented a Bill to make provision about the licensing and advertising of gambling.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 8) with explanatory notes (Bill 8-EN).
Northern Ireland (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill
Presentation and First Reading (Standing Order No. 57)
Mrs Secretary Villiers, supported by the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary Michael Moore, Mr Secretary Jones, Miss Chloe Smith and Mike Penning, presented a Bill to make provision about donations, loans and related transactions for political purposes in connection with Northern Ireland; to amend the Northern Ireland Assembly Disqualification Act 1975 and the Northern Ireland Act 1998; to make provision about the registration of electors and the administration of elections in Northern Ireland; and to make miscellaneous amendments in the law relating to Northern Ireland.
Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time tomorrow, and to be printed (Bill 9) with explanatory notes (Bill 9-EN).
Debate on the Address
Home Affairs
(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mrs Theresa May)
The Gracious Speech we heard yesterday put forward a comprehensive legislative programme. Underlying it is a basic principle: this Government want to ensure that people who work hard and want to get on in life are able to do so. We believe that it is part of the Government’s role to help people who want to work hard to succeed. We want to ensure that those who do the right thing do not find themselves penalised for their honesty and their commitment to playing fair. The corollary of that is that those who cheat the system and who do not play by the rules should be prevented from being able to take advantage, at the expense of the decent and hard-working majority.
Nowhere is this more true than in the immigration system. We are going to make the UK a harder place to live for an immigrant who has not played by the rules—who has dishonestly overstayed their visa, for example, or who does not have one at all—or who has committed a serious crime. The immigration Bill referred to in the Gracious Speech will do three things. First, it will diminish the pull factors that make migrants want to come to Britain to take but not to contribute. Secondly, it will make Britain a harder place to live for those who have no right to be here. Thirdly, it will make it easier to remove foreign nationals who have committed serious crimes and who should be deported. It will streamline the appeals system, making it much less slow and cumbersome, and give fewer opportunities for using the Human Rights Act 1998 to avoid deportation.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
Will the Home Secretary explain to the House why she has sent back fewer foreign prisoners than were sent back in the last year of the Labour Government?
Mrs May
If the hon. Lady cares to look at the figures, she will see that there has been a significant increase in the number of appeals by foreign national prisoners, which is delaying their deportation. That is exactly why this Government are bringing forward measures in the immigration Bill to deal with the appeals system, and I hope that those on the Opposition Front Bench will support them.
One of the most fundamental injustices of the present system is one that many Members will be aware of from the complaints of their constituents. It is the extent to which immigrants can call on publicly funded services without having made any contribution to the system that provides them. Our system is one of universal provision, and it will remain so under this Government, but it is also one that requires some contribution to be made in order for that provision to be accessed. That is the basic principle of justice that underpins the system, but it is a principle that has been flouted. When the Bill becomes law, it will be respected.
The Bill will ensure that temporary migrants and others will not be able to have free access to the NHS until they have made at least some contribution to the Exchequer. Furthermore, the Bill will strengthen legislation that penalises businesses that employ illegal immigrants. It is obviously unfair that those who are not entitled to be in Britain should be able to take jobs that ought to be filled by people who are so entitled. The Bill will strengthen our ability to enforce penalties on employers that have used illegal workers. It will also confirm that a migrant must have lawful immigration status of more than six months to qualify for a UK driving licence.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
On the Home Secretary’s point about businesses that employ illegal migrants, will she explain why the number of businesses fined for so doing has dropped by 40% since the general election?
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
On a point of order, Mr Speaker. An hon. Member has just called across the House, saying, “Stop making that stupid face.” Is that parliamentary language?
Mr Speaker
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his point of order. I did not hear the expression concerned, but I think that it falls into the category of behaviour that is discourteous but not disorderly. We will leave it there for the time being, but I appeal to Members on both sides of the House to remember what I said yesterday. Speaking on behalf of the House and of the public, I believe that we should try to express ourselves with restraint, moderation and good humour, in the best traditions required by “Erskine May”.
Mrs May
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
The Bill will also introduce a duty on private landlords to carry out immigration checks when letting property. It will penalise landlords who rent property to migrants who are not entitled to stay in Britain.
We shall also introduce an amendment to the immigration regulations covering EU nationals who come to the UK in search of work. They will cease to have a right to reside here and will have no access to benefits if, after six months, they do not have a job and do not have a realistic chance of getting one. There is a glaring unfairness in the way that immigrants’ claims to have the right to settle here are assessed. The system has become so complex that, as one senior judge said recently,
“immigration law has now become an impenetrable jungle of intertwined statutory provision and judicial decisions...There is an acute need for simplification”.
The immigration Bill will provide that simplification. It will also set out how the courts should interpret article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which sets out the right to respect for private and family life. Last July, we set out clearly before the House what the right to family life should mean. That interpretation was adopted by the House without a Division, because it was unopposed. Unfortunately, some judges have chosen to ignore that interpretation. The immigration Bill will provide them with rules on how article 8 should be interpreted that will have statutory force. It will place strict limits on the circumstances in which the right to family life can be invoked to block deportation. In particular, it will put an end to the unjust situation in which immigrants convicted of serious offences can escape deportation merely by claiming that it would interfere with their right to family life.
Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)
My right hon. Friend is making a very important point. The House has made it abundantly clear that the will of the British people is that we should be able to deport people whom it is considered undesirable to have in this country. What assurance can she give the House that judges are going to listen to what the House is saying this time, given that they have not done so in the past?
Mrs May
My hon. Friend makes a good point: many people are incredibly frustrated by cases in which judges decide that the right to family life means that someone should not be deported, despite evidence of a significant level of criminality. Last July, when we made changes to the immigration rules, I hoped and expected that judges would respond to those changes, given that there was cross-party support for them. As I said, there was no opposition to them in the House. The fundamental difference this time around is that the changes will be made through primary legislation rather than through the immigration rules.
I now move on to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill. The Bill aims to diminish the extent to which honest and hard-working people are preyed on by criminals and by bullies who show no regard for the basic rules of civilised living. It will do so in three ways. First, it will make it easier for citizens to get the police or local authorities to take action against people whose antisocial behaviour disrupts their lives. Secondly, it includes measures to ensure that we can tackle organised crime more effectively. In particular, we are substantially increasing the maximum penalty for the illegal importation of guns, and creating a new offence of
“possession for sale or transfer”
of illegal firearms. Thirdly, it continues the process of reform of the police, so that police officers have clear professional standards and are able to spend more of their time fighting crime than filling in forms.
The Bill also contains a provision to make forcing a person to marry a criminal offence. Forced marriage is a serious problem in some communities in Britain today. It is an abomination: it is totally incompatible with the values of a free society that anyone should be forced into a marriage. Astonishingly, however, forcing a person into marriage is not a crime under our law. This Bill will remedy that situation, and in doing so, it will signal very clearly that this country does not tolerate the forcing of one person by another into marriage. The Bill will also make easier the prosecution of people who attempt it. Prosecutors will no longer have to identify other offences such as assault or kidnapping before they can start proceedings against someone for forcing another into marriage.
Antisocial behaviour is destructive, demoralising and damaging. When it is repeated over and over again on the same victims, its results can be tragic, as numerous cases involving some of the most vulnerable and easily hurt people in our society have shown. The existing means for dealing with antisocial behaviour are neither quick nor effective. The Bill will give new powers to the police, councils and landlords that will ensure that quick and effective remedies are available. It will also give people the power to require agencies to deal with antisocial behaviour. It will no longer be possible for a police force or a council to ignore repeated complaints, as it is now.
Sir Peter Bottomley
I invite my right hon. Friend to join me in congratulating the police on making savings and on working far more effectively in reducing crime. On the issue of antisocial behaviour, will she review whether unauthorised campers and Travellers returning to the same place, doing damage and causing costs can be dealt with more effectively? This sort of antisocial behaviour is not acceptable and it is resented by local residents.
Mrs May
I recognise the problem that my hon. Friend identifies as one that affects many communities up and down the country. I am pleased to say that in numerous places we have already seen the police taking a more robust approach in dealing with these particular issues. I encourage the police to do that when they are faced with these problems which, as my hon. Friend says, cause considerable concern to local residents.
This Bill aims to give people much greater control over the services that are meant to help them, but which have often in the past been operated for the convenience of those delivering them. The Bill will change that situation.
The Bill tackles another aspect of antisocial behaviour: irresponsible dog ownership. It will extend the offence of being in charge of a dog that is dangerously out of control to apply to any location.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
In looking at the problem of dangerous dogs, can we be more careful this time round, because the last time we attempted this performance, it was a bit of a fiasco and we ended up with bad legislation? The right hon. Lady is right to highlight this issue as a pressing need, but we need to be very careful about how we frame this legislation.
Mrs May
I accept what the right hon. Gentleman says—that it is important in introducing legislation to look carefully at what its impact might be. The clauses relating to dangerous dogs are limited in number. They extend the ability to deal with dangerous dogs into private places. Sadly, we have seen a number of cases where individuals, and particularly children, have been attacked by dogs in the family home. The current legislation does not cover that, but the Bill will enable us to do so. We will, of course, look carefully at the drafting to make sure that the provision is as effective as everybody would want it to be.
Julie Hilling (Bolton West) (Lab)
The proposals to amend legislation to cover attacks on private property are, of course, very welcome. However, it is extremely disappointing that there is no dog control notice measure or something similar, to prevent attacks from happening in the first place.
Mrs May
I am conscious that a number of people have been asking specifically for a dog control notice. We have not introduced it because we believe that the other powers and orders we are introducing under this antisocial behaviour Bill will give sufficient power to the police to be able to deal with dangerous dogs without needing to introduce a separate—and yet another—notice.
Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North) (Lab)
I was bitten by what was obviously a weapon dog during the last election campaign, so although I was not seriously hurt and did not suffer too much, I am very concerned about this issue. I am also concerned about it on behalf of my constituents, who have made many complaints about dangerous dogs. Are the Government going to be serious about dealing with this problem and reintroduce licensing, with every dog having to be chipped, and with a proactive role for dog wardens and the police to ensure that dogs are not dangerous?
Mrs May
Excellent work is done by dog wardens in many local authorities throughout the country. We feel that the legislation we are introducing, which will extend the ability to deal with dangerous dogs, is sufficient to be able to cover the issues that cannot be covered at present. I know some people say, “Why don’t we go back to having the dog licence that was held in the past?” Not only is that quite difficult to administer, but, unfortunately, all too often the owners of dogs we will need to be concerned about do not bother to get a dog licence, whereas the law-abiding citizens do. Giving the police extra powers to deal with dangerous dogs so that they can deal with them in all situations, even within the private home where the dog normally resides, gives the important extension of powers to the police that will enable them to deal with dangerous dogs wherever they may be in the community.
I am sorry to hear of the experience the hon. Gentleman had during the last election campaign. Dogs and letterboxes are the major problems for campaigners. [Interruption.] Yes, I think there would be widespread support for measures on that.
The reform of the police and the modernisation of their regulatory framework has been one of the most important aims of this Government, and it still is. We have ended the tyranny of national targets, eliminated useless bureaucracy and freed up police officers’ time so they can fight crime rather than fill in forms. We have set up the National Crime Agency to fight the cancer of organised crime, we set up the Winsor review of police pay and conditions, and we are determined that the priorities of the police should reflect those of the public they serve.
With the election of police and crime commissioners, we have made local police forces more accountable to the people they serve. This Bill will provide the new College of Policing with the powers it needs to set standards for the police in England and Wales. It will also ensure that the Independent Police Complaints Commission has the powers it needs to investigate complaints of misconduct effectively.
Although this was not specifically mentioned in the Gracious Speech yesterday, we intend to introduce measures to clarify the compensation arrangements for those whose property is damaged by riots. The law on this has not been changed since 1886, and, unsurprisingly, it is in great need of modernisation: for example, the Riot (Damages) Act 1886 does not cover damage to cars, because, of course, in 1886 there were no cars. This month, an independent review of the 1886 Act that I have commissioned will commence. It should conclude by the end of September. We shall then consult publicly, before looking to publish a draft Bill in spring 2014, with the aim of introducing it in the fourth Session of this Parliament.
It is one of the fundamental duties of Government to protect the law-abiding public from the effects of criminal behaviour, and I would like to update the House on the position regarding our proposals on communications data. The Government are committed to ensuring that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the powers they need to protect the public. Existing legislation already allows those agencies to monitor who has communicated by telephone, as well as with whom, when and where. These data are used in 95% of all investigations into serious and organised crime, and they have played a role in every major counter-terrorism operation by the security services in the last decade, but terrorists, paedophiles and criminal gangs today increasingly communicate with each other over the internet using the latest electronic technology. Our proposals are simply about ensuring that we can keep up with criminals as they shift to e-mails, instant messages and the internet, rather than making phone calls. We cannot leave the British public exposed to dangers which could be eliminated were communications data obtained. As the Gracious Speech yesterday indicated, we will be bringing forward proposals to address this most important issue.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
The Home Secretary is well aware of my position, and I thank her for giving way. Will she confirm that, as was said in the Gracious Speech, these proposals will relate only to the aspects involving internet protocol address matching, on which she and I agree, and will be coupled with the safeguards requested by the Joint Committee?
Mrs May
I was about to say that the hon. Gentleman was a little slow in jumping up; I thought he might have done so when I first mentioned communications data. He was a member of that scrutiny Committee, so he will be aware that it said there was a case for legislation in this area. We accepted a number of the Joint Committee’s recommendations on the proposed Communications Data Bill. As I have just explained, because this is an important area for catching criminals and for dealing with terrorists and paedophiles, it is right that the Government are looking to address the issue. The wording of the Queen’s Speech yesterday made it clear that the Government intend to address the issue and, as I say, proposals will be brought forward.
Helen Goodman
The Home Secretary is indeed being most generous this morning. When she is considering what to do about IP addresses, will she also look into having better, tighter systems for age verification? We hear a lot about how a better age-verification system would deal with many of the problems that we are facing on the net.
Mrs May
The hon. Lady’s point does not technically come under the remit of the communications data issue and deals with access to the internet more widely. If I have understood the point she is making, there is an issue to address. Some hon. Members have been taking this point up; my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), for example, has been doing a lot of work in this area and examining any possible changes.
Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)
I am a little confused about what is being proposed for data now. Will it deal solely and exclusively with IP addresses or is the plan to bring in, either in this Session or the next one, what we all described as a snooper’s charter?
Mrs May
The hon. Gentleman refers to the proposed measure as a snooper’s charter, as others have done, but it was not about snooping and it was not a charter. It is about ensuring—this will continue in the proposal we bring forward—that we are able to deal with the situation that is emerging, where it is becoming harder to identify these communications because people are using new methods of communication that are not covered by existing legislation.
Hon. Members will note that I have not referred to the justice Bill, which will increase public protection by ending early release schemes for dangerous offenders, or to the offender rehabilitation Bill, which, as we have just heard in my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary’s statement, will require that all offenders released from prison, including those given short sentences, serve at least 12 months under statutory supervision in the community. Neither of those important Bills is the subject of debate today. The Opposition are in charge of the debate following the Gracious Speech, so will the shadow Home Secretary explain why the Labour party does not consider the rehabilitation of offenders and cutting reoffending to be worthy of inclusion in the debate? Perhaps she does not feel that the shadow Justice Secretary is up to the debate, which might well be true, given that he was not even here to respond to that statement, but we would like to know.
The Bills I have outlined send an unambiguous message: we are on the side of hard-working families; we will help people who play by the rules and who want to get on in life; and people should be able to receive benefits only if they contribute something first. On crime, antisocial behaviour and immigration, the Government and this legislative programme are on the side of the people, and I commend it to the House.
Yvette Cooper (Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford) (Lab)
Once again in the Queen’s Speech we have heard grand claims, from the Home Secretary and indeed from the Prime Minister yesterday, about what their plans will do on immigration, antisocial behaviour, law and order, and justice. Sadly, however, the grand claims are simply not backed up by the reality of what they are doing.
The trouble is that we have been here before. We all remember how in this Government’s first Queen’s Speech the Home Secretary brought us the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill. She said that it would give the police
“a strong democratic mandate from the ballot box”.—[Official Report, 13 December 2010; Vol. 520, c. 708.]
Instead, she spent £100 million on shambolic elections and only one in eight people turned out to vote, which was hardly a ringing endorsement.
Let us remember, too, what the Home Secretary said about her counter-terror legislation. She said:
“Public safety is enhanced, not diminished, by appropriate and proportionate powers.”—[Official Report, 7 June 2011; Vol. 529, c. 69.]
Instead, she brought terror suspects back to London and on Boxing day one of them ran off in a black cab and no one has seen him since. Let us remember how she promised that Abu Qatada would soon be on a plane, yet we are all still waiting. She promised there would be no cuts to front-line police, yet more than 5,000 officers have already gone from 999 response and neighbourhood teams. Time and again, the rhetoric does not match the reality.
The Home Secretary talked about the data communications Bill—that is, the missing data communications Bill. Here is what she said about that Bill less than six months ago:
“This law is needed and it is needed now. And I am determined to see it through.”
She also said:
“But Sun readers should know that I will not allow these vitally important laws to be delayed any longer in this Parliament.”
Instead, all that that the Queen’s Speech briefing says is that the Government are working with companies and
“It may involve legislation”—
“may”—it “may”; that is clearly the problem.
Dr Huppert
The shadow Home Secretary has carefully avoided saying what the Labour party policy is on the data communications Bill. Two days ago, the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), the former Labour Home Secretary, said that if Labour had won the last election it would have introduced such a measure. Is that her position? Can she enlighten us?
Yvette Cooper
The hon. Gentleman should contain himself to squabbling within his coalition and struggling to get some answers. We have always said that action will be needed to ensure that the police can keep up with changing technology. However, the draft data communications Bill drawn up by the Home Secretary was far too wide; it gave the Home Secretary far too many powers and there were far too few safeguards for privacy. It was absolutely right that something had to be done, but that Bill was not the right approach. We must wait to see what approach the Home Secretary will now take, because Government Members are squabbling so much among themselves that the result is a shambolic approach to a serious issue. Time and again, that is what we see: there is strong rhetoric from the Home Secretary, and then the reality simply does not stack up.
It is the same when we come to the so-called “flagship” immigration Bill. We now discover that the Bill will not be published until the autumn, because the Government have obviously still not worked out what on earth to do about it. This is an area where we agree that action is needed. Yesterday, the Government told us that the Bill would have five central elements, but now it turns out that three already exist and will not require primary legislation, and two are merely proposals for consultation.
On jobseeker’s allowance, the Government are replicating the exact words in existing regulations. When the Health Secretary was asked about the NHS, all he could say was that he promised to examine the extent of the problem and do an audit. On private landlords, the Government cannot tell us how their policy will be enforced, because they do not know who the landlords are and they will not have a statutory register. Time and time again this Queen’s Speech has not set out the detailed proposals that we need. Instead of “flagship” Bills, all we have are proposals that seem to have been sketched out on the back of a fag packet—no wonder the Government wanted to get rid of the cigarette packaging legislation.
Yvette Cooper
We have already said that the pace of migration was too fast and that the level should come down; we have supported measures in that regard. However, although the Home Secretary has made grand claims about net migration and the Immigration Minister is attempting to do the same, they will recognise that two thirds of their drop in net migration is a result of an increase in British citizens leaving the country and fewer British citizens returning home.
Let me quote the numbers to the Home Secretary; she is on the edge of her seat, itching to intervene. In fact, the drop in net migration has been 72,000. Of those, 27,000 more Brits are leaving the country and 20,000 fewer Brits are coming home. Is she proud of a set of policies that have driven British people out of the country? I will give way to her if she wants to respond to that point.
Mrs May
On that statistical point, I suggest the right hon. Lady looks at what the Office for National Statistics said, which was that it was not the emigration of British people that led to the drop in net migration. We have reduced net migration by a third. I think she said that she accepted that net migration was too high under the Labour Government. Will she now apologise for that?
Yvette Cooper
The Home Secretary is targeting net migration, which she knows is affected by British people leaving the country—by people leaving as well as people arriving. I state the figures again: a 72,000 drop, 27,000 more Brits leaving the country and 20,000 fewer coming home. People obviously do not want to come back to Britain under her Government. That is the problem that she has to face.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
Does the right hon. Lady accept that it is utterly astonishing that she is not apologising to the British people for creating such an enormous amount of heartache and grief for them? Rather than encouraging my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary in her attempts to put right the failings of the right hon. Lady’s Government, she is standing there and criticising. Should she not be apologising?
Yvette Cooper
Nice try from the hon. Lady, but the facts show that there is a series of problems in this Government’s measures on immigration. I agree that we should have had transitional controls on migration from eastern Europe. There are things that the Labour Government should have done but which did not happen. They should have happened.
We should have people working together. There are many areas on which we agree with the Government and will support the measures that they are taking, but look at what has happened, particularly on illegal immigration. The number of people refused entry dropped by 50%. The number of people absconding through Heathrow passport control trebled. The number caught afterwards halved. The backlog in finding failed asylum seekers has gone up. The number of illegal immigrants deported has gone down. This is not a catalogue of success on immigration from the right hon. Lady’s Government.
Yvette Cooper
I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, then I want to make some progress.
Nick de Bois
The shadow Minister was bandying around figures about net migration and people leaving this country. She might do well to remember that in the 10 years of her Government, 2 million people aged 25 to 44—the most economically active—left this country, and she has the cheek to lecture us about people not wanting to come back.
Yvette Cooper
As the hon. Gentleman will recognise, people are travelling and trading more than ever. That is why immigration is an important issue for our future and why we must get the policies right. A policy that targets net migration means that the Government can claim to have made huge progress on the things that the British people care about when they are failing to tackle exploitation in the labour market and failing to tackle illegal immigration, which is not even measured in the net migration statistics. Illegal immigration can go on getting worse and worse, yet the Immigration Minister can make more and more claims about his target, and the result is that he is not listening to the real issues that people are concerned about, particularly on illegal immigration.
There are serious issues on immigration, crime and justice that should be addressed in this Queen’s Speech and we support action in all these areas. I shall cover each of them. We want to support many of the Government’s measures, although we will scrutinise the detail. We support action to stop the terrible crime of forced marriage and the right hon. Lady will agree that it is important to get the legislation right. We support action on dangerous dogs, though we will wait to see whether it goes far enough and to look at the detail of her proposals.
We welcome action on fire arms, but what is the Home Secretary doing to stop people with a history of domestic violence owning a gun? We need an answer for Bobby Turnbull, whose mother, aunt and sister were tragically killed by Michael Atherton, who was granted a gun licence despite his history of abuse. We agree, too, with more support and rehabilitation for offenders, but where is the evidence that these untested massive private contracts will work? When the Justice Secretary tried it for the Work programme, it proved worse than doing nothing at all, and when the Home Secretary tried it for the Olympics, she ended up calling in the troops.
Time and again the promises do not match the practice. The right hon. Lady promises action on antisocial behaviour, yet she is weakening powers, not strengthening them. There will be no criminal sanction if antisocial behaviour measures are repeatedly breached. She promises that the community trigger will make a difference in persistent cases, yet in the pilots it was hardly ever used. Out of 23,000 incidents of antisocial behaviour in Manchester, the trigger was implemented three times. In Richmond it was not used at all.
Yet still there is nothing to deal with the serious consequences for justice of the police cuts and the policies that the Government have pursued. For nearly 10 years, the proportion of crimes brought to justice went up. In 2002, 18% of crimes were solved, and that rose to more than 30% by the 2010 election. Crime fell, but a higher proportion of crimes were solved. Not any more. We all want crime to keep falling, but we need support and justice for victims too. The proportion of crimes brought to justice has fallen since the election. There are 15,000 fewer police officers, 200,000 fewer arrests and 30,000 fewer crimes solved, and some of the most serious crimes of all have not been followed up or offenders have been let off.
The Queen’s Speech proposes to expand community resolutions for things such as antisocial behaviour, and we support more action in the community to resolve low-level crimes or antisocial behaviour—people apologising to victims and making reparations. But it must not become a short cut for dealing with serious and violent crime because there are not enough police to do the job, and that is what is happening on the Home Secretary’s watch. The number of serious and violent offenders let off after they said sorry has gone up massively since the cuts started—up from 13,000 to 33,000 in just three years. Yet it goes against all the guidance from the Association of Chief Police Officers. ACPO says that it should not be used at all for domestic violence because it
“represents serious risk to the victims of such offences and is often subject to a complex and protracted investigation”.
That is too right. We know the pattern in many domestic violence cases: the offender apologises and says he will never do it again and that he really, really loves her, until the next time, when he hits her all over again. The criminal justice system must not sanction that. Yet that is exactly what happened 2,700 times last year—a fivefold increase since before the election and before the cuts started; a fivefold increase in the number of cases where a domestic violence offender was let off after they said sorry.
What was the response from Ministers? The Home Office has refused to issue new guidance, to set safeguards, to raise the matter with ACPO, and to rethink police cuts. Instead it says that it is a
“matter for Chief Constables. Through crime maps and police and crime commissioners, the public now have the means to hold them to account.”
That is reassuring. The police are overstretched, violent offenders are getting off, but at least we can Google it, and at least people get a vote in three years’ time. That is not an acceptable response to a serious problem.
On immigration, the grand claims do not match the reality either. We support action in many of the areas that the Government have talked about and we will scrutinise the legislation when it finally comes forward. Concerns about immigration are genuine and Parliament should respond. The pace of immigration has been too fast and we support measures to bring immigration down, particularly from low-skilled migration. But I hope that the Home Secretary will agree that Britain has benefited from people coming to our shores through the generations and contributing to this country. From our great scientists to the founders of our most successful businesses, from our great artists to our Olympic gold medallists, people who have worked hard for this country have boosted our society, our culture and our economy too.
As people travel and trade more than ever in future, in global markets, immigration will be important to Britain’s future as well. It is because immigration is important that it needs to be controlled and managed so that it is fair for all. We supported the proposals on article 8 when they were passed through Parliament last year. Article 8 is a qualified right and it is reasonable for Parliament to say how that should be balanced, especially when crimes have been committed, and we will work further with the Home Secretary in this area. But she should not pretend that the Government’s failure to deport foreign criminals is all because of the Human Rights Act. In fact, the number of foreign prisoners deported has fallen by 800 a year since the election, and she has herself admitted that only a minority of cases involve successful appeals under article 8. Far more often the problem is lost paperwork and administrative incompetence, problems that have been getting worse not better on her watch.
Nor has the Home Secretary set out proper plans to deal with exploitation in the labour market and illegal immigration. I hope that she will now introduce the powers that we put forward for borders enforcement staff in the Bill last year. I also hope that there will be action to close the loopholes on student visitor visas, and further action to deal with the fewer illegal migrants deported, more absconding at the border and fewer cases of illegal migrants reported to the Home Office simply not being followed up.
Kelvin Hopkins
I strongly agree with what my right hon. Friend is saying, but does she not accept that we must argue the case for a substantial increase in staffing to deal with all those matters?
Yvette Cooper
It is significant that the Home Office has cut around 5,000 staff from the UK Border Agency, and we have seen the consequences, for example in the growing delays for business people, who need visas rapidly, and longer delays and problems with appeals.
Crucially, we also need action to deal with the exploitation of migrant workers to undercut local staff. Where is the action to enforce the minimum wage? Where are the measures to extend gangmasters licensing? Where are the measures to stop agencies recruiting only from abroad? Where are the measures to stop employers using overcrowded housing to get around the minimum wage? Higher fines for businesses employing illegal labour are right, but they are no use if enforcement has dropped by more than 800 companies since the general election.
Let us also be clear that UK Independence party policies would make the situation worse. It wants to end statutory paid holidays, redundancy pay and maternity leave. Getting rid of those entitlements would be deeply unfair. Also, to do so would make it easier, not harder, for employers to exploit migrant workers and undercut local terms and conditions. The truth is that neither the Tories nor UKIP are willing to address the real problem of exploitation and the practical issues that trouble people because they are simply in a race to the bottom in the labour market and in the economy. If they really are concerned about deporting foreign criminals, why are they all determined to opt out of the European arrest warrant, just because it has the word Europe in the title, and even though it was responsible for the swift deportation of 900 suspected foreign criminals last year for trial back home? The reality is that those policies are not driven by facts, justice or a serious concern to get immigration policy right.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
On the question of deporting foreign-born criminals to serve the balance of their sentence in their home countries, does my right hon. Friend agree that, given that most of the prisoner swap agreements we have with non-EU countries need the prisoner’s permission, it is difficult to see how the Government will achieve anything with that stated policy?
Yvette Cooper
We are still waiting to see the detail of the Government’s policy, because in so many of these areas we get strong rhetoric but the reality does not add up to it, and often it does not even emerge.
The Home Secretary might think that she is fending off the threat from UKIP, but actually she is doing the opposite. The more she ramps up the rhetoric and widens the gap between it and reality, the more she increases public concern and the more sceptical people become. This is no time for an arms race on immigration rhetoric. Instead, we need fair and sensible policies that will make things better, not worse.
Let me raise one final immigration issue with the Home Secretary. We agree with the sentiment in the Queen’s Speech that those who come here should contribute, but what about those who have already contributed to this country by risking their lives and those of their families for our troops and our nation, and many of those are still doing so? What about the Afghan interpreters who have supported our troops and face threats from the Taliban as our troops pull out? When we left Iraq, we recognised the debt we owed those interpreters. The Americans, the Australians and the New Zealanders are all recognising their obligations to the interpreters. Surely she should show a similar sense of honour and add to the Queen’s Speech a settlement scheme for the Afghan interpreters, to whom we and our troops owe so much? We will support her if she does.
This is a Queen’s Speech that fails to provide the answers on law and order. It fails to provide the answers we need on immigration. It fails to provide help for family living standards. It fails to provide the boost our flatlining economy so badly needs. Once all the pomp and ceremony has passed, the reality of the Queen’s Speech is looking pretty thin. The Home Secretary, like the Prime Minister and the Chancellor, talks tough but does not deliver. As the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark Reckless) said, she
“talks the talk but does not walk the walk.”
On the Opposition side, we could not agree more.
Sir Edward Garnier (Harborough) (Con)
Unsurprisingly, I rather disagree with the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). I think that the Queen’s Speech contained some very positive and interesting aspects, not least the proposals that the Secretary of State for Justice spoke about earlier. The Queen’s Speech set out that
“Legislation will be introduced to reform the way in which offenders are rehabilitated in England and Wales.”
For me, that is perhaps the most important part of the Queen’s Speech. I hope that the programme that the Government bring forward, and the Bill or Bills relating to rehabilitation, will produce real benefits for the public.
I will just add—this follows a couple of newspaper reports over the past few days—that the money available for spending on rehabilitation is, I suspect, being unfairly reduced by the ordering of costs out of central funds for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When it fails successfully to prosecute offenders, sometimes it has to pay its own costs and sometimes it does not, but invariably the successful defendant’s costs come out of central funds. I hope that the Front-Bench team will look carefully at their resources to ensure that central funds are not used—I presume that “central funds” means Ministry of Justice or Home Office money—to bail out private prosecutors when they fail to bring their prosecutions home.
Let me revert to the wider subject of rehabilitation and place it within the context of the criminal justice system as a whole. It strikes me that the criminal justice system is a process, not an event. Our prisons are part of that process and, for all but the very few prisoners who will live out their lives in custody, they are places of temporary accommodation into which and from which the “community”, “society”, the “outside”—call it what we will—sends and takes them back. For most of those who are sentenced to prison, custody is not the end of the journey but a part of it.
Conversely, for many of us—those of us on the outside—who have no experience of the criminal justice system and who have never been into a prison or met anyone who has been sentenced to a term of custody, prison is society’s final answer. That is wrong: prison is itself a process within the wider process of the criminal justice system. It cannot be isolated in a silo from the other parts of the criminal justice system, such as the police, the courts, the probation service, the drug and alcohol abuse programmes and the education, training and diversionary activities that run alongside them.
The value of prison for society, law-abiding and criminal alike, should be that it takes in offenders and releases them reformed and rehabilitated so that they can return whence they came as different and better people, ready to participate as responsible citizens, looking after their dependants, free from drug use, better qualified, earning a living, paying their way and going straight. That is no doubt the unattainable ideal to be placed beside the hope of the crime-free society, but just because we cannot have total success does not mean that we should not strive to do better than we are doing now. I therefore look forward to seeing the detail of the Government’s proposals in relation to rehabilitation.
Prison, for most of those who end up inside, is evidence of failure: the offender has failed to look after himself, his family and those he cares for; he has failed to get an education, a job and to maintain his physical and mental well-being; and he has failed to understand, or has simply ignored, the needs and rights of others. In failing in so many ways he has caused incalculable damage to those most close to him and to his immediate and more distant victims. But in sending him to prison and doing nothing with him save incarcerating him—statistically most offenders and prison inmates are male—are we not also failing ourselves, our neighbours, our communities and our country? Prisons, properly understood and properly directed, should be prisons with a purpose that serve the public interest.
Helen Goodman
The hon. and learned Gentleman makes a very reasonable point when he says that we should look at the criminal justice system as a whole, and the interactions between the institutions have a big impact on the effectiveness of the system, but does he not understand that it is precisely for that reason that the proposal to privatise the probation service and extend payment by results without having completed the pilots is so risky, because the institutions will be competing against each other, rather than trying to promote a good criminal justice system for society as a whole?
Sir Edward Garnier
I am glad that the Government are taking a risk, but it is not an irresponsible risk. The outcome that we are looking for is rehabilitation. The probation service should not simply be an employment system; it should be a system more widely looked at that takes prisoners and rehabilitates them so that they can re-engage in society. If the Government’s proposals work—this is not a new idea; the Conservative party has been thinking about it for many years—they should be welcomed. Of course there will be doubt from the trade unions and from the Labour party, which are more state-centric organisations than we are, but for goodness’ sake let us give it a try. The current system is not working. If the Government are to be believed, as they should be in this regard, the Opposition should be a little less wary of this exciting new venture, because the benefits of it working are worth striving for.
At the moment, we have overcrowded prisons that can do no more than lock up for the period of their sentence the violent, the dishonest, the mentally ill, the addicted substance abusers, the illiterate, the innumerate and the socially inept. It can do no more than warehouse human beings for no other purpose than keeping them off the streets and preventing them from reoffending while inside. That is not a wrong or improper purpose—it is a very good reason to send an offender to prison—but on its own it is an insufficient and unimaginative purpose, and without more it is a huge waste of public money. If we do no more than house and release offenders and fail to carry out the essential work of helping them to find somewhere to live, to find a job, to stay off drugs and to return to their families and look after their dependants, we will fail again and again, and reinforce that failure.
We have a choice. We can continue to reinforce that failure or we can think hard about why we are failing the victims of crime and those we send to prison, as well as the wider taxpaying public, and do something about it. We can continue to put large cohorts of people into an overcrowded prison estate and send the same cohorts of people back out again to commit more, and often worse, crimes, or we can try to change things for the better—better for the taxpayer, better for the victims of crime, better for the public at large, and better even for the criminal.
Prisons need walls to deny criminals their liberty, to keep them off our streets and to stop them committing further crimes while serving their sentences, as well as to prevent them from escaping and to keep them safe from those on the outside who would do them harm. But those walls also need windows through which society can see in and know what is being done inside in its name and through which the offenders can see out and realise that a life of hope and purpose awaits them and is worth striving for. This is the era that cannot keep a secret and where no confidence is respected, and yet there remains a secret world of which the public know little or nothing: the world inside our prisons. It is time to put those windows in those walls.
No doubt the Government’s plans for rehabilitation will not entirely cure the problem of reoffending, but this is a Conservative answer that is positive, forward-thinking and practical, and at least worth thinking about. The status quo is not an option. Some years ago, the then chief inspector of prisons, Anne Owers, wrote:
“There is a link between humanity and effectiveness.”
Public safety, in her view, hinges on having an effective process, “And this isn’t one”. She was right then and she is right now. The prison system in England and Wales is creaking. The Prison Service, in its various guises, is confused, and the public are increasingly concerned. Traditionally, correctional policies have focused less on correcting and more on punishment and temporary prevention. Keeping offenders incarcerated and thus protecting society from their crimes and deterring them from committing them again and others from starting on a life of crime, is the job, or one of the jobs, of the prisons, and it is not an easy one. However, the Government are now attempting to deal with the issue.
Another central purpose of custody, and a more challenging one, must be to reduce, even if we cannot totally prevent, levels of reoffending. All but a tiny minority of prisoners are released at some point, and it is in our interest to prevent them from returning to a life of crime. As the Prison Reform Trust has written,
“Prisons should be places that hold securely, and make every effort to rehabilitate, serious and dangerous offenders. The skills and focus of those who run them should be wholly directed towards that aim, in the interests of public safety.”
If one thing stands out from any sensible examination of the prison system, it is that this second pillar is unstable, leaving not just room for improvement but potential for danger. It is, furthermore, wasting vast sums of public money. The cost of keeping a criminal in jail must now be well over £50,000 a year, and for younger, teenage offenders I would not be surprised if the cost were well over £150,000 a year. That does not take into account the cost of fostering the children of prisoners while their parents are away.
Stereotypically, any focus on rehabilitation is labelled as soft, but an intelligent analysis of the prison system must surely conclude that regardless of the well-being of offenders, their successful rehabilitation benefits the public purse, enhances public safety, and is in the public interest. I recognise that the need to reduce reoffending must be accompanied by the need to foster a public understanding that reform and rehabilitation of offenders is in their interest and a public good—a necessity not entirely obvious at first glance. As a former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, explained,
“Some newspapers appear to have an agenda which is to persuade the public that judges are soft on crime, that no prison sentence is long enough and that a sentence which does not involve imprisonment is no sentence at all. The only purposes of sentencing which they recognise are punishment and deterrence—rehabilitation does not enter the picture…We need to get across the message that rehabilitation of offenders makes life better not just for them but for the rest of us.”
The Government are now pushing that agenda, and I welcome that. It is clear that there are arguments worth making and that now is not too early to do so.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)
I would like to concentrate on immigration issues and to start with what immigrants bring to the United Kingdom. If we went by what is said by UKIP and in tabloid headlines, we would assume that it is all chaos and problems, but we should stop and think. There is a reason why Slough, one of the most diverse towns in the country, is the third most productive town in the country. Migrants are entrepreneurial, brave and risk-taking. They are prepared to move their families thousands of miles to learn a new language and to build a better future for themselves and their children. That has real benefits for Britain, and we should not forget that. I start from an unashamed view that Britain’s openness to migration is one of our great strengths. The many cultures in our country have played a key role in making us a world leader in cultural and creative industries. The panicked reaction of trying to out-UKIP UKIP was wrong.
I sometimes do not understand why my party constantly keeps saying that we got it wrong on immigration, because I think that we got it mostly right. We stopped a test on arranged marriages that was introduced by the primary purpose rule. We stopped the huge delays for husbands and wives overseas. When we were elected in 1997, asylum cases were taking years to determine. We ended that situation, and we moved it to months.
Dr Huppert
I agreed with the hon. Lady on almost everything until she said that the previous Government stopped asylum cases taking years to process. She will be well aware that there has been a backlog of hundreds of thousands of asylum cases that have taken very many years, including throughout the time of the previous Government, and the situation has still not been fully rectified. Does she accept that her party’s Government did not in fact stop asylum cases taking years?
Fiona Mactaggart
The hon. Gentleman does not have the history of going into the way that the Home Office works that I have. What happened was that initial determinations of asylum cases had been taking years and years. In ’97, there were thousands of cases that nobody had made any kind of decision on, and the initial determinations were made quickly. He is right that there was a backlog of a number of cases that had been lurking in an underground bunker. In fact, when we were first elected, the underground bunker contained thousands of cases that had not been subject to any decisions at all, and the bunker was full of poison gas. The way in which the Home Office administers cases is ludicrous and I will address the issue later.
I believe that the previous Government did get some things wrong on immigration. We allowed the development of bogus colleges which conned students and allowed people to study here who should not have qualified to do so. We failed most in not sufficiently transforming the administration of immigration that we inherited from the Conservative Government. We did not do enough to make the system work well. We started that work—we introduced e-borders and we proposed identity cards—but we inherited a mess and the Home Office did not sufficiently get it sorted.
Today’s editorial headline in The Times says that the Government are right to prioritise delivery. Although The Times appears to be giving the Government an alibi for not proposing enough legislation in the Queen’s Speech, immigration is a field in which they have failed to prioritise delivery, which is key to ensuring that our immigration system that works. From where does immigration need to operate?
Ms Abbott
On the past Labour Government’s record, I gently tell my hon. Friend that I had a few asylum cases that took longer than two months to resolve. Does she agree, however, that one of the most pernicious myths propagated is that the previous Labour Government had an open-door policy on immigration? There was no open-door policy and it is misleading for people to continue to repeat that.
Fiona Mactaggart
My hon. Friend is right. In order to get effective administration of immigration in the UK, we need to work out where it can best operate, and in my opinion that is at our borders. We are an island, which provides an opportunity for a primary mechanism of border-based immigration control.
It is not possible to operate effective and fair internal immigration control without identity cards, which is why in 2003 I changed my position from hostility towards them to being in favour of biometric ID cards. The Government’s proposed new mechanism seems to be dependent on not just internal immigration control, but wholly privatised immigration controls, with GPs and landlords—any old person—responsible for checking people’s immigration status. Frankly, that will open the door to more discrimination: people who do not look or sound British, or who cannot provide documents that the non-immigration authorities understand in order to prove their status, are likely to face particular difficulties. Anyone who looks or sounds like they are from abroad is likely to be targeted. That is not fair or right, and it is not an appropriate way for us to operate in the UK.
We know that landlords and GPs will not be able to understand the bits of paper, because employers who, rightly, already have a responsibility are unable to find out whether their employees are properly qualified. In a significant number of cases in my constituency, that is because the papers that prove status are stuck in the Home Office, which is not making a decision on them. I am not sure how a landlord is supposed to be able to prove to their own satisfaction whether someone is qualified or not.
In order to operate the proposal sensibly, it will probably require a register of landlords, which I would enthusiastically accept, because I am concerned about a number of issues with regard to private landlords. At present, private landlords in Slough habitually say that they do not want tenants on housing benefit, but in my view that is discriminatory: it discriminates against disabled people, who are substantially more likely than anybody else to depend on housing benefit. Lawyers have told me that it would be impossible to bring a case of disability discrimination, partly because landlords are not big institutions and because of the costs involved. If we increase the number of people whom landlords have a duty to discriminate against, we will create a society in which the excluded will number not just those with a suspect immigration status, but those with a perfectly secure immigration status.
Rather than legislating in that way, I advise the Government to get with the programme of making the system work—but that is not what they are doing. On illegal employment, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has said, 800 fewer businesses have been fined in the past year for employing illegal workers. That figure is down from 2,097 in 2010 and 1,215 in 2012. The rhetoric is outperforming activity.
The same is true of the rhetoric on human trafficking. The Prime Minister has said that he wants us to be the leading country in dealing with human trafficking, yet we heard compelling testimony from Kalayaan just a couple of days ago about how the abolition of the overseas domestic workers visa is increasing the oppression of overseas domestic workers in private households. The reach of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority should be spread far more effectively, so that instead of being criticised by the International Labour Organisation, as is currently the case, we can show ourselves to be leaders in preventing human trafficking and the exploitation of workers.
The person who put this case most tellingly was Paul Houston, whose daughter was killed in a hit-and-run incident that became a cause célèbre for those who want to scrap the human rights of foreign nationals, when he said:
“I’m tired of the Borders Agency blaming its failings on human rights instead of just doing its job. Getting landlords to check the status of tenants will lead to suspicion that anyone who isn’t white or who has a foreign-sounding name must be here illegally.”
Let us consider the proportionality of the proposed deportation and human rights legislation. At present, a person sentenced to a year’s imprisonment is also expected—there is a presumption—to be deported. It is more usual for the Home Office to win rather than lose an appeal against such a case. Of the 819 deportation appeals to the first tier tribunal in the year April 2011 to March 2012, 67%—two thirds—were dismissed and 33% allowed. Very few appeals go to the upper courts and the judges have to decide them according to law, which includes the European convention on human rights as the European Court of Human Rights and the British courts have decided it, and not the Home Secretary’s personal views on it.
The Prime Minister has said that
“from here on I want a family test applied to all domestic policy. If it hurts families, if it undermines commitment, if it tramples over the values that keep people together, or stops families from being together, then we shouldn’t do it.”
However, that is precisely what the deportation proposals and those for the diminution of human rights risk doing. I want to give examples of two cases in my constituency in order to try to persuade the Minister who will respond to the debate to give a commitment that those people whose sentence is only in relation to immigration offences should not be caught by the Government’s proposals.
My first constituent is an African man who has lived in the UK for nearly 14 years. He came as a student, formed a relationship and had a son who was born here in 2003. That relationship broke down, but he is in frequent and close contact with his son and on good terms with his ex-partner about that contact. He was refused re-entry after a visit to his home country because he was not continuing to study and was removed immediately. He returned with another passport and worked on false documents, incidentally for a well-known children’s charity. He was arrested for using false documents to come back to the UK and to try to get permission to remain, and was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment. In the meantime, he had formed a new relationship with a British citizen who was born in Devon and worked at a special school. She was close to her parents and her two very elderly grandmothers. She stuck by him while he was in prison and they got married in August 2010 after his release. They now have an 18-month-old child.
My constituent applied to revoke the deportation order that was made after his sentence and won his appeal in summer 2012 on article 8 grounds. Eventually, he was given the six months’ leave that the UKBA has decided to give in such circumstances. He will have to apply again and pay Home Office fees for a further extension and has no idea when he might be able to get some security. I received an e-mail from his wife yesterday, which said that he
“has returned to work, he now works there full time in the role of security and youth worker. He continues to see his son fortnightly and our son has become familiar with the routine of”
his father
“taking him to a childminder every morning.”
She wrote that he
“is a very important part of my family and we stay with my parents regularly, as well as regular visits with my extended family and he will be an usher at my sisters wedding in two weeks time.”
That is exactly the kind of person whom the Home Secretary’s proposals are designed to target, unless we are given a commitment that people whose only offence relates to their immigration status will not be included.
My second constituent who has an immigration offence is unsure whether he will be able to stay with his wife and children. The eldest child is 10 years old and has applied for British citizenship, as is that child’s right.
The risk is that we are following the agenda of the tabloids, rather than the agenda of humanity. An alternative approach would be to say that we, as the country that helped to write the European convention on human rights, are proud of our human rights record and will uphold it. We should trust judges to make the decisions on individual cases, rather than write big rules to discriminate against people. We should say that we do not believe in privatising our immigration administration, but that it is time to make the Home Office’s administration of immigration operate better and do what it says on the tin. If we did all those things, this would be a more fair, just and equal country, which is what we should all aim for.
Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)
It is a great pleasure to be called in this debate on the Queen’s Speech. It is also a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart). I usually agree with much of what she says and on this occasion I agreed with large chunks of it. I will not go through every constituent in my area who has had to wait years for decisions to be made; the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) made the point for me.
I was generally very pleased with yesterday’s Queen’s Speech. It contained a lot of good measures that the Liberal Democrats are proud to have championed for a long time. There was excellent news that will help us to create a stronger economy and a fairer society.
Aspiring businesses will be boosted by the legislation on the national insurance employment allowance of £2,000. That is a progressive way of helping businesses out, giving them a springboard for growth and, critically, encouraging them to hire staff. There are proposals to improve the intellectual property system. The Hargreaves proposals suggested that European Union unitary patents could lead to £2.1 billion in growth. That will be welcomed by a lot of the high-tech businesses in my constituency, although we must not go down the dangerous route of software patents. The Energy Bill, which will continue its passage, will provide green jobs. The High Speed 2 Bill will generate about 100,000 jobs. As we have heard, the £10,000 income tax threshold will lift millions of poorly paid people out of income tax and give money back to others that can be spent to grow the economy.
On fairness, the care Bill will put an end to vulnerable members of society having to sell their homes to pay for care costs in their lifetime. There will also be a new flat-rate state pension, help for carers and the continuation of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. I hope that through cross-party agreement, that Bill will include the proposal to allow humanist weddings to take place in England and Wales, as they do in Scotland.
In government, we have fought for and will continue to fight for a stronger economy and a fairer society, but I will focus on the home affairs and justice measures in the Queen’s Speech. I will start with the contentious issue of immigration, on which I largely agree with the hon. Member for Slough. This country benefits massively from immigration. I am pleased to say that very clearly. If we were to take away the immigrants from my constituency, it would be disastrous. The hospital could not function without people who have come from overseas, universities and high-tech businesses would suffer massively, and the quality of society would be massively diminished. We should be delighted that we have successful immigration. Immigrants come to this country and make a huge contribution. I am very proud to support that.
However, our system does not work well. Under this Government, the previous Government and, I dare say, the Government before that, our border controls have simply not been good enough and we have not been able to keep track of people. We definitely want to ensure that the people who should be able to come into this country can get in easily and quickly. They should not have a struggle with bureaucracy or wait months for decisions, whether they are a wealthy businessman or somebody seeking asylum. Everybody deserves a prompt, correct decision. That is not what has happened. Improvements are being made and we will see whether they go far enough. It should be easy for talented business people, academics, researchers and genuine asylum claimants to come here legitimately. There have been far too many problems with that.
I have a constituent who had been sentenced to death in Iran for converting to Christianity. He applied for asylum under the previous Government and was rejected because, although he had a copy of the death sentence, it was deemed that there was not enough evidence that he would be at risk if he went back. Most people who are asking for asylum do not have a copy of a death sentence. That decision has been corrected and he is living in Cambridge and is very active there. The Home Office has been very helpful to members of his family.
We have to fix the system. I want exit checks to be reinstated. That is a long-standing Liberal Democrat position. If we do not know who is leaving, we do not know who is still in the country. That causes frustration because there are lots of figures that suggest that people are still in this country who should not be, when in fact they left many years ago. A lot of the figures on student migration include people who have left the country or who did not come here in the first place.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I agree with the hon. Gentleman. The previous Government’s abandonment of exit checks has led to the appalling situation whereby we cannot tell who is in the country. I would certainly welcome it if they were put back in.
Dr Huppert
I thank the hon. Gentleman. I think that it was the Government before last who got rid of exit checks, but they certainly were not restored by the last Government. I believe that they are in the process of being restored by this Government. I look forward to clarification from the former Immigration Minister.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
There were two sets of exit checks: one for those from outside the European Union and another for those from inside the European Union. The final exit checks were removed by the previous Government in 1998.
Dr Huppert
I thank the Minister for his detailed clarification and for being so well briefed. The past two Governments removed one set of exit checks each. We need to have them back so that we know who is leaving.
We must ensure that in the drive to correct our systems, we do not bring in measures that stifle our success or international standing. It is fantastic that we attract students from around the world. They come here and pay money, making this a fantastic export business. Some of them stay and contribute to our economy. Others leave and set up businesses or get elected in their own country, and have a good relationship with our country. We should be proud of that. That is a huge factor in my constituency and many others. We must not drive those people out when we correctly try to stop those who are abusing the system and who come here falsely. We need steps that get it right in both ways.
The demise of the Border Agency was somewhat rushed. We must ensure that there is not just a change of name, but a change of practice. The era of decade after decade of backlogs and of people not getting answers promptly must finally end. We all want to see that; no one in any part of the House would like those backlogs to continue to grow or even to exist at all, and we must have a system that will end them. I hope the Government will manage that, but it will be a tough task.
Ms Abbott
Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the inordinate delays and backlogs in the immigration system have two malign effects? First, they make it difficult for those with the type of talent, expertise and entrepreneurship that he describes to have their cases dealt with swiftly. Secondly, they encourage abuse, because many third-rate, dodgy immigration advisers end up giving their clients advice just to play for time.
Dr Huppert
The hon. Lady is absolutely right and I agree with everything she said. Delays cause huge harm, and she is right to pick on a number of the advisers and immigration lawyers who help out. A huge number of reputable lawyers do a fantastic job, but all of us who deal with a significant amount of immigration casework see shocking cases of people who should not be allowed to practise as they do, and who are extorting the vulnerable in a deeply unfair way. It is a huge problem that is cruel to those involved, and we must take action.
Much of what we need to do can be achieved without legislation. Some areas, however, need legislation and I look forward to proposals in the immigration Bill, which I hope will contain good provisions and send the signal that we can do the right thing. I know the Minister for Policing and Justice agreed with this when he was Immigration Minister, but there are, for example, specific issues about the status of children born outside the UK to unmarried British fathers before 2006, and to married British mothers before 1983. These are slightly odd cases because those people are not entitled to citizenship, although they are if they were born to unmarried British fathers after 2006, or earlier in the case of the mother. I hope that anomaly—I think that was the word the Minister used—will now be corrected. I also hope that a number of other proposals will be included in the legislation. My hon. Friend the Member for Brent Central (Sarah Teather) pointed out that asylum support rates should be looked at each year, and I hope that will find its way into the Bill if legislation is required.
The idea of landlords and employers having a role is interesting. For employers the issue is clear, but we need stronger controls on those who knowingly hire people who are not allowed to work. We also need a system that makes it easier for employers. I have seen cases where the UK Border Agency has given employers unhelpful or inaccurate information about people’s right to work. Employers cannot be expected to understand all the details of the system—I do not think any hon. Member in the Chamber would claim to understand every nuance of it, although I am prepared to be corrected—and we must have a simple, clear system. If landlords are also to have such a responsibility, they too need such a system. I do not mind if a landlord has to enter a passport number and name on a computer and gets an answer—I can live with that—but if they all are expected to become experts in immigration law, we should be aware that that simply will not happen. I look forward to seeing how the system will work.
I am delighted that the draft Anti-social Behaviour Bill is ready for consideration, and I am pleased that large parts of it have received pre-legislative scrutiny. That is an excellent pattern, and I hope more Bills will go through such scrutiny, and that future Governments will follow the advice, which is useful to ensure good, rather than rushed, decisions. We must deal with antisocial behaviour, which is a blight on many communities. I do not think that antisocial behaviour orders worked; they felt slow, bureaucratic, ineffective, and we know that many young people treated them almost as a badge of honour. A huge proportion—more than half, I think—were breached. The system simply did not work and was part of an effort to sound tough on antisocial behaviour. I hope that the proposals in the Anti-social Behaviour Bill will work, and I will be disappointed if it turns out that they are just another example of people trying to sound tough. However, I am hopeful that the orders and injunctions it contains will be more effective and produce more effective community remedies.
I will not go through the Bill in detail, but I have one concern about the naming and shaming of offenders under 18, which I think should be done only as a very last resort, particularly now that so much information is available on line. The record of a 14-year-old who is publicly named online will be available when they are 18, 24, 34 or 44, and we run the risk of stigmatising for ever young people—who made errors and should not have done what they did—in a way that would not have happened 20 or 30 years ago. That was discussed by the Home Affairs Committee during pre-legislative scrutiny, and I am pleased at the Government’s indication that such a measure should be used only as a last resort. I hope the Minister will clarify that although one section of the law on naming is being disapplied, clear guidance will be given that that should be done only rarely.
I was happy about the criminalisation of forced marriage, which strikes me as absolutely right and was recommended by the Home Affairs Committee, as well as the work on dangerous dogs. In 2011, there were 6,500 hospital admissions in England for dog bites and attacks, not counting those who were treated in A and E and sent home, or the many leaflet deliverers and canvassers who received just a small bite. The new measures will encourage responsible dog ownership, and I am particularly pleased to see the category covering attacks on guide dogs. I spent time with Guide Dogs for the Blind, and I was led blindfolded around my constituency by a guide dog, which was an amazing experience that I recommend to all Members—I see some have had the same experience. There have been a huge number of attacks on guide dogs, which are particularly damaging because of the effect on the person involved and because guide dogs are trained to look after their owner, not turn and fight off the other dog. There are awful cases of a guide dog leading its owner away while being savaged and either killed or seriously harmed, and I am therefore pleased to see protection for assistance dogs included under clause 98, meaning that an attack on a guide dog will count similarly to that on a person.
Rehabilitation has been a long-term Liberal Democrat policy and an issue that we keep discussing. The current jail system simply does not work and there are people who have been in jail but who come out and go back in again, which none of us wants to see. At times, we have seen a bidding war between political parties and areas of the press on who can sound tougher about locking people up for longer. The goal should be to ensure we do not have offences, not to punish people as toughly as we can.
Jail is expensive. It costs £40,000 to put a person in prison for less than 12 months, and many of those will reoffend. The situation is even worse for women offenders, huge numbers of whom are jailed for reoffending. Frankly, there are questions about how many women offenders should be in jail—I think it should be a far smaller number than it currently is. Between 2000 and 2010, the female prison population rose by 27%.
There is firm evidence that measures such as restorative justice and community sentencing are far more effective than costly short-term prison sentences, and that is the right way to go. It is not about being tough on crime but about stopping crimes from happening, and that is what we should see. The continued progress of the rehabilitation revolution will encourage probation services to keep reoffending rates down and shift the focus from being tough on crimes that have already happened to ensuring they do not happen in the first place.
Those are the home affairs and justice Bills in the Queen’s Speech, but I wish to touch on one that I am pleased was not included—the draft Communications Data Bill. This proposed legislation has an interesting history. Last year, the Home Office thought it was ready to be part of a full Bill, but I am delighted that my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister said, “No, I am not sure that it’s ready. Pre-legislative scrutiny needs to consider it and pull apart the details to see whether it is fit for purpose.” I served for a long time on the Joint Committee that considered that Bill carefully—it was, I think, the most detailed piece of pre-legislative scrutiny ever done in this House—and concluded that it was not ready at all. Although there was a case, as there always is, for stronger measures, it was nowhere near made. The Committee’s report was quite damning and stated that
“the draft Bill pays insufficient attention to the duty to respect the right to privacy, and goes much further than it need or should”.
That was a unanimous, cross-party, cross-House Committee. The report described some of the information coming from the Home Office as being, in one case, “fanciful and misleading”, and said that evidence for the problem it was trying to solve was misleading and unhelpful. The head of MI5 said that evidence presented on the problem relied on “pretty heroic assumptions”. It also highlighted that some of the proposals could reduce the amount of communications data available in the United Kingdom. It is a strongly written report and well worth reading.
I was therefore delighted that, after the report, and after the Home Office did not address the fundamentals—it did not manage to show how the 500,000 pieces of data that have been collected already were used, or to provide evidence of the benefits and other things—my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister announced that the proposals would not go ahead. I am delighted with that decision.
I am pleased Her Majesty was clear that most of communications data proposals would not happen. The Home Secretary had a different interpretation, but Her Majesty said that the proposal would address only the problem of matching internet protocol addresses—I am delighted Her Majesty the Queen managed to say that, which I suspect is a first. The Government will not pass legislation allowing a Home Secretary to ensure that records are kept of every website that people visit. They will not take an internal lead forcing internet service providers to monitor and collect information on what everyone does on Facebook, Google, Skype, Twitter or any other platform. We should not set a standard for the world by saying that such information can be collected as it passes through our networks. We will not spend more than £1 billion—£1.8 billion was the original figure, but we suspected that it would increase—snooping on our own citizens. That will not happen under this Government.
I am aware that the Home Secretary would like to implement that proposal, but she will not get her way. We have heard that the Labour party would have liked that, too. A former Labour Home Secretary said on “Daily Politics” that Labour would have gone ahead with the proposal, and the shadow Home Secretary has said that Labour would go ahead with a communications data Bill. She said that Labour would go ahead with collecting web log information and intercepting information on what people do on Facebook and Google. She is not in the Chamber, but if any of the shadow team would like to correct my interpretation of what she said, they are welcome to do so. The Liberal Democrats will stand firm; our position is supported by many Back Benchers and Front Benchers of the other parties in the House.
Safeguards are needed. For example, far too many bodies have access to the information. I was told off for saying in an interview that the egg marketing board was allowed access to communications data information. I had a letter saying that that was inaccurate. I apologise. In fact, the Egg Marketing Inspectorate would be allowed such access.
Evidence will be needed on IP resolution, but I believe legislation will not be needed. We need training on using the huge amount of data available, which is what the Metropolitan Police Commissioner said was most useful. When I asked him how he would spend £1.8 billion, he spoke of training, more officers and better equipment.
The Queen’s Speech contains much to be glad of, and I am pleased that many measures are not in it. However, I am sorry that Australian influences seem to have killed off proposals on plain packaging, minimal pricing and the regulation of lobbying. I am sure they are separate issues, but there is very much to be proud of, and I look forward to debating the measures over the coming year.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. We have a lot of hon. Members to get in. I would be grateful if we could have speeches of between 12 and 14 minutes. I do not want to put a time limit on speeches, but if we can try to use some common sense, hopefully we will get there.
Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)
The Queen’s speech should not have been written on vellum; it is so thin that it should have been written on onion skin. Being slim and having little content might not be bad things in themselves. When Governments are confused and conflicted, it is sometimes better to do nothing rather than frame incoherent legislation. Unfortunately, the legislation framed in the Queen’s Speech does not meet that test—much of it is incoherent. One cannot help asking how easily the Government’s commitment to supporting people who have saved for their retirement sits with a record of quantitative easing that has eroded savings income through reduced interest rates and reduced annuity rates.
I cannot help but wonder how a Bill to reduce the burden of excessive regulation on business will sit with the immigration Bill, which appears to be the flagship Bill of the Queen’s Speech. The immigration Bill will mean that businesses and landlords will be fined and turned into enforcement agencies of the UK Border Agency and the Home Office. The Government have proudly preached the one in, one out principle, but, notably, the Home Secretary has so far failed to identify any corresponding regulations for that regulatory burden.
The Home Secretary spoke of how she would dispose of immigrants with criminal records. Criminal checks are a vexed issue in the Home Office. In March, I wrote a letter on behalf of a constituent—I will call him Mr S. I was advised in December 2011 that Mr S would be granted leave to remain, subject to security checks. I wrote:
“A further fifteen months has now passed however and”
Mr S
“has still not received a final decision on his case. In your response of September 2012 you acknowledged that due to the delay in concluding”
Mr S’s
“case, the original security checks were no longer valid and a new set had been requested. You also advised that they are only valid for a period of three months.”
I asked:
“Please confirm that this second set of security checks has not now also expired and that you now need to apply for a third set. This would be completely unacceptable; however six months has now passed since your letter in September advising that the second set of security checks had been requested”,
so that might be the case.
In that case, the Home Office had already accepted that somebody would be granted leave to remain, subject to security checks being acceptable, but getting those checks has been impossible for Mr S. During that time—more than a year—he could have been functioning properly, employed in his community and earning, and getting on with his life, but he was absolutely unable to do so because of the incompetence of the Home Office. If we are to have a system in which enforcement is properly carried out and we get rid of people subject to security checks, let us at least ensure that those checks are conducted efficiently.
I have great respect for much of what the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) says in the Chamber. However, I had to laugh when he said, “It would be fine if an employer or landlord simply put details into a computer and got an answer.” Let me tell him what the MPs’ inquiry line and the regional account managers are like. Regional account managers do not always meet their response target of 10 working days. Responses are often holding responses even when they come through. Sometimes, no response at all is received. Rarest of all is a conclusion to a case.
I raised that problem with the MPs’ inquiry office. I was advised that Helen McIntosh, who was formerly in charge of that service, had been moved to other work. At that point, a rota of staff managed the service. It is a constant problem that staff are rotated and moved to other duties, leaving half-finished cases to be picked up again only when the MP chases up the inquiry. In one legacy case last year, we were given repeated assurances over a period of several years that the case would be concluded within deadline after deadline, all of which were not met. Finally, I had a personal commitment from Mark McEvoy to resolve the case by a certain date. When he did not do so I requested a meeting with him. Before that could be arranged, however, I was advised that he had been moved on to other responsibilities.
The idea that one could put a prospective tenant’s name and their Home Office reference number into a computer and get a response by return from the Home Office so that one could say, “That’s fine, you can take the flat next week,” is ridiculous. If hon. Members do not understand that this will lead to discrimination in the provision of services, they are making the cardinal political mistake of believing their own political propaganda.
Let me turn to support for family life, something on which the Government say they pride themselves. A constituent of mine, with a young baby who is a British citizen, is estranged from her violent partner and has been granted limited leave to remain for 30 months on a 120-month pathway to settlement. This single parent who has been subject to domestic violence will have to renew her application every 36 months and pay a fresh, exorbitant fee that, if she is looking after her child, she cannot work to afford to pay. During this period of 10 years, she can work but not claim any of the following public funds: income-based jobseeker’s allowance, attendance allowance, severe disablement allowance, carer’s allowance, disability living allowance, income support, child tax credit, working tax credit, social fund payment, child benefit, housing benefit, council tax benefit or state pension credit. I thank the Government for supporting the family in the way that they do—a woman subject to domestic violence whose child is a British citizen, and they propose to toughen the immigration rules! One could hardly do so.
I want to honour your commitment to letting us move on, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I will stop talking about immigration and move on to the final aspect of the Queen’s Speech that it would be remiss of me not to address: the parts of the speech that were not there. There was talk of the Energy Bill, a carry-over Bill that needs to be finished off. The reference to infrastructure in the Queen’s Speech is clearly part of that. The draft Bill was published and we complained that it contained no energy efficiency measures. We were told they would be in the Bill. The Bill was published. It contained no energy efficiency measures and we were told that they would be introduced in Committee. In Committee, there were still no energy efficiency measures. We were told that they would be introduced later in Committee. By the end of the Committee stage we were told that they would come later still. I hope that they will appear later, on Report. I fear that they will appear later in the House of Lords, and that Members will have no opportunity to scrutinise the key, essential bedrock of any energy policy for the next 40 years—energy efficiency. It is an absolute travesty that the Government are seeking to use a carry-over Bill to deny Members the opportunity to conduct proper legislative scrutiny in this Chamber.
The Government have made a classic mistake when it comes to energy policy. They have looked at energy policy in the way that a phlebotomist looks at an organism, concerned only with the blood supply. Energy is the blood supply that keeps an economy working, but they should look at it like a general practitioner would, by looking that the health of the whole organism. The Government have singularly failed to do that. It is essential that we see our energy policy as part of our economic policy and industrial strategy. That is why the Government have failed to introduce proposals for the second phase of carbon capture and storage. That is why their legislation to ensure that no decarbonisation target for 2030 can be brought into law before at least 2016, and maybe not after that, is a catastrophic failure. It fails to ensure that the relevant investment in low-carbon generation is incentivised. That is locking us, as the Chancellor would have it, into high carbon, fossil fuel growth well into the future. It is ensuring that our industry, and the jobs and growth dependent on it, is not being invested in at the moment.
There are many others who wish to participate in the debate and for that reason I will conclude my remarks. It would have been of great benefit to see a food strategy Bill. It would also be nice to think that the throwaway line at the end of the Queen’s Speech, which said that climate change would be on the agenda of the G8 summit after all, had some substance, but we will have to wait and see.
Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)
It was a great Queen’s Speech. It was succinct and focused, and I hope that my speech follows suit. It is fantastic that we get the opportunity, during the debates on the Queen’s Speech, to have a free-ranging discussion. I want to cover four specific proposals in Her Majesty’s speech, the first of which is High Speed 2.
My views on HS2 are clearly on the record, so I will not go into them now. However, I hope that the thoughts, feelings and concerns of my constituents will be taken into account in the new consultation on compensation. I urge those on the Front Bench to consider seriously the merits of a property bond. The high-speed link will be a very long time in coming. Unfortunately, too many of my constituents are trapped in their homes and unable to move. It is not that their house prices have dropped in value—they cannot sell at any price. The advantage of a property bond, whereby the Government underwrite any loss once the line is built, is that it would enable them to get on with their normal lives in the interim. I therefore urge the Government to consider this option seriously.
The Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill is vital. It is all about the quality of life of our voters in this great country. It is true to say that antisocial behaviour utterly destroys quality of life, whether it is violence, bullying, littering or dangerous dogs. All too often, antisocial behaviour is carried out by kids who have had the worst start in life. I have spoken many times on this subject in this Chamber. If we really want to solve antisocial behaviour we have to focus on the earliest years. In all of our rehabilitation and youth policies, we need to focus on getting the very youngest a good start in life, as this will mean that they do not join the conveyor belt to antisocial behaviour and crime. We need a revolution in support of the perinatal period. We need to work far earlier with those who are pregnant to help them deal with poor maternal mental health and, later, problems relating to poor attachment with their babies.
As I have said before in the Chamber, all of a baby’s brain development takes place in the first two years of life. In the first year, it builds 1 million neural connections per second, while its entire lifelong emotional resilience—its ability to deal with the things that life throws at us—is largely determined by the age of two. Anything we do later to rehabilitate offenders—for instance, to sort out speech and learning difficulties, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or any of the problems that lead young people into a life of antisocial behaviour and crime—would be much better done through prevention policies in the earliest years. I urge again the Front-Bench team to work closely with the Department of Health and the Department for Education to consider a revolution in the perinatal period.
I want to talk briefly about the immigration reform Bill. The Opposition caused these problems. It was undoubtedly their failure to put in place proper transitional controls that caused the heartache, the sense of injustice and the resentment of immigration that we see today. I agree with hon. Members who have said that immigration has been good for this country. I absolutely accept that point. EU immigration has been good for this country, but it has gone too far, too fast, without any controls and, specifically, without a close focus on fairness for the existing population as against fairness for those who would join this country. The right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) ranted that it was not the time to ramp up the rhetoric on immigration. I could not agree with her less. It is essential not just to talk about it, but to act on it, and that is why the Bill is vital.
Ms Abbott
Does the hon. Lady accept that there has never been a time when immigration was not discussed, whether in Parliament or the media? Every day for years, there has been a story in the tabloid press. We have had major immigration and nationality Bills in every Parliament. Furthermore, we know where over-heated rhetoric on immigration goes in a time of recession, and it is not a nice place.
Andrea Leadsom
I am grateful to the hon. Lady for that comment, because it highlights precisely my point. She is subliminally implying that this generates racism, and that has been the problem with the debate for the past decade. Particularly under her Government, anybody who wanted to talk about the problems of uncontrolled immigration was somehow racist. I have just said that immigration has been of huge benefit to this country—I hope she was listening to that—but at the same time fairness is vital to the interests of this country.
I will now address that fairness aspect, which is where I think the Bill is incredibly important. It should ensure that those who have paid into the system benefit more than those who have not. This is not just a problem that concerns Britain; it also concerns Germany. The Fresh Start project, of which I am a founding member, recently went to Berlin to talk to German politicians and businesses. They feel that immigration has benefited the German economy, but that the fact that people can migrate there for the sole purpose of claiming benefits is simply unfair and generates resentment.
Constituents have said to me at surgeries that it is totally unfair that they, having potentially paid into the Exchequer coffers for years, get so little back if they lose their job. The Fresh Start project has assessed what happens on the continent. Many countries, including Germany and the Nordic countries, have a far more Bismarckian system of benefits payments, which means that if someone who has paid into the system for years loses their job, they can, for a period, generate half of their previous income while they get themselves back on their feet. The system in the UK is very different.
If we are to address the resentment over access to benefits for migrants, and access to benefits for those who have paid in versus those who have not, we need to look seriously at reducing benefits for those who have never contributed either because they have never worked here or because they have recently migrated here. Those who have paid in, as well as school leavers who have not yet got a job but whose parents have paid in, should get a higher level of benefit. That would be fair. In dealing with the impact of immigration on voters’ quality of life, fairness is key.
Helen Goodman
The hon. Lady exaggerates her point about what she calls benefit tourism, but to say that she has got it out of perspective is not to say that there are not significant economic incentives for people to come to this country. Surely, immigration has more likely been fed by the fact that if someone comes here and works hard for, say, three years and saves up £3,000, they have enough to put down a deposit on a house in an eastern European country, but not here. The disparity in exchange rates means that the incentives are totally different.
Andrea Leadsom
I completely agree that the vast bulk of people who come to this country come here to work, but equally the hon. Lady must agree that more than 40,000 EU immigrants are claiming child benefit here for children who do not live in this country. If she wants to write that cheque herself, she can then claim that it is a trivial sum, but to my constituents, who are writing those cheques—they are the taxpayers—it is utterly unacceptable and unfair.
Finally, I would like to deal with an excellent Bill introduced in the last Queen’s Speech. The purpose of the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill is to address the institutional failure of the banking system. Recent scandals such as LIBOR rigging and swaps mis-selling have left voters utterly disgusted and contemptuous, not just of the culture of banking, but of the seeming immorality of those at the top. I know that the Government have made great efforts, as has my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Mr Tyrie) through the Banking Commission, to weed out the culprits and to put in place reforms that will minimise the chance of a repeat of this nightmare.
In my opinion, however, another reform is long overdue. We need to spark a revolution in bank competition to facilitate the widest range and type of new financial services entrants and to force the big oligopoly banks to reprioritise excellence in customer service. That revolution is bank account number portability, which would make it possible for us all to switch banks instantly, taking our bank account numbers with us, and would remove the need to fill out endless new forms and re-establish new standing orders and regular payment instructions.
Bank account portability would have four key advantages. First, it would lead to a revolution in competition and bring in new entrants. At the moment, 80% of small and medium-sized enterprises and personal current accounts are banked with the big four oligopoly banks, so new competition—new entrants—is essential. Secondly, it would spark a revolution in customer service and product innovation in the payments sector. Thirdly, it would impose a significant reduction in fraud resulting from systems failures due to the out-of-date legacy systems in the oligopoly banks. I ran an investment banks team during the ’90s when there was a massive merger of banks, broker dealers and funds managers. Each of the oligopoly banks has up to 20 legacy systems. It is unbelievable. The recent failures of RBS-NatWest systems to make even simple payments highlighted that these systems are held together with string and sellotape.
Fourthly, a means of resolution is terribly important in banking. If we have another financial crisis and bank failure, rather than people lining the streets to take out their money, we need a means of instantly transferring bank accounts from a failed bank to a survivor bank. Cyprus is a case in point. The British Government decided to underwrite customer deposits in London branches of Cyprus banks, but we had no means to move customer bank accounts elsewhere. Bank account number portability would solve the very significant issue of resolution.
I am delighted that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury is consulting on introducing a new payments regulator in a Government amendment to the Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill. An independent regulator would deal with the big problems that the Payments Council and VocaLink—the two bodies governing and providing the infrastructure for payments—are governed by the oligopoly banks themselves. It is the most astonishing closed shop. However, I urge the Government to go further and require the new regulator to evaluate bank account number portability properly. Seven-day switching is just more string and sellotape on an already broken system.
This is a positive and optimistic Queen’s Speech, focusing on a small number of high priority Bills for this Government. I believe they will make strong improvements to the quality of life for our voters, which is what it is all about. However, I hope that Back Benchers such as myself will be able to contribute our ideas to making the legislative programme even stronger.
Mr Elfyn Llwyd (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom). I did not agree with everything she said, but her remarks about banking structures were made with great authority and knowledge, I am sure—and the word “oligopoly” will serve us all well when we do crosswords.
Some comment has been made about how the Queen’s Speech was not widely leaked, but having read it, we can see that there was not a great deal to leak. It was a very thin Queen’s Speech—the thinnest I have seen in my 21 years in this place. I wonder why that is, because for the past months we have been treading water as Members of Parliament, dealing with insubstantial debates, Opposition days and lots of less than vital legislation. However, there are some good things in the speech; I would like to refer to one of them.
The legislation being introduced to allow sufferers of mesothelioma whose employers cannot be traced to gain compensation is a positive step forward. This group of people has been let down for far too long. It is right that we should do everything possible for them to receive reparation, in many cases fairly urgently. However, it is rumoured that under the proposed scheme claimants will receive about 30% less than the standard for asbestos-related cancer, were it the subject of other litigation. Two thirds of what someone is entitled to is probably better than nothing, but justice dictates that they should get 100%, especially as I understand that the scheme is to be funded by the insurance sector, which of late has hardly been on its knees financially.
We might compare the proposed scheme with that which Plaid Cymru Members established in the mid-1970s during the tenure of the Labour Government. As a price for our support to keep that Government going, we insisted on compensation for miners and quarrymen. I am proud that we did that, but it involved a Government-backed scheme. In essence, the Government are taking a positive step forward, but let us look at the detail, to ensure that we do right by the people who are suffering.
There is much to be regretted in this Queen’s Speech, such as compulsory price tendering for legal aid. I declare an interest as a former solicitor who practised in legal aid cases and who also did legal aid-funded work at the Bar. I am not given to hyperbole often, and I do not know whether hon. Members realise this, but the current proposals will mean the disappearance of thousands of solicitors’ firms from the high street. These are firms whose expertise we have always relied on, and they are often family firms that do things gratis for people who call in. They will be taken over by larger firms that are not full of legally qualified people. There will be a devastating effect in some areas, especially in rural, smaller towns, where firms will disappear overnight.
The reason is quite obvious: the Government’s proposals are a race to the bottom. The Government confidently expect that any tender for work would have to be 17.5% lower than current legal aid rates. However, legal aid rates have been pegged for the last eight or nine years anyway, so lawyers who practise legal aid are not, in truth, fat cats. There are one or two silks who do extremely well, but I can assure hon. Members that most people—both those at the Bar and solicitors who largely rely on legal aid work—will never retire with a massive pension or be fat cats. To be honest, they may well end up as rather scroggy moggies.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that having only four firms for the entire Dyfed Powys area would mean not only devastation for the many family firms he has mentioned, but inaccessibility and a lack of choice for clients?
Mr Llwyd
That is absolutely right. The Government’s proposal will quite obviously mean that the client will have no choice. It will lead to a paralegal system, with people coming out of the conurbations to try to deal with tens of cases in one day, taking notes roughly and then reporting back, and then eventually somebody will turn up for the trial or whatever. That concerns me greatly. The whole idea of a fixed fee for a trial or plea worries me as well, because there will inevitably be problems. It is a race to the bottom.
There is a further important point to be made about the Welsh language provision we routinely have in Wales. Members might not know this—I have practised in Welsh courts myself—but any trial can be conducted through the medium of the Welsh language, whether a jury trial, a civil matter or a case in the magistrates court. That is as it should be. Welsh has equal status with English in Wales—again, as it should be. That provision and the work that the Courts Service has done over the last couple of decades will disappear overnight. There will be a great deal of anxiety and turmoil in Wales over that. I regret to say that if the Government go ahead with this proposal, they will be directly responsible for damaging the Welsh language and culture and the services available to people in rural and semi-rural areas. That will happen not just in Wales but in England—although I am thinking in particular about the problems of north and mid-Wales.
There are some Bills in the Queen’s Speech that will not enhance the UK’s international standing. Although previously trailed, the fact that the 0.7% of GDP meant for international development will not now be enshrined in legislation is an unfortunate step backwards.
Today we have largely been discussing the impact of the immigration Bill. In parts, the proposed Bill is very unfortunate. Let me explain why. We need to move away from scaremongering and put in place measures to protect domestic workers and prevent employers from undercutting the work force by paying less than the minimum wage. We all know that the agencies are doing that. However, all too often the Government use immigration as a scapegoat, in an attempt to distract us from their failure to create enough meaningful jobs and secure economic recovery.
I would argue that I live in a nirvana in north Wales. [Interruption.] I see the shadow Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), laughing. He does not live too far away. Where he lives is also quite a nice place, although not quite to the same degree as Dwyfor Meirionnydd. However, let us not go down that route just now. I obviously know my area intimately. I will be perfectly honest: over the past few years I have had one or two complaints from individuals who have said, “Why are these people from eastern Europe working in hotels?” They asked why such people are doing this or that. I told them why: because very often local people are not prepared to do that work. They are not prepared to work the long or unfriendly hours.
I can speak with some authority on this matter. A local college in Dolgellau has an excellent reputation for catering courses, among other things, yet none of its students is going into the local hotel industry. They are just not interested. Instead, several well-meaning, hard-working young people have come in from various eastern European countries to do that work. They are putting in the hours and some of them, to their credit, are even learning Welsh. They are working hard and doing the stuff that local people do not want to do. I have yet to see any evidence of a so-called benefits scrounger and have not come across the problem. In my view, benefits tourism is a ridiculous concept. I see the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire grinning at that. We have heard about the 40,000 people claiming when their children are not even resident in the UK, and I understand that point—
Mr Llwyd
Perhaps not.
Much of the debate on immigration is dictated by the drumbeat of the United Kingdom Independence party. Why should we spend hours discussing this issue, just because Farage and his bunch think that they are on a roll? There was one council election in Wales last week. It was on Ynys Môn—Anglesey—and UKIP stood in every ward. It did not take a single seat, however. Plaid Cymru took four times as many seats as Labour, and the Conservatives failed to win even one. The Lib Dems, God bless them, took one.
Andrea Leadsom
I want to make it clear that this legislation has nothing to do with UKIP; it has everything to do with fairness for the people of this country who pay their taxes day in and day out and who do not see why someone who has never contributed should come here and use our services. What does the right hon. Gentleman have to say to that?
Mr Llwyd
I heard the hon. Lady make that point in her speech, and I did not agree with everything that she said. That was one of the points that I was unsure about, and I am equally unsure about it now. We must look at the issue carefully, but we need to detoxify the debate. We need to forget about UKIP, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and get stuck in and have a sensible, cool-headed, factually informed debate. We would do our constituents a great service if we were to adopt that approach. That is probably what the hon. Lady is saying and, to that extent, I agree with her.
Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)
Is the right hon. Gentleman saying that we should simply forget about the cost of all that welfare? A lot of taxpayers—hard-pressed, as we all are at the moment—want us to think carefully about those costs, particularly when the money is going out of this country to children who have never been here.
Mr Llwyd
If the hon. Lady had listened, she would have heard me say that I agree with the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire on this issue. I am not saying we should forget about it—[Interruption.] No, I am not. I understand that money is short, and I did not say that at all. The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) has completely misunderstood what I have said, but I do not think that anyone else has done so. I did not say that, but I am saying to her and to everyone outside the House that we need to detoxify the debate and sit down and discuss this issue in a clear-headed, proper manner. We must not dance to the UKIP tune at any time, now or in future.
A number of pieces of proposed legislation in the Queen’s Speech seem at first glance to be driven more by ideology than by common sense. I am particularly interested in the rehabilitation revolution, as it is known. We heard earlier that the probation service had recently acquired a gold medal for the excellence of its service. Now, however, we see evidence that those who have been in prison for 12 months or less are the cohort most likely to reoffend. That is something that we have all known for a long time, yet that cohort has never fallen within the ambit of the probation service’s work. It is little wonder, therefore, that those people reoffend, and something needs to be done. Not a great deal is being done to rehabilitate those people in prison, and once they are out, they are left without any assistance at all. On that, I agree with the Government.
My solution would be simpler, however. It would be to extend responsibility for those people to the probation service. They are the experts. They have been described today by the Secretary of State today as having “expertise and professionalism” and making “a vital contribution”. If that is so, why on earth do we have to bring in the privateers? Was G4S’s performance at the Olympics so brilliant that we now have to bring the company into the probation system?
Nick de Bois
I am grateful to a fellow member of the Justice Select Committee for giving way. He has just suggested that we try to have a sensible debate about this matter. Focusing on privateers is completely erroneous. For example, he knows well the St Giles Trust, a registered charity that does superb work on reforming and rehabilitating people. He must surely agree that this must not become a debate about privatisation.
Mr Llwyd
I often respect the views of the hon. Gentleman, and I hope that we debate issues in a constructive manner when we meet on the Justice Committee. Yes, of course there are people in the voluntary sector who can do this work, but I am concerned that many of those smaller entities will be unable to carry the capital risk, and that most of the work will go to G4S, to Serco and to all the rest of the robber barons who will be jumping in. They will be listening to this debate and eagerly awaiting their chance to enter the sector. I hope that they make a better job of it than they did of the Olympics; otherwise, we will have to get the Army in to do it.
I accept what the hon. Gentleman says; the third sector—the voluntary sector—does an excellent job. He and I recently visited a third sector institution up in Liverpool, Adelaide House, which is doing an excellent job. To the credit of the previous Government and this one, it is being funded directly, and that is absolutely right. Yes, there is a role for the voluntary sector, and if it is to expand into this area to do such work, I would have fewer objections. However, I question its capability and capacity to handle the capital risk involved.
I welcome the draft Wales Bill, as far as it goes. It will transfer powers over elections to the Welsh Government, introduce fixed five-year terms for the Assembly and overturn the ban on dual candidacy for Welsh elections. I must, however, express my profound disappointment that there was no slot in the Queen’s Speech for a full, proper government of Wales Bill. The pressing need for such legislation is quite obvious. As I am sure hon. Members will know, the Commission on Devolution in Wales, chaired by Paul Silk, recently published its first report, on the financial powers of the Welsh Assembly. It received broad cross-party support. It recommended that the Welsh Government should have control over minor taxes as well as job-creating levers and borrowing powers, so allowing the Welsh Government to raise and invest money in Wales’s public services and infrastructure, thereby improving the economy. The Silk report recommended that those levers be devolved as soon as was practical. Lest we forget, this Government have been effectively treading water for the past nine months or so, and have failed to bring forward any really important pieces of legislation. All things considered, there is surely a case for a legislative slot for such an important vehicle. We are already falling behind, and time is of the essence.
In the absence of a new government of Wales Bill, we as a party have drawn up our own list of Bills that we would like to see debated. That includes Bills devolving to the Welsh Government control over justice and policing, transport and energy powers and job-search functions. We also believe that we should introduce what we describe as an economic fairness Bill. Central to these proposals is our justice and policing (Wales) Bill, which would establish a separate legal jurisdiction for Wales, to correct the anomaly that Wales is at present probably the only country in the world that has a legislature, but no legal jurisdiction of its own to serve it. There is already a very substantial corpus juris establishing itself in Wales that does not have a jurisdiction to serve it, and the need for one is now urgent. It is becoming more pressing month by month.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
Speaking as a fellow MP representing Wales, I wonder whether the right hon. Gentleman has costed those proposals and, if so, whether he could share those costings with the House today?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Order. Before the right hon. Gentleman deals with that intervention, I remind the House that the Chairman of Ways and Means has indicated that if each speaker contributed 12 or 13 minutes to the debate, that would allow all Members to get in without imposing a time limit. We are getting close to needing a time limit, so perhaps those who have already spoken could exercise some self-restraint in not intervening, which would enable the right hon. Gentleman to conclude his remarks.
Mr Llwyd
I accept what you say, Madam Deputy Speaker, and you have probably saved me from having to answer the right hon. Gentleman’s question.
As I do not have time to deal with that particular query, let me say that the dangerous dogs Bill is welcome, but that we must scrutinise it very carefully. Other measures in the Queen’s Speech are clearly welcome, too, but as always, the devil is in the detail.
I looked at The Independent earlier today, and saw that its front-page banner headline was “Coalition adrift as key policies go missing from Queen’s Speech”. That might be the reason for its being a bit thin, but there are measures that we can all build on, improve and take forward. I hope, however, that the toxic debate about immigration will not dominate wider debate of the Queen’s Speech. I conclude on that note, Madam Deputy Speaker, and thank you for admonishing me in time.
Henry Smith (Crawley) (Con)
I am grateful to be called to speak in this debate on the Gracious Speech. It was three years ago this month when Mr Speaker called me to make my maiden speech, and after your recent ruling, Madam Deputy Speaker, I can assure you that I will be much more concise in this submission than I was in the previous one.
I would like to take the opportunity briefly to support the measures in the immigration Bill that was announced yesterday in the other place. Last September, during the previous parliamentary Session, I had the privilege to introduce a private Member’s Bill, called the NHS Audit Requirements (Foreign Nationals) Bill, which was intended to tackle the large-scale abuse of our national health service that occurs when people not entitled to receive free NHS care do receive it. That Bill came about as a result of my submission of Freedom of Information Act requests to every health trust in the country. I asked how many foreign nationals they had treated and what level of costs they had managed to recover from the treatments of those foreign nationals—either directly or, more typically, through reciprocal agreements such as the European health card insurance scheme.
The responses I received were really quite shocking, as about half of all health trusts said that they did not record information on the treatment of foreign nationals at all. Many of those who responded with some data provided confused information. Some had treated British citizens who had moved abroad and some had treated those who had served in the armed forces abroad as foreign nationals, while others recorded data only on EU nationals or on European economic area nationals. Frankly, the general picture of how the NHS records data about the treatment of foreign nationals was in a very parlous state indeed.
Technically, people are entitled to free treatment on the NHS if they have been habitually resident in this country for a year or more. The reality, however, is that free treatment is available to people—in many cases literally as soon as they step off the plane and arrive in this country. That is certainly the case in my constituency, which has Gatwick airport within its boundaries. I have heard reports of about 150 heavily pregnant women arriving at Gatwick airport every year, and of my local area’s East Surrey hospital having to support and treat those women from the pregnancy process through to birth. Indeed, it was reported to me just this morning that women who are 35 weeks pregnant have often presented themselves at Gatwick airport. That is, of course, a burden on the national health service; it is essentially an abuse of the generosity of our system.
The problem, however, is much more wide scale than that. Where people present themselves to a local GP surgery, the GPs are encouraged to register the individuals and not to ask about their eligibility to receive primary health care or free health on the NHS at all. Once someone is registered with a doctor’s practice, they will receive an NHS number and will then be free to be referred on anywhere in the health care system without any further checks. In the majority of cases, such people will be entitled to free prescriptions as well.
What we essentially have in this country, then, is not so much a national health service as an international health service. I do not think anyone in this place would want to deny the very best treatment that our health system can offer to people in this country and around the world, but people should be able properly to contribute to the system, and the system should be able to recover the costs of treating foreign nationals through reciprocal arrangements or, where such arrangements do not exist, the costs should be directly recovered.
I received an e-mail this morning from the Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, my local acute health care trust. It detailed the latest available figures on the cost of treating foreign nationals—to its credit, it does audit them—as more than £500,000. Yet the amount it was able to recover through reciprocal arrangements or directly was in the order only of about £130,000. That is a pretty typical picture across our health service and trusts up and down the country.
Last year, together with the Minister for Immigration, my hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), I had the privilege of visiting the immigration facilities at Gatwick airport. As part of our discussions with immigration officials at the airport, we spoke to a desk officer who liaises with the Department of Health and NHS trusts in order to try to recover costs from foreign nationals who have used NHS services. The picture presented was again that we were successful in recovering those costs only from a minority of those foreign nationals.
It is incredible that we have allowed this sort of situation to become commonplace in this country. If we look to other European countries, we find that they are much more rigorous in ensuring that the treatment of their foreign nationals, including Britons, under their health system is properly recorded so that those costs can be recovered—in the case of our European neighbours, through the European health insurance card scheme. They achieve that by checking eligibility at the point where health services are received. If someone needs to see a doctor for primary care, a gateway mechanism is introduced. In the case of emergency treatment, it is of course important that care is delivered as soon as possible, but in other countries it is again commonplace for the costs of such emergency treatments to be recovered after the individual has been treated, stabilised and is capable of being discharged. It is incredible that we do not do that, which is why I am very supportive of the measures announced in the Queen’s Speech to ensure finally that we have some rigour, because this is ultimately about fairness to the taxpayers who fund our NHS.
It is right that we have an NHS that is universally available regardless of ability to pay, and it is right that that system is largely paid for out of taxation, but it cannot be right that that system is then freely available to anybody arriving in this country without any meaningful checks. By introducing these checks to ensure that our health service is not abused in that way, we can restore confidence in our system and create greater fairness, and also ensure that the health budget is not unnecessarily overburdened, as it is at present, to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds.
Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)
I shall direct my remarks to the Queen’s Speech as a whole. I have listened carefully both yesterday and today to the speeches from Members on the Government Benches and heard about the progress towards the sunlit uplands that they have described for us all, and nothing could better demonstrate the fact that they fail to grasp, let alone have any ability to deal with, the problems facing this country. In the face of a flatlining economy, rising unemployment and the loss of the triple A credit rating, all we have from them is more of the same.
Most of all, the Queen’s Speech was marked by a poverty of ambition for this country—by a failure to articulate any vision for the future and a lack of faith in the ability of the people in this country to work their way out of the problems. We hear in here that the economy is improving, but we know that outside it is flatlining and lending to business is falling. We hear that the Government are on the side of people who work, yet those people have lost £1,700 in income since the last election.
That gap between rhetoric and reality comes about because the Government have at their heart a club of old school and university chums who have no idea of the struggles many families in this country face. They know nothing about counting the pennies to get to the end of the week, and nothing about the desolation that unemployment brings. If they talked to people in constituencies such as mine, they would know what is happening. There are people in work who fear they are going to lose their job. There are parents who fear their children will never have a home of their own and never do as well as them. There are grandparents who worry about their grandchildren being out of work. Yet there is nothing in this Queen’s Speech for them.
Some 1 million young people in this country are unemployed, and in parts of my constituency youth unemployment is up by 43%. There is nothing for them in the Gracious Speech. There is nothing to match our job guarantee for young people. I know it is said that the Prime Minister got his first job when someone rang up from Buckingham palace on his behalf. I do not think he has ever grasped the fact that most people cannot do it like that.
Our public services are facing unprecedented problems. My local hospital is losing hundreds of posts, many in the front line. It has breached its accident and emergency waiting times on 14 occasions in the last 26 weeks. Yet the same Ministers who have wasted £3 billion on an unnecessary reorganisation and whose Department paid back £2.2 billion to the Treasury have no plans to tackle this. They would rather see skilled nurses and dedicated health assistants on the dole than admit they should change course.
This country—the seventh richest country in the world—is shamed by the fact that thousands of its people rely on food banks, yet we heard nothing in this speech about plans to tackle poverty, much of which, we should remember, is in-work poverty. We heard nothing about encouraging employers to pay a living wage, and nothing about developing the training and skills people need in order to improve their lives and get a better deal for their families.
Although this Government say they support strivers, they instead constantly target them. [Interruption.] For example, they say they have frozen council tax, yet 700,000 of the poorest families—working families—are paying more in council tax as a result of their changes. [Interruption.] Their welfare reform legislation will mean real-terms cuts in tax credits, sick pay and maternity pay for people who are working. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) would stop chuntering from a sedentary position, perhaps she would realise that these sums of money, which are small to members of her Government, for many families in this country make the difference between getting to the end of the week and not getting to the end of the week.
Yet one thing the Government are very good at is transferring blame. We can see that in all their rhetoric about welfare reform, but they neglect to point out that many benefits go to families in work. They neglect to point out that the welfare bill mostly goes on pensions. They neglect to point out that, as a proportion of tax-take, the welfare bill has not, in fact, increased for the last 20 years.
Helen Jones
I will give way in a moment, after I have made a little more progress.
Why do they use that rhetoric? The answer is simple. They are saying to people in this country, “The flatlining economy and rising unemployment is not the Chancellor’s fault or the Prime Minister’s fault. It’s your sister’s fault for going on maternity leave. It’s your neighbour’s fault for being sick. It’s your cousin’s fault for having a spare bedroom.”
Helen Jones
Before the hon. Gentleman gets worked up, let me tell him that I would clamp down ruthlessly on fraud, because it is stealing from poorer people, but he knows as well as I do that fraud is less than 1% of the bill and is less than the amount the errors in the Department for Work and Pensions costs the system. To pretend all these things about the people who have lost their jobs in my constituency after years of work, and the people who are sick or disabled who would like nothing better than to get a job, is an insult to those decent people.
Nick de Bois
I am very grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way, and that is the first time I have had an answer to an intervention that I never made. It is also an answer that addresses a subject I was not going to touch on. What I was hoping for was a little bit of guidance. The hon. Lady rattled off a list of welfare measures that she found utterly unacceptable, but we have been led by her party’s Front-Bench team to believe it supports many of our welfare reform measures. Can she therefore answer this question: would she repeal every single one of the measures she listed?
Helen Jones
The hon. Gentleman is trying to put words into my mouth that I did not say. What I did say to him is that we would crack down on fraud ruthlessly, but I will not subscribe to the rhetoric that tries to label decent men and women who simply want to get a job as somehow being scroungers, and nor will I subscribe to the rhetoric that says all people who are receiving benefits are out of work. He knows very well that that is not true. Many of them are low-paid working families. We should look to improving their living conditions to reduce the welfare bill.
Nick de Bois
I have not mentioned any of the terms the hon. Lady listed. She has tried to put those words in my mouth. I would be extremely grateful if she clarified the point.
Helen Jones
I have just clarified it for the hon. Gentleman, but let me say this to him. The results of that policy are very clear. Just when the country needs to be united, what this Government are about is promoting division. They are about making people suspicious of one another: those in work fearing those out of work; the rich behaving as if the poor are a problem; those who lose their jobs, even in areas of low immigration, being made to think immigration is the problem.
We have seen the results: a country fearful and disunited. That does not build a confident, prosperous Britain, because when people are fearful, they do not take risks and innovate—they cling to what they have. It does not build a Britain at ease with itself either, divided between rich and poor, north and south. We are a better country than that, and we can be a better country, but it requires leadership from a Government willing to change the priorities. The first priority is to build a prosperous economy throughout the regions and nations of this country.
This Government have systematically taken money out of many of our regions, which have already been hit by unemployment. They have transferred £1 billion out of the north of England in their local government settlement alone. They have hit those big cities suffering most from unemployment through their welfare reforms; for example, Birmingham will lose £10 million on council tax changes alone, and Liverpool is losing more than £7 million in bedroom tax. That is money that would otherwise be spent in local shops and businesses, promoting those local economies. That is why it is important to have a British investment bank, at arm’s length from government, that not only lends to small and medium-sized enterprises, but ensures that we invest in the different regions of our country, promoting their economic strengths and building up their capacity. It is also right that we should be on the side of people who work and who want to work, but that means actually getting people back into jobs.
Dr Huppert
The hon. Lady is right to say that there is some unpleasant rhetoric about benefits, with some unpleasant suggestions made. Will she join me in condemning a suggestion made three or so days ago that there should be no benefits for anyone until they have paid national insurance for two years? That would clearly hit incredibly hard young unemployed people and people who are disabled. The proposal was made by her colleague, the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann).
Helen Jones
My hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw makes many proposals, some of which I agree with and some I do not—that is probably one we would have to park somewhere.
I was talking about jobs. There needs to be a matching of not only our jobs guarantee for young people, but our guarantee of jobs for older people who have been out of work for more than two years. We also want to switch money from a tax cut for millionaires to support tax credits for the very people are who are out working in low-paid jobs, doing the right thing. We have to protect people’s rights at work—the Prime Minister wants to negotiate them away—not only because doing so is morally right, but because the strongest and most prosperous economies work through partnership between employers and employees; they work through training and investment in employees, not through a quick hire-and-fire culture. We will never compete with developing nations on low wages; we have to compete with them on skills.
One key to doing that is housing. Constituencies such as mine are desperate for homes for those who want to get a foot on the ladder and for homes to rent, yet the builders who come to us want to build homes for commuters. When they do agree to build some affordable housing, they often buy themselves out of that commitment—the Government’s permission to renegotiate section 106 agreements has not helped—and such an approach simply builds ghettoes. If we are to build viable communities, we need to look at other ways of building the affordable housing we need. We need to look at co-ownership and at councils being allowed to build by accessing money through the use of their pension funds. I have long believed that local authorities should be able to build not only for sale, but for rent.
Getting that economy right is key to many of the things we want to do, to improving the living standards of our people and to ensuring that they have the services they need—I do not have time to go into that this afternoon. To achieve that, however, requires one thing: a Government willing to lead, not one blown about by every last opinion poll or every election setback that they see. This Government are no longer that Government. They are in office but they have no plan for the future, they have no vision of how this country should develop and they have no faith in the British people to make that development. That is why they are no longer a Government who are good enough for this country.
Angie Bray (Ealing Central and Acton) (Con)
It is a pleasure to be called to speak and to join other hon. Members in debating the contents of yesterday’s Gracious Speech by Her Majesty. It sets out a refreshed programme for government that will build on the strong and effective progress we have already made. It outlines measures to do more to keep our communities safe and secure, while promising to help deliver more for people who want to get on and achieve things.
I want to focus my remarks, in my few minutes, on the upcoming Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill. Just how much good progress we have already made in keeping our neighbourhoods safer and secure was made clear to me when I was lucky enough to help launch the UK peace index a few weeks ago. As the completely independent figures show, violent crime is coming right down, in no small part because of the work that the Home Secretary and her team have been doing over the past couple of years. I am sure that the measures promised in the new Bill will build on that progress.
The Bill will also cover one of the issues I have been most active in working on and one closest to my heart: dangerous dogs. I do not expect other Members to remember this, but a plea to do something about the problem was one of the main points I made in my maiden speech, almost exactly three years ago. I said then that tackling the scourge of dogs being used as weapons—a massive antisocial behaviour issue—must be a priority, and I have been campaigning along those lines ever since.
I have always said that the issue is as much about dangerous owners as dangerous dogs—in fact, it is more so. It is imperative that measures against antisocial behaviour focus on the owners who train their dogs as weapons to use for intimidation and as a badge of status. They blight the lives of communities with their threat of aggression, just as much as do the actual attacks that sometimes, sadly, occur. We need measures that will tackle this head on by giving communities and their local police necessary enforcement powers. I am pleased with the progress made by this Government on making microchipping compulsory. Although that will not itself solve the problem of vicious dogs, it will introduce greater accountability and responsibility through detailing ownership, which will go some way to deterring irresponsible ownership.
It is absolutely right to extend section 3 of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 to cover private land. It has long struck me as extraordinary that a postal worker posting a letter could get his finger chewed off by a dog at the other side of the letterbox with no comeback, yet if the owner of the dog, in a crazy world, had substituted themselves for the dog, they would automatically be chargeable with an offence—presumably, grievous bodily harm, so although this measure is very late in coming, it is none the less very welcome.
We need clarity on what happens when a dog attempts to protect its owner’s home from an intruder. It is right that when this happens with the owner present, there should be no penalty attached. However, there are concerns that, as things stand, if the owner is not present while the dog defends the property, there may well be a penalty to pay and the owner will be held liable for an attack on the intruder. That would be ridiculous and would fly in the face of all common sense, so I hope very much that this matter can be sorted out sensibly.
Another major area of concern has already been mentioned today, and those of us who have been campaigning on this issue are well aware of it—I refer to the growing problem of attacks by out-of-control dogs on guide dogs. This is a particularly nasty trend, because guide dogs have been trained to be passive and docile, and such an attack is, of course, incredibly upsetting for the owner, who depends so much on the support of their dog. I am delighted that this appalling problem has now been recognised by the Government, and I hope that the penalties will be as tough as possible.
Although the question of dangerous dogs is not strictly the responsibility of the Home Office, the Government should consider what encouragement can be given to local authorities to deal with it. Some, such as Wandsworth and Ealing, are already working on finding ways to use tenancy agreements on their estates to control dog ownership. This seems an obvious route to take as so many of the problems with dangerous dogs arise on unruly estates where the local council has significant control, if it wants to exert it. That is an underused tool and it needs joined-up government thinking, along with work by the Local Government Association and London Councils. The truth is that even where councils are considering such an approach, enforcement is not always carried through. The Government need to send a strong message that local authorities will be expected to play their part in helping to tackle this blight. Local authorities have the powers and they should be used.
I will finish by touching briefly on one or two other measures in the Queen’s Speech that I welcome. There are three Bills in particular: the national insurance contributions Bill, the deregulation Bill, and the intellectual property Bill. They will all contain measures that should genuinely help small businesses. Giving people confidence by saying to them, “If you’ve got a good idea, go for it,” must be at the heart of our agenda. It is the key to success and to that magic word, growth.
Finally, and not before time, we have the long-awaited care Bill, which is an important step forward in providing the care that our elderly need without forcing them to sell the roof from over their heads. It is not as generous as it might be, but it is a good start. We also need to do all we can to support carers themselves. In particular, when families look after their elderly relatives at home, thereby providing the best kind of family support and saving NHS resources, we should consider how we can reward that incredibly important support as generously as we can.
The Queen’s Speech lays out an important legislative programme for this year, and there is much to be done.
Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate on the Queen’s Speech this afternoon.
I am interested in some small proposals in the Queen’s Speech: the proposal to protect intellectual property; the proposal to produce a draft consumer rights Bill, which, as we have been briefed, will cover digital purchases as well as ordinary purchases; the proposal to invest in infrastructure, particularly broadband, following the Government’s significant failure to deliver broadband in rural areas; and the Home Secretary’s proposals to match internet protocol addresses.
My main concern, however, is with what is not in the Queen’s Speech, namely a proper and complete Bill from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on communications and the media. The Communications Act 2003 has now been overtaken by significant changes—both technological and in the market—and it is time that the Government stopped taking a piecemeal and bite-sized approach to the internet, which has led to a rather chaotic situation, and took a much more strategic overview.
The new technology obviously has the potential to disperse power and to support economic growth. However, those things will happen only if we have a policy to maximise access and challenge some of those in this arena who have significant concentrations of power—not only in the market but in the democratic processes and the information that is available to people. We need a strategy that can reproduce online the rights and responsibilities that we have in the real world. We also need a much stronger cross-departmental approach than the Government seem capable of delivering at the moment.
The new means of communication are proving to be very significant to jobs and business development. Last year, the communications sector was worth £50 billion, which was 4% of GDP, and it employed more than half a million people. I am told that every year between 60,000 and 130,000 new jobs are created in this sector. We know that businesses that are online are growing much faster than other businesses, so we must ensure that the legal underpinning is there. I hope that the proposals on consumer rights mentioned in the Queen’s Speech will support that process, but it is rather disappointing that the Bill will only be in draft form.
We must make changes in three broad areas: first, we must deliver broadband to all parts of the country and give people access to it; secondly, we must improve digital inclusion, training and skills; and, thirdly, we must strengthen people’s rights with a digital consumers charter. Everyone should have access to broadband. Everyone is entitled to a telephone and the Post Office has a universal service obligation, and broadband is now so significant that it should be put on the same footing.
The Queen’s Speech said that the Government would
“continue to invest in infrastructure”,
but the fact is that the previous Labour Government had a target of ensuring that everybody had 2 megabits per second by 2012. The Government abandoned that target and probably will not achieve it until 2016. At the moment, 2.6 million households, mainly in rural areas, have no possibility of accessing broadband.
A further problem with the Government’s approach is that they have prioritised speed over access. It is significant that the Government’s super-connected cities programme, into which they have poured £150 million, has been challenged by some of the operators on state aid grounds as it is not clear whether the subsidy is needed to develop faster speeds in inner-city areas. At the same time, the Government are allowing a situation to continue in which 10.6 million people have never sent an e-mail and 16 million people have inadequate digital skills. My secretary says that it is quite clear that I am one of those people, but I do not think the problems I face because of my lack of digital skills are nearly as serious as those faced by many of our constituents. When the Government try to make it compulsory to access universal credit online, they will come up against a serious problem as many of the people involved will be precisely those who do not have the access or the skills.
The Government should be developing a strategy to get as many people online as possible. That means doing something much more energetic in the rural areas as well as helping people to improve their digital skills through training and education. We need to pause for a moment and consider that point. The Government are trying to do something in schools—although I do not think it is adequate—but if an adult does not have a job or if their job does not involve work in an office, it is difficult for them to learn those skills.
Furthermore, it is extremely expensive to be online. Ministers must face up to this point. It costs about £5 a week to have a connection and the kit costs a further £100. Meanwhile, the welfare reforms mean that I have constituents who are now expected to live on £20 a week; it is not sensible to say to the same group of people that they should prioritise spending £5 a week on an internet connection.
Another group of people who suffer from digital exclusion and this growing divide in our country are those who are disabled or who have learning disabilities, as we do not oblige the manufacturers of kit to make the kit accessible for them.
A Labour Government would switch half the money— £75 million—from the super-connected cities programme to a digital inclusion programme. On the basis of the experience in the previous Parliament, when we found that it cost about £30 million to get 1 million people online, that could help some 2 million people get online. It would be much better to use the money productively. It would have a much bigger impact than some of the infrastructure that the Government have been prioritising. There is no point in putting money to one side because of a legal challenge and not using it at all. It would be far better to help some of those people to get online.
The communications sector, as I said earlier, is highly concentrated and monopolistic. In each technology there are a small number of players, some of which are very large and some of which are vertically integrated. Many of the operators are international and foreign-owned. For example, last year Facebook floated for £100 billion. That is larger than nine European economies. Vodafone has a market capitalisation greater than that of BP. There are only four mobile phone companies, of which three are foreign-owned, and BT and Virgin own all the infrastructure for broadband, down to the last mile.
In addition to being extremely wealthy, some of these firms are very aggressive and through litigation have been challenging rulings by Ofcom. For example, the internet service providers challenged the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills on the legality of the Digital Economy Act 2010. I am glad to say that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills succeeded and the internet service providers failed in that challenge.
Against this background, it is a worry that the Government have failed to give Ofcom the resources that it needs and that they are not introducing new legislation to strengthen its powers. If it does not have the necessary powers, it is much more likely to succumb to such expensive litigation. It is a bit contradictory. The Government have cut the Ofcom budget, but they have not strengthened its powers, which means that Ofcom’s legal bill is running up and up, so that is not a sensible way of carrying on. We need to strengthen Ofcom’s powers in order that the work of the regulator can no longer be deliberately frustrated. That could be addressed through cost capping or reforming the standard of appeal under the existing communications legislation.
A fully connected country has the opportunity to share information and disperse power, but currently the small number of players means that consumers’ interests are not always at the forefront of their minds. We need regulation, not to tell companies what to do in every last detail but to promote competition. I should like to highlight the elements which a consumers charter approach should cover. First, we need to deal with privacy and online theft. According to a survey by O2 and Populus, people’s No. 1 worry about the web is how their personal data are used and how large companies share the data that people hand over. We must take effective action to protect people’s privacy and engage much more energetically with the proposals coming from the European Union on personal data.
The Home Secretary’s proposals on internet protocol addresses are welcome but I am not sure they go far enough. As I said to her earlier today, she should take the opportunity to strengthen age verification because it is important to help parents protect their children online. The Government have been saying for three years that they want to do something about that and the Prime Minister says that he wants to run the most family-friendly Government, but not one real step forward has been taken. We need a statutory backstop now. It is what the Labour Government promised in the previous Parliament—a statutory backstop so that if the ISPs have not introduced measures to enable parents to protect their children, they will be required to do so.
Furthermore, we need better price transparency. Many of the firms are bundling up people’s television contract with their mobile phone, internet connection and so on, making it difficult for the ordinary consumer to see what each is costing. We must do something about that and to help people switch from one provider to another. We must also see some action on security for people making payments over the internet. It is not clear from what the Government have said whether they propose to do that or not. That would increase security for consumers and would also be welcomed by businesses because they cannot expand e-commerce without more security on the internet.
Finally, people in this country are most exercised by nuisance calls. We know that in order to address the proliferation of nuisance calls, legal action is needed. It is extremely disappointing that after three years, two Secretaries of State, the promise of a Green Paper and the promise of a White Paper, none of that has happened. We need to see a Bill now.
Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) and although I do not necessarily draw the same conclusions, her argument about the effect of broadband on the economy is not in doubt.
I shall do two things which, I think, will please the House: I shall be extremely brief and therefore observe the courtesy of listening to the following speaker. I am pressed because of another meeting so I hope the House will forgive me for being brief, which it will no doubt welcome, and for not staying for subsequent speeches.
I shall speak specifically about antisocial behaviour. The term underplays the awful way in which the lives of those on the receiving end of antisocial behaviour are transformed and how they enter into periods of intense frustration, worry, concern and even fear if they are the victims of repetitive antisocial behaviour. I am sure that other Members regularly see constituents in that situation. Sadly, I see them all too regularly—I would go so far as to say that in almost every single surgery I encounter a case of antisocial behaviour. The term worries me for two reasons. If it is used to describe extremely serious instances, it can lead to action not being taken swiftly enough. Some police forces struggle to deal with what they regard as an antisocial behaviour complaint. As a consequence, many incidents are repeated and go on for a long time.
Working with one of my local papers, the Enfield Independent, we came across a case in my constituency where for three years utterly unacceptable bullying behaviour was taking place against two shopkeepers and residents in neighbouring houses. One resident was having her bin set on fire regularly and was having stones thrown down on to her roof, and people’s doors were being trashed—all serious criminal behaviour which went without a response for nearly three years.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
Has the hon. Gentleman, like me, experienced a lack of reporting by residents? They tell me that there is no point in reporting such incidents because they are simply not being dealt with by the police in a way that we would wish to see.
Nick de Bois
The hon. Lady makes a fair point, which will make my speech even shorter. There is a sense of frustration. The Government’s measure is vital and important, but it may not mitigate some of the reasons why people will still continue to be reluctant to report. That is due not just to a belief that something will not happen, but to fear. After coming across this incident, I found myself talking to six residents and two shopkeepers, and not one of them wanted to report the crime. They knew who was responsible and that it was consistently the same people, but they were fearful of repercussions if they took the matter further.
Nick de Bois
I will deal with that point now. I will not make the usual response that I will cover it later because I do not have clue how to answer it—I am sorry; I am probably being very unfair to other hon. Members. The point fits in with my theme.
The concept behind the community trigger is an excellent idea. It basically means that if five complaints are made, the police are obliged to investigate. That is a good and important concept. If there is a reluctance to complain because people doubt whether anything will happen—although I think the community trigger will encourage them because of the compulsion on the force to act—we need to be comfortable that the police can react and in a sufficiently timely manner. I live in a borough where the police have had to deal with extremely serious issues and I accept that there will be times when they may have to delay their investigation, but I hope they will investigate. I am afraid that there have been too many instances when as an MP I have had to prompt action when it should have been the citizen’s complaint that prompted the action. But the potential problem with the community trigger is that sometimes it is difficult to get one person to complain, so to get five may be quite a challenge.
I genuinely support the moves on antisocial behaviour and I am keen to see them go ahead, so I recommend to Ministers that in addition to the community trigger proposals where residents can complain, perhaps they should consider allowing locally elected councillors to be representatives of people, and where sufficient residents have expressed concern they could also trigger the process. I see those on the Front Bench nodding in agreement—they are not really, but I would welcome comments on that. My constituents ask me to do something about such matters, and if they feel more comfortable with their elected representative doing something, perhaps because of fear, that could be a positive role for a councillor who could use the community trigger to act on their residents behalf. If councillors are not elected to do that, what are they elected to do?
With antisocial behaviour being firmly placed on the Home Office’s agenda and in their sights for introduction into a Bill, I urge Ministers to ensure that enforcement can be met and that local police forces can be held accountable for that. We in this House can legislate, but we cannot implement measures on the ground. I hope that with the introduction of police and crime commissioners, local people will be able to hold their police force to account to meet the challenges that they have set them, but in London boroughs, which come under the Met police and the commissioner, it will be trickier.
I wholeheartedly support the measures in the Bill, but if there is frustration on the ground, I hope that Ministers will not regard their job as done once they have legislated. The job will be done when we have made a significant dent in this dreadfully unacceptable behaviour of those who want to terrorise their neighbours and vandalise their property.
Nia Griffith (Llanelli) (Lab)
I want to speak on a number of important issues. The Queen’s Speech seems to lack vision. There is no idea of a coherent society or how we make it a better and fairer society. There seems to be a lot of tinkering at the edges without really tackling the main causes of the main issues of the day. As my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Helen Jones) pointed out, we lack an economic vision—a vision to rebuild our society and use the talents of our people to improve the lot of all of us.
We often talk about community cohesion, but when we try to define what makes that it leads to all sorts of discussion. Key to community cohesion is a sense of respect for each other and self-respect, and key to that is thriving communities that offer job opportunities for our young people and for all our citizens. That would bring the welfare bill down. Many people are desperately looking for a job and would like to work more hours, but nothing in the Government’s proposed programme will help to create jobs.
The Welsh Government are playing their part in creating jobs and providing support to businesses. They have already created 4,000 jobs in the Jobs Growth Wales programme, and are on target to create another 4,000 this year and the year after. The focus is on helping the private sector to grow, so young people are helped into work and businesses are helped to grow. Jane Hutt, the Finance Minister in the Welsh Government, has recently announced a package of £75 million of additional capital investment to support the Welsh infrastructure investment plan. In addition, £400 million is to be spent on housing to help to realise a target of 7,500 affordable homes by 2016.
But we all know that the main economic levers are held by the UK Government, where the savage cuts in tax credits and the increase in the regressive tax VAT mean that millions of less well-off families are struggling to make ends meet, particularly as prices are rising very quickly, while those earning more than £150,000 are given a tax break. This is not only unfair, it is economic nonsense, because the least well-off spend their money quickly and it goes back into the local economy, whereas the better-off may wish to stash it away or spend it abroad. We have only to look at our town centres to see the dire effects of squeezing middle and low-income families. Research also shows that greater equality between the better-off and the less well-off members of society makes for greater community cohesion. We need a tax on bankers’ bonuses to provide money to invest in jobs, such as house building.
On immigration, what we really want is a crackdown on all forms of exploitation, whether of migrant workers or our own workers. There are still far too many examples of gangmasters bringing in groups of people, housing them in substandard conditions, making all sorts of deductions from their salaries and, with regard to their hours and working conditions, exploiting them ruthlessly. Far from tackling the problem, the Government seem to be doing the opposite. They have done away with the Agricultural Wages Board, which was one body that set down minimum standards for accommodation, and have put the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 under threat, whereas we would like to see it extended to cover those in the construction and care industries, for example.
Many Members will have visited the excellent exhibition on human trafficking opened by the Prime Minister. One of the calls was for some form of slavery Act. Perhaps that is a slightly dramatic term, but it would have been nice to see something in the Queen’s Speech that tackled that type of exploitation and began digging down into the real problems that exist not only in one or two parts of Great Britain, but right across the country, as the exhibition’s wall map showed. Simply not enough is being done to tackle human trafficking.
Another issue, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), is the overseas domestic workers visa. That is another thing the Government have done that has made it more difficult to trace people and rescue them from domestic slavery. That is what we really need to tackle when we talk about immigration. Trafficking and exploitation have continued, all of which is bad for not only those workers, but local people, who are obviously being undercut. I think that everybody would accept that what we really want is decent jobs with decent remuneration for local workers and migrant workers alike.
Helen Goodman
My hon. Friend is making an interesting case. I represent a constituency in the north-east, where we have high unemployment and low wages. Will she tell us what the situation is like with regard to unemployment and wages in her constituency?
Nia Griffith
We have two great scourges: first, unemployment, and secondly, underemployment and a low-wage economy. That means that people are dependent on tax credits. We would like the minimum wage to be increased at least in line with inflation and to move towards a living wage that gives people enough to live on without having to have their salaries topped up by tax credits. That is obviously an aspiration that many of us share. Certainly, some of our local councils are trying to work towards that.
Lyn Brown
I was interested to hear what my hon. Friend said about trafficking. I had a dreadful case in my surgery only last week in which a woman had clearly been trafficked from Bangladesh and used to undercut the minimum wage for the past 10 years. She was kept in servitude—practically slavery—the whole time while working for less than £50 a week, most of which was taken away for her bed and board. Does my hon. Friend agree that that needs to be tackled? We need to get to the traffickers, but the victims also need to be protected, because at the moment the Home Office thinks that it might deport that woman soon, and I will be writing to the Minister about the case shortly.
Nia Griffith
That is a good example, but sadly it is not an isolated one; there seem to be many such cases. A report from the Government’s own Department shows that we have not tackled the problem sufficiently. It has been suggested that a commission is needed to look into that. Whether or not that is the right way forward, we certainly need some action. It would have been nice to see a concerted effort in the Queen’s Speech to legislate to tackle human trafficking. Furthermore, the Government’s threat to pull out of the European arrest warrant system is yet another measure that could undermine our co-operation with other countries in dealing with the criminal gangs that cross borders.
When it comes to the rest of our immigration policy, I think we all understand that we need to be absolutely fair and to deal with people in a proper and timely manner, but we must also be careful not to become a country to which nobody wants to come. One of the problems we have in west Wales is getting the skilled doctors we need in our hospitals. We all want to see our young people trained, and thank goodness the Welsh Government are trying to limit student fees to £3,500 a year, unlike this Government, who have let them rocket to £9,000, which I am afraid will deter many from studying medicine. Obviously we want to see our own students coming through, but at the same time we are dependent on attracting the right quality of specialists from abroad. We want to be absolutely certain that we continue to attract those specialists and that I do not have hospital registrars coming to my surgery because they are having difficulty renewing their visas and sorting things out.
On antisocial behaviour orders and the proposal to replace them with much weaker measures, it seems to me that we need something stronger, not weaker. We know that ASBOs are not perfect, but we want stronger measures, not weaker ones. They must follow things through, not with a civil action that takes for ever but a proper criminal case that acts as a deterrent against people getting an ASBO.
Yesterday the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) spoke eloquently about the relationship between alcohol and disorder and the failure to go for minimum pricing. As she said, that is not about beating the poor with a high price but about protecting many members of society from a lot of the results of alcohol abuse, whether it be domestic violence, difficulties in our inner-city areas, or wanton acts of violence. She clearly made the connection between health inequality and the availability of very cheap alcohol.
The hon. Lady also talked about plain packaging for cigarettes and, as a doctor, made a clear case for the reasons why we should do everything we possibly can to deter our young people from taking up smoking. It is a great sadness to me that this Queen’s Speech does not give us any measures on plain packaging. Even more worrying was the insinuation that possibly some of the information we were given about plain packaging, such as it leading to more smuggling of cigarettes, was inaccurate in having been portrayed as coming from the police.
That brings me to the other missing feature of this Queen’s Speech—the transparency that we need on lobbying. We know that there will always be vested interests and that people can declare those interests and explain on whose behalf they are speaking, but we remain concerned that there is a lot of veiled and dishonest lobbying where people are not up front and it is not exactly clear who is behind it. It would have been nice if the Prime Minister had been able to announce yesterday that he was going to do something about what he has called
“the next big scandal waiting to happen.”
Indeed, there was the scandal that led to dinners for donors in Downing street. Those are some of the issues that need to be addressed further, and it is a great shame that that will not happen in the next legislative Session.
I return to the police, particularly those in my own area. I recently had the pleasure of meeting the new chief constable of Dyfed-Powys police, Simon Prince, and had very meaningful discussions with him about how to make our communities better and safer places. I was pleased to notice his emphasis on the need for partnership with other organisations to make a cohesive community and for a coherent approach to tackling and preventing problems, as well as a better understanding of the role of the police in society.
One worry that we have locally is the threat to take away the police helicopter. It is clear to anyone who knows the Dyfed-Powys area, with its mountains and its long coastline, much of which is rocky, that a fixed-wing aircraft, which may have its uses for reconnaissance and search purposes, does not offer the necessary versatility that the helicopter affords. Indeed, a review carried out last summer by five air support unit executive officers concluded with the recommendation
“to place the fixed wing in St Athan and to retain the rotary option”—
namely, the helicopter—
“at the current base at Pembrey.”
Furthermore, only a couple of years ago some £1.5 million of public money was spent at Pembrey to create an absolutely state-of-the-art helicopter base, so it would be a real waste of that money if the helicopter were to move elsewhere. I ask Ministers to address that issue very seriously.
On mesothelioma, I am very pleased about the programme to help people who cannot trace their original employer. A lot of the people I meet have worked for many different employers. Sometimes they have been self-employed. They may have been working in different facilities, perhaps doing a plumber-type job, and going round to all sorts of different providers. So far they have had no one to turn to for compensation. I hope that it will be a properly funded programme that will give them the money they so desperately need. I also hope that it will not involve delays, because one of the horrible features of this disease, which is a very nasty one, is that once it becomes visible it is not very long, perhaps only nine months to a year, before people pass away. There have been cases where money has come far too late to be of any help, so the Bill needs to make money available to stave off that problem in the interim period before the compensation comes through.
On legal aid, I have been seriously lobbied, perhaps for the first time ever, by solicitors, who admitted that they might not be the most appealing, cuddly group in society. Nevertheless, they made the very good point that it makes no sense for only four firms to provide legal aid for such a huge area—the Dyfed-Powys police area is the largest in England and Wales and the fourth largest in England, Wales and Scotland—when most of those who currently operate there are from small family firms. There are no large providers. Will the Government consider seriously the number of providers that can be employed in a particular area?
Another anomaly follows on from that. If someone who has committed a crime and has been helped at a police station by a firm of solicitors is involved in another incident before that case gets to court, they might be helped by a different firm the second time around. Indeed, three or four different firms could end up attending to that person and they would all have to turn up at court. Rather than cutting down on costs, that seems wasteful.
I can see that you are anxious for me to finish, Mr Deputy Speaker, so I shall conclude my remarks on that note.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. Speeches are now averaging about 10 or 11 minutes each. I do not want to impose a time limit, so I would be grateful if Members could respect others who wish to contribute.
Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)
I am pleased to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), who made a good contribution about the importance of community cohesion. I want to address the need for legislative changes to safeguard elderly people in the place they call home, and comment on a scandal in south Wales.
Whether they are looked after by a public or private provider, the law should ensure that elderly people’s care is excellent, and respect their dignity, individuality and choice. Care should be delivered with professionalism and compassion. Where care standards fall short, the elderly and their families should have confidence that there will be effective sanctions and redress.
This House has rightly scrutinised the shocking scandals in Stafford hospital and the Winterbourne View care home for adults with learning disabilities. I want to highlight the disgraceful treatment in care homes for the elderly in south Wales, the full details of which have yet to reach the public domain.
Gwent has recently seen a failure to secure justice for care home residents following the collapse of serious criminal charges, which has left the families of an alleged 103 victims feeling aggrieved and abandoned. An £11.6 million investigation known as Operation Jasmine began in 2005. It produced 10,500 pieces of evidence and led police to brand the negligence discovered as “death by indifference”. However, just two convictions have been secured for wilful negligence since the start of the inquiry in 2005. It took so long to bring charges against the director of the residential care homes who was investigated that, by the time his court case was scheduled in March, Dr Das had suffered an assault, leaving him unfit for trial.
I have been speaking to the families affected by the stymied Operation Jasmine, who are still grieving over this shameful crime—a crime without punishment. The neglect and indifference in these care homes continues to appal. There are little things, such as losing a mother’s false teeth for days on end or dressing her in a neighbour’s damp or dirty clothes, and big things—the stories that chill the blood—such as the dad who challenged his family on his return to a care home, “Why have you put me here?” The same father was left curled up like a dog for hour upon hour, slowly developing pressure sores that exposed the bone underneath.
How can we use that sorry experience to inform the reform of the law of wilful neglect, to extend corporate responsibility or to reform our social care legislation? First, I want a public inquiry so that we can understand how Dr Das was able to continue running care homes despite damning reports by the inspectorate, and so that lessons can be learned.
According to a former employee, Dr Das
“would pull up in his Rolls Royce and complain they were spending too much on incontinence pads”
at his care home in Ebbw Vale in my constituency. He failed to pay care home registration fees, and paid the outstanding tax and national insurance for his staff only on the eve of a hearing on HMRC’s petition to wind up his company. He settled his gas and electricity bills only when the energy companies threatened to cut off the gas to his care homes. He failed to ensure that all staff had proper Criminal Records Bureau checks and that sufficient numbers of trained staff were available for cover. Dr Das gave false evidence to the Care Standards Tribunal, both orally and in writing, with the intention to deceive. The tribunal found that:
“Dr Das has developed an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion”.
Given the weight of the evidence compiled by Operation Jasmine, I hope that the Welsh Government or the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales will agree to an inquiry.
Secondly, we must look at the law on wilful neglect. If a patient does not die from poor care and does not have a loss of capacity under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, the guidance of the Crown Prosecution Service says that a criminal offence is difficult to identify. The Prime Minister was therefore wrong when he told me on 1 May that the criminal law was already there to deal with care home abuse. It is not.
The deputy chief constable of Gwent police, Jeff Farrar, told me today:
“The depth and quality of evidence obtained in this inquiry and the engagement throughout with expert witnesses and the CPS was substantial. And it is not only frustrating, but difficult to see how if such cases occurred in the future (where the death of an elderly person in a care home was attributed to omissions as opposed to deliberate acts) the police could ever produce sufficient evidence to reach the threshold test for charging these offences.”
Others agree with that view. The Joint Committee that scrutinised the draft Care and Support Bill recommended that organisations—not just employees—that are found to have contributed to abuse or neglect in a care setting should be liable to criminal prosecution for breach of corporate responsibility. Age UK believes that neglect should be classified as abuse, whether wilful or not, because of the difficulty of proving intention. Therefore, if someone is abused or neglected as a result of incompetence or indifference, it should still be seen as abuse.
I hope that the Government will engage with voluntary organisations and MPs of all parties to improve the legislation. Prevention is the best option and inspection procedures must be robust and transparent, but when neglect occurs, those who are responsible must be brought to justice so that everyone knows that callous and degrading care will be punished. Finally, high standards of patient care must not be sacrificed to boost personal profit, as when Dr Das enjoyed his Rolls-Royce while penny pinching and cutting the supply of incontinence pads to the residents in his homes.
Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)
I am very glad to have an opportunity to say a few words on the Queen’s Speech. It was a Queen’s Speech that could best be described as the creation of one Lynton Crosby, the chief Tory strategist. It is extraordinary that an important, symbolic and historic event that takes place every year should this year have the fingerprints all over it of an Australian huckster. The Lynton Crosby effect can be seen in both what is in the Queen’s Speech, and what is not in it. What runs through the speech, the way it was briefed and its theme, show that this speech has anti-immigration measures as its centrepiece.
In the wake of recent local elections, politicians on all sides are clearly focused on the UKIP vote and what we need to do to appeal to that. There are, however, too many myths about immigration. It is a myth that we have not been allowed to talk about immigration during past decades. My Government had a major Bill on immigration or nationality in every Parliament, and I do not think a day has gone by over the past 20 years in which a tabloid paper has not run an anti-immigrant story, whether it is asylum seekers eating swans or Romanian ladies in headscarves who are the latest threat to the body politic. The myth that no one is allowed to talk about immigration is just that.
It is also a myth that Labour had an open-door policy on immigration. I do more immigration casework than most Members of the House because of the nature of my constituency, and we have filing cabinets full of cases, many of which went on for months, moving into years. The assertion that under the previous Government immigrants and asylum seekers could just walk into the UK is a myth that wants quashing.
I do not doubt that the polls are right when they reflect concern about immigration. I note, however, that the more diverse an area, and the longer immigrants have been there, the less frightened people are of immigration. Fear takes hold in parts of the country where there are hardly any immigrants. Some Labour Members like to point to the children or grandchildren of earlier waves of immigrants who have difficulty with immigration and say, “Look, this West Indian and this African are worried about eastern European migrants.” I have been an MP for more than 20 years, and in a part of London that has seen successive waves of immigration I have noted that it is always the last group of immigrants but one to arrive who feel that they can complain about the latest group. It is almost as if being able to complain about the latest group of immigrants cements someone’s status as a real British national. I do not say that that does not reflect real concerns about immigration, and where there are such concerns, whether about job insecurity, low wages, or an absence of housing, this House and my party should address them. However, it is important not to get swept up in myth making.
In an extraordinarily cynical manoeuvre, the Government —on the instructions, I imagine, of Mr Lynton Crosby—have made immigration one of the centrepieces of the Queen’s Speech, yet a number of the measures that they suggest will not, in practice, achieve the effects that the general public might think. For instance, the Prime Minister spoke about being able to throw out foreign national prisoners almost as soon as they are sentenced. Well, we will see whether that can happen. All prisoner exchange agreements with non-EU countries turn on the consent of the prisoner, and until now, prisoners from Jamaica, which has the largest number of foreign nationals in British jails, and prisoners from Nigeria have always refused to go back to their countries of origin to serve their sentence. I do not know what will change.
An issue was raised in the context of the Queen’s Speech about stopping immigrants who are not entitled to NHS treatment from receiving it. Of course we should not facilitate health tourism—no Opposition Member defends that—and of course hospitals should be able to get back money that they are owed. There is, however, a danger of blowing this up into a huge issue when the sums of money, given the total NHS budget, are not necessarily that great. If hospitals and doctors are to query the entitlement of people who walk through their door, given the nature of things the danger is that they will query those from visible minorities who may well be not just British nationals, but third-generation British nationals. What will that do for community cohesion?
Lyn Brown
One thing that worries me is that such rhetoric could prevent people who are sick with transmittable diseases from going to the doctors because they are worried about whether they are entitled to do so. That will cost us more, as people who are entitled to health care pick up diseases. Does my hon. Friend agree that such rhetoric will also cost more in terms of lives and serious illnesses in our communities?
Ms Abbott
I am glad my hon. Friend raises that public health aspect of the rhetoric and the media narrative of stopping immigrants from approaching doctors and the health service. Many who are perfectly entitled to approach their doctor will feel inhibited, and there is a danger of disease incubation—people might finally go to the health service only when they are far gone, which will cost a lot more. Another danger is communicable disease. The pronouncements on stopping immigrants from unwarrantedly accessing NHS health care are not just wrong, toxic and unworkable, but inimical to good public health.
The Queen’s Speech is a Lynton Crosby public speech partly because of the immigration theme that runs through it, which is all about rhetoric. The measures will either not deliver or deliver in a minimalist way. All it does is heighten fears. The Government believe that it is to their advantage to do so.
The Lynton Crosby effect is both what is in the speech and what is not in it. We know that his company, Crosby Textor, is on a retainer with British American Tobacco in Australia to fight plain packaging. I put it to the House that it is no coincidence that a man who made his considerable sums of money fighting plain packaging in Australia turns up as the Conservative party’s chief political strategist, and it suddenly drops its commitment to plain packaging.
Dropping that commitment cannot be because of the evidence. I do not ask the House to believe me on the significance of plain packaging; the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry), who has responsibility for public health, said just weeks ago that she was persuaded having seen the evidence—the Department of Health has seen the evidence. What happened between the Department of Health forming a view on plain packaging and the Under-Secretary coming out in public in favour of it, and a Queen’s Speech that does not mention it, even though it is the preferred solution of medical experts and smoking cessation campaigners? Lynton Crosby happened. The idea that thousands of people could have their health endangered because of the malign influence of Lynton Crosby on Tory party policy is very regrettable.
The House must remember that tobacco remains the biggest cause of health inequalities in terms of death rates—it is more significant than any other factor. As I have said, there is complete consensus, including among the British Medical Association and medical and smoking cessation campaigners, that plain packaging is a key aspect in reducing levels of smoking and improving the health of the population, but because Lynton Crosby raises an eyebrow, it seems to have been dropped from the Queen’s Speech.
Another measure missing from the Queen’s Speech that has tremendous public health implications is a minimum price for alcohol. I am proud to tell the House that the Labour party’s policy is to support a minimum price for alcohol because there is a consensus—again—among campaigners, doctors’ organisations and anybody concerned about alcohol abuse, and even among some Government Members, that something must be done about the deluge of cheap alcohol. We have gone from the situation in the 19th century when people were worried about pubs and clubs, to worrying about men, women and children buying cheap alcohol in the supermarket and corner shop and doing themselves real damage drinking at home. We are seeing rising levels of liver disease as a result of the consumption of cheap alcohol. At one point the Prime Minister said that he was persuaded by the arguments for a minimum price, and brave statements were made by the Home Secretary. What happened then? Lynton Crosby came in as chief political adviser and the commitment to a minimum price on alcohol disappeared, again to the detriment of the health of thousands of our people.
This is the Lynton Crosby Queen’s Speech. It is disgraceful that he is able to abuse his position as a political adviser to interfere with the legislative programme of this Government. The health of thousands of people will suffer as a result of that interference, and the malign narrative on immigration that is being propagated is no way to build social cohesion. It rests on myths, rather than facts, and is no way to build what we on the Opposition Benches would like to see: one nation politics.
Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)
I enjoyed the start of this debate and I recognise that I have not been here for all of the speeches in between, so I am grateful for the chance to say a few words.
I want to follow on from the speech by the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and the speech made yesterday by my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston), who talked about the importance of public health.
Back in 1986, I was made Minister with responsibility for roads—painting white lines on national roads—and someone asked me what I was going to do to improve road safety. I asked how one measured the change in the level of road safety. Within 20 minutes, we were discussing casualty reduction. Casualties can be counted, however inaccurately. I asked what was the dominant factor, and was told that young men drinking more than the legal limit of alcohol and then going driving mattered a lot. I received consistent advice from virtually every respected group in the country that three things had to happen: the legal limit had to be lowered, which would criminalise more people; policing had to be stepped up; and penalties had to be increased.
In those days, there were approximately 2 million occasions a week when young men would drive a car having consumed more than the legal limit for alcohol. They were not necessarily over the limit when they drove. The number of drink-related deaths when the driver or motorcycle rider was above the legal limit when killed, or the passenger was killed, was 1,200 a year.
The figure now is between 200 and 250. Four-fifths of a socially acceptable, illegal, body-bending habit evaporated with no change of law, no change of sentencing and no change to enforcement.
Considering the difficulties that younger people face, whether they are our own children or somebody else’s, does matter. If we had an 18-year-old who said, “Do you know that interest rates have been at 0.5% for a long time, the rate of unemployment has fluctuated between this, that and the other, and the rate of inflation on different measures is between this and that?” we might say in response, “I hope you are doing A-level economics.”
If that 18-year-old said, “I am in court on Monday on a serious criminal charge,” or “My husband”—or wife, boyfriend or girlfriend, or a stranger—“and I have become pregnant; what should we do now?” or “I have decided to become a lifelong smoker of 20 a day, seven packs a week, at more than £7 a pack in after-tax income, so you, the parent, are more likely to bury me than me bury you,” each of us might regard the second set of announcements as more significant and more important to us than interest rates, the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation.
I estimate that the figures for those taking up crime for the first time to be about 1,800 a week. Those figures can be obtained by asking how many people get convicted each week for the first time, having committed an offence for which the sentence could be six months or more.
When I first raised the matter, the Home Office claimed it did not have the information, but it did—although it is probably now with the Ministry of Justice. As part of our national statistics, those figures should be coming out regularly, both nationally and regionally, so that the media might start paying attention to how it is that so many of our young people—a third of males by the age of 30—have been convicted of a serious criminal offence. That is why I told the Home Secretary earlier that we need to pay attention to the numbers who commit offences for the first time and for how long, on average, they go on doing so. There are relatively few lifelong serious criminals.
In her speech yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) said that 200,000 teenagers took up smoking every year. If 40% of our young people are taking up smoking—almost the same level as 25 years ago—all the measures taken since then, such as removing promotions from the front of tobacconists and raising prices significantly, must have been inadequate.
Why and when do people take up smoking? Very few take it up after the age of 21. It is something that teenagers take up. Ask a young person who is smoking, “How old are you?”, and they might say, “I’m 15”, “I’m 13” or “I’m 18”. If we say, “You’re too young to smoke,” effectively we are saying, “You’re doing an adult thing.” We ought to say, “Oh dear, a child. Only children take it up. I’m sorry you’re one of them,” and walk away.
We might also say to that child, “If you are a smoker, try not to be the first person to light up in any group and try not to smoke in front of someone who is younger than you.” Whatever the merits or demerits of plain packaging—it is not an argument I want to get into—what is certain is that smoking is a social disease: people pick it up because those around them are doing it. We need to change that culture. In effect, we need to make smoking like picking your nose: it goes on, but it should be in private, not public, and people should just disapprove. Before we changed the law, people did not smoke in a church, chapel, temple, mosque or synagogue. It just was not done. It was not expected.
We must do for smoking what we did for drink-driving. What was effective for drink-driving was, first, telling hosts, whether in a pub, club, party or at home, “Always have alcohol-free drinks within reach. No one should ever have to ask for an alcohol-free drink.” That is not just for drivers, but for those who are temperate, who make up 10% of the population, for those who were alcoholics, who also make up 10% of the population, for those who are pregnant, those who want to be pregnant, those who have drunk too much and those who are on a diet—there are all kinds of reasons.
Secondly, we want to ensure that passengers pick an alcohol-free driver. If I were going on a holiday to the Costa Lot from Gatwick and saw the pilot coming out of a bar and tottering slightly as he walked up the front steps of the aeroplane, I might think, “This plane is not for me”—planes can fly themselves, but cars cannot. In my time, five young men would get into a car and drive to the pub. Each would buy a round of drinks and four passengers would get back into the car knowing that the driver had had five drinks and that they had paid for four of them.
Thirdly, if like me someone drinks and drives, they should decide in advance which it is going to be that night. If in years to come, I get held for drink-driving, people will point to this speech and say, “Ya-ha-ha, hypocrite!”, but the fact is that between host responsibility, passenger choice and the drinking-driving choice, things become much better. That has become the norm and young people, instead of being four times as bad as their parents, are probably four times as good.
I want to turn to sex. Between 40% and 45% of people in this country get involved in a conception that ends in a termination—a formal abortion. We have nearly 400,000 abortions a year in this country, which is 40,000 a year more than we had 25 years ago, despite all the sex and personal education, the availability of contraception, the advice and politicians saying, “Say no.”
The only thing we cannot inherit from our parents is celibacy, unless we are conceived in a glass dish. We say to people, “Think about family planning or birth control.” After a good party, we might think about having it off. If we do, do we wait for the embarrassment afterwards of saying, “Cripes, we’ve conceived, we’ve already got five children” or “What did you say your name was?”, or “I know we’ve lived together for two years, but we hadn’t planned this.” We need to give people the confidence to use more than the words “family planning” and “birth control”. It is a choice between what embarrassment people want: between talking beforehand about contraception or afterwards talking about the consequence of having conceived.
We can drop down to the Dutch figures, which are one quarter of ours, in about six months, if we start using language that is helpful to people, as we did with drink-driving. So often in Parliament, we use language that does not relate to people in their homes, in their lives or on the streets. It worked with drink-driving.
Too often in politics we believe that the law is the answer to questions. The law can make something into a crime, but it does not necessarily stop it happening—we would not have 80,000 people in jail tonight if it did. The law can give people rights, but they cannot always use them. The law can also provide a system of dispute resolution, which can often be useful, but not always.
There are some good things in the Queen’s Speech about fairness, but if we rely too much on the law to make the changes that affect our social health, we will be relying on the wrong weapons or crutches. Openness and language matter enormously.
The last thing I want to talk about is fairness. One of the issues that came up at the end of the last Session was leasehold reform. I believe we have to go much further. There are 3 million leaseholders in this country. There was a time, 40 or 50 years ago, when George Thomas—later Lord Tonypandy, but in between the occupant of the Speaker’s Chair—was campaigning for leasehold reform because so many people living in the terraces in the Welsh valleys were being exploited by the leasehold system.
Leasehold enfranchisement came. Now we have leasehold valuation tribunals, which are supposed to be a cheap, simple and effective way of resolving disputes between leaseholders and freeholders and their managing agents. There is an organisation called Lease that provides advice. It gets just over £1 million a year from the Government, but it needs much more help. I am seeing Lease tomorrow and I hope to work with it to tell Government what they need to do.
There are two or three Departments involved: the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Ministry of Justice and one other—I forget which one. They need to put together a taskforce to analyse why some cases do not get to a leasehold valuation tribunal fast, why they cost far more to resolve than the £500 advertised as the fee and why clever lawyers manage to put down the leaseholders and let some freeholders—not all, but some—abuse the system. I will give the House one example of abuse. The freeholder, through their managing agent, can arrange insurance and make the leaseholders pay the premium without saying openly what the commission is and without necessarily testing the market. That is just one example; I could give a number of others.
When we look at fairness, which is mentioned in the Queen’s Speech, let us hope that we can build it in and use this place to bring some of the issues into the open, so that they can be resolved properly by those who are doing things anyway, who can find ways of doing them better. Doing things better is what matters most. It certainly worked when I had responsibility for reducing casualties on the road; it can work in other fields as well.
Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)
When Members of this House trooped along the corridor to the other place yesterday to listen to the Gracious Speech, we hoped to hear some good news—perhaps an admission that the Government’s economic policy was misguided and that we would see a new focus on growth and jobs, rather than self-defeating austerity. Although that hope may have always been forlorn, I had at least hoped to see some progress on issues where I know the Government are not implacably opposed to progress. Sadly, my constituents, and everyone else’s too, were let down.
I know that Ministers want headlines about immigration, offender management and crime, but Home Office Ministers had a chance to keep in with their colleagues in the Department of Health, working with them to introduce a minimum unit price for alcohol and helping to put a stop to some of the antisocial and criminal activities that our people and police officers have to deal with, while at the same time saving lives and hard cash for our under-pressure NHS. I will return to what Home Office Ministers should put before this House a little later.
Like my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), I just cannot understand why Ministers have a blockage when it comes to taking opportunities to improve our society by making it safer and healthier. Despite laudable statements about the need to tackle smoking and excessive drinking, there is no sign of legislation to combat them. However, I hear that the Prime Minister said again yesterday—after the Queen’s Speech, that is—that measures on both smoking and drinking would be introduced, so where are they? The British Medical Association chair of council, Dr Mark Porter, said he was “bitterly disappointed” that standardised packaging for tobacco and the introduction of a minimum unit price for alcohol had been ditched, adding:
“If the government U-turns on its pledge to deal with alcohol and tobacco related harm, we will have to question its commitment to protecting the nation’s health”.
The decision to drop a proposed Bill to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes and tobacco, seemingly taken over the heads of the officials and Ministers who wanted it, robs us of an effective new tool to combat smoking.
Let us not forget that smoking is a major but preventable cause of death and disease, and the attitude that we should wait and see how Australia’s action works out represents a public health failure at a time when innovative action is needed. An unattributed Government source was quoted in The Sun as saying:
“Plain packaging may or may not be a good idea, but it’s nothing to do with the Government’s key purpose. The Prime Minister is determined to strip down everything we do so we can concentrate all our efforts on voters’ essentials. That means growth, immigration and welfare reform.”
I would have thought the health of the nation was also a key purpose. Perhaps the source should have added that the Government were also determined to keep in with the powerful tobacco and alcohol lobbies, whose coffers seem bottomless and whose tactics are shameless as they work to condemn generation after generation to the respiratory diseases and cancers that their products cause.
We know, thanks to documents produced by the tobacco industry, that it invests heavily in packet design in order to appeal to specific target audiences, even young people. Can that be right? The tobacco lobbying industry keeps asserting that there is no evidence to suggest that that makes any difference. If that is the case, I wonder why great sums of money continue to be spent on lobbying against this change, and on the marketing itself. Surely the industry could save money in both respects. We have to assume that it is either knowingly throwing good money after bad or not being fully honest with us. Perhaps Home Office and other Minsters could also take an interest. Do the activities of the tobacco lobby—hiding behind the organisations that it funds, making false claims about its marketing strategy and contributing so spectacularly to the ill health of our nation—constitute crimes against our people?
We know from research by the British Lung Foundation that smoking is a habit that people tend to take up at a young age. More than 200,000 children start smoking each year in the UK and around two thirds of smokers start before the age of 18. It is well known how hard it is to quit smoking. It is estimated that an enormous 70% of smokers continue to smoke despite wanting to quit. Plain packaging would help to de-glamorise the buying of cigarettes and show that we as a nation are serious about preventing children from taking up smoking.
There are also no proposals for action on introducing a ban on smoking in cars when a child is present. I have put the case in this House for such a ban many times, including twice introducing private Members’ Bills. With colleagues, I ensured that such provisions were tabled as a new clause to the Children and Families Bill. I hope that, in the absence of other action, the Government will back that new clause in a few weeks’ time when the Bill comes back to the House on Report. That will be a wonderful opportunity for them to do a little thing to reduce the effects of smoking.
When I spoke to officials in the Department for Health, however, I was told that the Government were reluctant to go forward with a ban on smoking in cars when a child is present because they were keeping their powder dry for a big fight with the tobacco industry over plain packaging. So when are we going to have that fight? Not in this parliamentary year, it seems. Those campaign groups, individual campaigners and concerned parents who have contacted me and others to put the case for a ban will be disappointed that the Government have taken action on neither issue.
In retreat, the Government have essentially said to the tobacco industry that if it shouts loudly enough, puts enough adverts in national newspapers and has its lobbyists exert as much pressure as they can muster, it will get its way and the Government will capitulate. If the Government had had the courage, they would have introduced in the Gracious Speech a Bill to ensure that all cigarette packets had the same plain design, and to ban smoking in cars when children were present. Those would have been bold, progressive moves that would have been popular and right.
It is not just tobacco that the Government have capitulated on. The Home Secretary, the Prime Minister and others have promised a new approach to tackling alcohol abuse and binge drinking. I believe that that could be done through minimum unit pricing, but that is another policy that seems to have fallen down the back of the No. 10 settee. The British Medical Association’s director of professional services has urged the Prime Minister:
“Be courageous: this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to save lives, to save the country money. Both of those are very good deals for him. And it will get him the thanks of an awful lot of people. Not just doctors and nurses but also the families of problem drinkers who desperately want the government to do something to help them help the people they love to kick the habit and to save their lives.”
I agree, and I had hoped that the Prime Minister would face down the alcohol industry lobbying and do the right thing. Once again, however, the families of heavy drinkers and the victims of drink-fuelled antisocial behaviour have been let down, despite the stated views of medical professionals, campaign groups and victims.
Professor Steve Field, a Government NHS adviser, said:
“On minimum unit pricing of alcohol we must not wimp out of that decision. It’s vital for people’s health, particularly the health of more vulnerable people. It will probably save around 1,000 lives a year and will also reduce admissions to hospital. It will also reduce the burden of long-term care and it will also help with social cohesion because a lot of alcohol triggers violence, it triggers domestic abuse, and if you look at society as a whole, we urgently have to do something about alcohol, of which”
minimum pricing
“is the first step. The government must take control and it’s up to them.”
I, too, regret the fact that the Government have passed up this opportunity. When the Minister winds up today’s debate, perhaps he will confirm whether the Government are going to wimp out after all.
If the Government are so preoccupied with tackling the economic issues we face, I would have hoped to see a better set of proposals to do just that. Instead, we see yet more dithering, yet more fiddling around the edges and yet more misdirected supply-side measures when a lack of demand is what is holding us back. They should have started with a jobs Bill. Unemployment, and particularly youth unemployment, continue to hold us back. My Stockton North constituency has a youth unemployment rate of 1,280 and general unemployment stands on the cusp of 10%. Nationally, more than 1 million young people are out of work. The Government have to do better by young people, who too often do not recover from early setbacks in their careers.
I do not have the precise figures on under-employment, but anecdotal evidence suggests that we are suffering particularly acutely in the Stockton borough as more and more people are forced to take low-paid, part-time jobs. We could create thousands of jobs—quality jobs—by replacing, for example, the huge number of police officers that have been lost under this current Government. A jobs Bill, as proposed by my right hon. Friends the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Leader of the House, would be a welcome start. That would see the introduction of a compulsory jobs guarantee, which would ensure a paid job for every adult who is out of work for more than two years.
A Labour jobs Bill would also guarantee a six-month paid job for all young people out of work for over a year, paid for by a bank bonus tax, with those offered a job being required to take it. It would also require large firms getting Government contracts to have an active apprenticeship scheme to help ensure that opportunities to work for the next generation exist and that the Government are taking real and meaningful steps to promote them actively.
We have seen the cost of living sky-rocket during this Parliament, with even those in work feeling the pinch. Thanks to the Government’s refusal to get a grip on energy costs, the perverse decision to increase VAT and the cut in in-work benefits, people in my constituency are feeling the pinch like never before. Prices are rising faster than wages, and people are now £1,700 a year worse off than they were in May 2010. Even my local fish and chip shop in Norton village is getting battered by this Government! A drop in demand means that it has to close earlier and reduce staff hours so that staff wages are much lower.
The Government should have taken Labour’s advice to cut VAT back down to 17.5%. They should have taken real action on fuel bills, introduced tough new fare caps on train routes and brought greater regulation to bear on estate agents who routinely rip off those in the private rented sector. My party have shown that we are willing to take action across the board to tackle the injustices and iniquities of the private sector where it is not working in the best interests of all of those who rely on it. As the Labour party, we are willing to go where the Government are not—making the interventions that will boost public health, tackle unemployment and ensure that those who are in work get a fair deal from the businesses with which they interact.
This Government’s failures border on the criminal. The Gracious Speech was a chance to correct some of the Government’s wrongs; sadly, what we have ahead next year is a programme that is light on legislation and light on action—above all, it is a missed opportunity.
Gemma Doyle (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab/Co-op)
I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to today’s debate. Yesterday’s Gracious Speech was, I think, the third since I was elected to represent West Dunbartonshire in 2010. As with the previous two, however, I am afraid that yesterday’s was simply another wasted opportunity by a Government who should be getting to grips with the real challenges facing the UK. As other Members have mentioned, yesterday’s speech was more important for what it did not include than for what it contained.
Across the UK, people are really struggling. They may be unable to get a job because of the flatlining economy or struggling to make ends meet because of the cost-of-living crisis. I can assure Members and Ministers that the people of West Dunbartonshire are absolutely no different; in fact, they are at the sharp end of this Government’s crisis. The Prime Minister promised there would be a change for the better when he went into Downing street in 2010, but the truth is that things are getting much worse, not better. In West Dunbartonshire unemployment is up, youth unemployment is up and long-term youth unemployment is now 10 times the level it was in May 2010—more than 1,000 young people are looking for a job. It is an absolute scandal.
It does not look as though things will be changing any time soon. Currently in my constituency, more than 12 people are chasing every job—and, almost unbelievably, the number has been as high as 40 people out of work for every advertised job in the last three years. In fact, I frequently hear of jobs—part-time jobs that do not require any skills or qualifications—for which more than 100 people have applied. That, if nothing else, should be setting off alarm bells for this Government.
Yet the Government repeatedly say they want to reward those in work; indeed, the Home Secretary said so in her opening remarks today. However, those in work who are having their tax credits and housing benefit cut will struggle to see how what the Government are saying to us here in this Chamber matches up with what they are doing to people around the country. There are simply not enough jobs for people to go into. The vast majority of people who are sitting at home are not doing so because they do not want to work: they are being failed by a Government who are unwilling or unable to get growth in the economy and to create the jobs they desperately need.
This Government have cut public sector jobs in my constituency. By now they have, I think, given up repeating the mantra that the private sector will sweep in and make up for all the jobs they have cut. If any Minister wants to come to my constituency and talk about how the private sector can be helped to grow, they will be very welcome, but so far that growth is not happening, and we face an unemployment crisis.
The national insurance holiday, which we first heard about in the Budget, is welcome. Indeed, it is very similar to the scheme we were calling for, but it is three years too late. The Government should have introduced it much earlier. Instead, we have we have had three years of flatlining growth.
The Gracious Speech contains no real plans to get the economy back on track, and nor are there any plans to help people struggling with the rising cost of living. All we have had is more of the same from an out-of-touch Government: no answers and nothing to say to the people of this country.
Scotland is being hammered by two Governments that are one and the same, both putting misguided ideology ahead of necessary action and legislation, and both bereft of ideas when Scotland needs solutions. When Labour delivered devolution to Scotland, we did so in order to create aspiration and achievement in the good times, and to protect the people of Scotland from the worst excesses of a Tory Government in the bad times. We could now have a Scottish Government using their ingenuity to bring forward creative proposals, but we do not have that. They could, and should, be straining every sinew and using every mechanism at their disposal to help the Scottish people, but instead they are standing on the sidelines, and today the Scottish National party is not even interested in turning up to debate these issues—I think there was a brief intervention from one SNP Member at the very beginning of this debate.
The Scottish Government are standing on the sidelines and rubber-stamping Tory measures such as the bedroom tax. They have passed no legislation to protect people from this policy. They have done nothing to help councils and housing associations in Scotland deal with the fallout from the bedroom tax. In fact, just last week I was told in confidence of a Scottish Government official who had a civil servant who let it slip that they had been told that everything they do must be about winning the referendum. That is absolutely scandalous, because power is a privilege and it must be exercised with caution and in the best interests of the people. At the moment, in Scotland, it is being used in a desperate attempt to win a campaign that is not about the interests of the Scottish people; it is about the interests of the First Minister.
There is an alternative for people throughout the whole of the UK: Labour’s plans in our alternative Queen’s Speech offer the real change that this country needs. I urge Ministers to look at it, because it gets to grips with the issues they need to deal with. It includes a jobs Bill, to introduce a compulsory jobs guarantee; a consumers Bill, to tackle rip-off energy bills and train fares; and a finance Bill to kick-start the economy, to get it moving again. Those are the changes and the things that people out there want to see.
Our plans also include an alternative immigration Bill with real economic powers to put an end to workers having their wages illegally undercut by employers exploiting migrant labour; it would double the fines for breaching the minimum wage and give local councils the powers to take enforcement action. Those are the things we want to see happen. However, the plans that we heard from the Government yesterday and from the Home Secretary earlier today fail to deal with the big problems to do with the exploitation of foreign workers to undercut local workers. The Queen’s Speech was also very much a missed opportunity to tackle the problem of illegal immigration. We want to see a much fairer system of controls and limits on students, cutting the number of bogus students but ensuring that we have a much more effective system for the migration we need. Legitimate students should not be targeted by the Government to bring immigration down; they are an easy target but not the right one.
There are things that the Home Secretary could be doing, but she is not. The new Schengen information system, which will share information on migrants travelling within the EU, will guarantee the authenticity of documents and help to identify illegal immigrants. So far, for some reason, the Home Secretary has failed to sign up to that—she is refusing to do it. Unlike some Government Members, I am not scared of immigration, because our country has benefited greatly from it, just as other countries have benefited from emigration from this country. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), in her contribution, set out well the beneficial impact that immigration has had on her town. Indeed, I suspect that few Members of the House are not partly the product of a story that involves immigration at some point in the tale.
There are issues that need to be addressed, and unless the Government get to grips with the problems, immigration will continue to be an easy scapegoat and the byword for all the problems faced by the Government. Immigration should not be the scapegoat, but that is what they are using it for at the moment. I therefore urge the Government to deal with firms that are not paying the national minimum wage, with recruitment agencies that are only advertising and using overseas labour, and with the slum landlords profiting from substandard and overcrowded housing. There is nothing in the Government plans to deal with those three pressing key issues. I hope that the Government are anticipating our amendments to their Bill, which the Leader of the Opposition has stated that we will table, and that they might work with us and support those amendments.
The Home Secretary did announce plans to break up the UK Border Agency. I agree that reform of the UKBA is absolutely needed; all of us who deal with casework involving the UKBA would recognise that. Serious issues need to be fixed and tackled; we have seen lower levels of enforcement and huge delays for people coming through the airports last summer. Those problems need to be tackled, and we do not want to see a repeat of that.
The Government are still failing to acknowledge that things have got worse and not better on their watch, including on deportations of foreign criminals, where the number has decreased. Surely the first step to solving problems is to accept responsibility. It is not good enough to keep blaming other people, whether they are officials in the UKBA or elsewhere, or indeed the system, as the Home Secretary did earlier—she blamed the appeals system. She presides over that system, so she needs to get to grips with it.
It is worth recapping some of the facts and the failures: the backlog in finding failed asylum seekers has gone up; the number of illegal immigrants who have been deported has gone down; the number of foreign prisoners who have been removed has gone down; the number of businesses fined for employing illegal workers has gone down; fingerprint checks on illegal migrants at Calais have been stopped; basic security checks on 100,000 missing asylum and immigration cases have been dropped; and the e-Borders technology has been delayed. I do not know how anyone could describe that as anything but a catalogue of failure.
The Government must get this issue right. The plans that they announced yesterday have been found wanting. I hope that they have listened to some of our proposals, and that when the immigration Bill comes forward we will be able to get it right. Unfortunately, at the moment we are simply getting more of the same from an out-of-touch Government: no ideas, no answers, and nothing to suggest. People across the UK deserve an awful lot better.
Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)
I am most grateful to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important Queen’s Speech debate. It is also a great pleasure to follow the eloquent and thoughtful contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Gemma Doyle).
I begin by welcoming some things in the Queen’s Speech. First, I welcome the inclusion of Bills for High Speed 2. I fully support the project which cannot come a day too soon, because faster and better infrastructural links to Birmingham, to the north-west and, ultimately, to Crewe, with proper connections to various regions, will bring great benefits for businesses, tourists and other travellers to and from my north-east Wales constituency. I welcome those Bills and I only hope that the project moves on as speedily as possible, because it is absolutely vital.
Secondly, I welcome the carry-over of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. It will be a very proud moment indeed for this House and for this country when it is on the statute book.
Thirdly, I welcome the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, but I would welcome it even more if budgets such as that for North Wales police were not facing cuts of 20% and antisocial behaviour orders were not being scrapped. I welcome the inclusion in the Bill of gun-related laws, but I hope that the Home Secretary and her team will consider carefully the points about gun ownership and those with a history of domestic violence that were made earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). We only have to see what has happened in America and the power of the National Rifle Association there to know what the power of the gun lobby can be like, and we in this country also need to be vigilant about it.
I welcome the chance to discuss immigration in this House. Indeed, as some Members have said, it has happened at fairly regular intervals and I do not believe it is an issue we should be frightened of. We should discuss it in a sensible and constructive way. If there is a debate more widely in the country, it would be foolish for us not to follow and listen and respond thoughtfully to the points that are made and to deal with them in legislation.
There are some serious issues and omissions that the Government need to address. Why is more not being done to tackle the use of foreign labour to undercut local workers? As residents of Black Park and Chirk in my constituency told me at the last election, how can it be right that some jobs are advertised only in eastern European languages for agency workers and offer only the worst possible terms of employment? The constituents who ask those questions, and others like them, are absolutely right to do so.
Also, what are we to make of the fact that there have been no prosecutions for breaches of the national minimum wage in the past two years when a recent King’s college study found that between 150,000 and 250,000 workers in the care sector alone are being paid below the national minimum wage? Is it any wonder that many people in this country are angry when such abuses go unpunished? Why can we not extend the Gangmasters Licensing Authority to other sectors?
On immigration, it is beyond belief that the Government are considering the measures that they have announced. I remember that two or three years ago we were told that a national register for landlords would be impossible. It would be too bureaucratic and difficult for the landlords, and would add red tape to the work that they already did, yet now we are told that landlords are expected to be almost the main body policing the system of immigration by identifying illegal tenants. It is nonsense that on the one hand the Government can say it is too bureaucratic to do that, and on the other they can pass the buck straight on to landlords.
There are some issues that never made it into the Queen’s Speech. Plain packaging for cigarettes is one; a lobbying Bill is another. Dare I say that I suspect the two are rather intimately connected? My party would have brought in a new jobs guarantee Bill. It is a pity that none of these will make it on to the statute book, as all would have been a credit to this House and would have brought long-term social and economic benefits.
Finally, I turn to another matter that I would like to have seen in this Queen’s Speech, one that I know has great support across the political spectrum and has been raised in various guises in this House by various Members, including me on numerous occasions. I refer to death or serious injury on the roads caused by uninsured, unlicensed or careless drivers. In last year’s debate on the Queen Speech, I welcomed the aspects of the Crime and Courts Bill that brought into effect new provisions on drugs and driving. It is in the spirit of welcoming this change that I call on the Government to be bolder on the issue.
I have raised in the House before the case of Robert James Gaunt. Robert was a nine-year-old boy who was tragically killed in March 2009 while crossing the road in the village of Overton in my constituency by a driver with no licence or insurance, who failed to stop. He was a driver who did not report the accident and, even worse, who attempted to cover up his crime by re-spraying his car. For ending the life of this innocent young boy, the driver incurred a pitiful sentence of 22 months. That was at the very limit of what was possible under the law for that offence. When 1,300 people signed the Justice for Robert petition to back longer sentences for this crime, I promised to stand up for Robert’s memory on their behalf and I will continue to raise the issue here in the House.
I hope the Government will therefore support my ten-minute rule Bill that comes to the House this summer. It will call for the Government to undertake a review of the maximum penalties for driving offences that lead to death or serious injury, for I believe that this measure and any like it that speak up for road safety cannot come a day too soon, and I trust that Ministers will listen sympathetically to my request on this vital issue.
Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East) (Lab)
I am not alone in being disappointed with the Queen’s Speech as it failed to deal with any of the real issues and challenges facing our country, such as 1 million young unemployed, the rise in the cost of living, especially for those on low wages, no investment in the growth of our economy, and no real reform of the banking system. The Chancellor said that his austerity measures would bring the budget deficit down by 2015. He has already accepted that that will not happen, and the triple A rating which he considered a holy grail has also gone. In real terms he is borrowing even more to balance the budget. The GDP to national debt ratio is heading towards 80%.
When Labour came to power in 1997, the GDP ratio to the national debt was 42%. By early 2008, it was down to 35%, just before the global recession started. The Government then had to act to save the banks and avoid a worsening financial crisis. As a result, they had to borrow additional money, and the national debt went up, but figures show that by 2010, the GDP ratio to the national debt began to fall again. However, with the austerity measures of the current Chancellor, without a growth plan for the economy, the GDP ratio to the national debt is now some 80%.
These figures are important because it is often said that the Labour Government left the country in an economic mess, but the Opposition know that that is not the case, because the facts and figures from the Treasury and other Departments show that we were financially prudent. It is not just me who says that; that famous left-wing body, the International Monetary Fund, has said the same. It has stated clearly that the actions taken by the previous Prime Minister and the Chancellor were the right ones in light of the situation that we faced and—these words are important—the global recession. Much as the Labour Government would have liked to control the whole world, we certainly did not run the USA or Japan, or any of the other advanced nations, but they experienced a similar global crisis. That is important: it was a global crisis and had nothing to do with the suggestion that somehow the Labour Government were financially mismanaging the economy. If anyone is mismanaging the economy, it is the current Government, who are borrowing £164 billion extra to cover the budget deficit.
It makes sense that, if one is not going to invest in the economy, if there are to be no jobs in the economy, and if people are not paying their taxes, the revenue that a Government receive will obviously be less. In order to continue to meet the budget deficit, they will have to borrow more, which is exactly what the Chancellor has done. As a result we now have a higher national debt, the economy is not moving, and again the famous left-wing socialist institution, the IMF, has said that the Government need to change their course. The Chancellor needs to change his course. He must bring in programmes and investment to stimulate growth in the economy. Austerity alone will not be enough. Those who have suffered the most from the austerity and cuts have been the disabled, the elderly, those on low wages, and often women with small children. Their economic situation has been made worse, and their cost of living has risen the most.
But the Government are not satisfied just with taking away people’s economic rights and financially hitting them; they are also taking away some basic civil rights. The cuts to civil legal aid for bodies such as the employment, health and disability tribunals, and in family cases, has meant that many people are now unrepresented. There have been cuts to funding for the citizens advice bureaux, which last year in Bolton South East saw 14,000 people who were suffering, including the vulnerable, disadvantaged and poor, and those on low incomes, and now they will suffer even more. If they have a problem, they will not be able to go to a tribunal. They will have no legal representation and there will be no one to explain their rights to them.
There are further proposals to cut criminal legal aid, which again affects ordinary people most. We hear about the famous few rich defendants, the big criminals, but the majority of those who face criminal charges are not the rich, but ordinary people. The myth that all criminal lawyers earn millions and millions of pounds is another complete lie. Yes, there is the odd Queen’s counsel or barrister who will earn that sort of money from legal aid, but more than 95% of the members of the Bar and people practising criminal law earn nowhere near that. In fact, their earnings are often very average, compared with those in other sectors. The idea that the majority of barristers somehow get £1 million a year from legal aid is a complete distortion of the truth. In fact, it is a complete lie.
The Ministry of Justice now wants to introduce something called price-competitive tendering, which will undermine access to justice and damage our judicial system. People should be able to choose a lawyer on the basis of quality, rather than being given the one with the lowest price. Price-competitive tendering will force bidders to tender at least 17.5% below the current magistrates’ rates, and if they get the contract they will also be able to continue working in the Crown courts. With cuts of 35% on criminal advocates’ fees already coming in, all we will see is the really experienced and talented lawyers simply not practising criminal law and inexperienced newcomers taking up cases instead.
There might not be much sympathy for people charged with criminal offences, but I believe that in this country we still have the principle that someone is innocent until proven guilty. Being able to defend oneself from incarceration in the criminal justice system is a fundamental part of a democratic society. That is something we should be proud of, not something we should try to hide or do away with by making it harder for people to access criminal legal aid. Price-competitive tendering will have a great impact on our criminal justice system.
A sad thing in politics in this country is that for a number of years now there has been constant criticism of our judges when they take decisions that the Executive are not happy with. I practised law for more than 20 years, in different courts, and there were times when I did not agree with the judge’s decision, but I did not start bad-mouthing the judge. Instead, we had a system of appeal that allowed us to take the matter further so that someone more senior could consider it, because errors can occur and it can be useful to have another pair of eyes to look at decisions that have been taken. Surely that is the only proper way for politicians to behave in cases involving judges.
Our judges are of a very high calibre. They are not ignorant people who do not know about the real world. They know what the real world is like and they know the law. I think it is about time politicians across all political parties started giving the judiciary the respect it deserves. Ultimately, an independent judiciary is very much a hallmark of a civilized democratic society. That is something we should be proud of in this country. We should not constantly be denigrating judges.
Things that we now take as being accepted were not accepted 20 years ago, and that is because our judges have effectively been applying the law in a way that has benefited many people. For example, it is now perfectly acceptable to take on a public authority or a Department for any wrongdoing. That was not the case until a number of years ago. It is only because our judges have said that public authorities and bodies should be accountable and scrutinised that that is now accepted as normal business in this country. That was very much down to judges.
Many years ago, Lord Denning brought in the equitable principle in the famous High Trees House case. I know that ex-lawyers sometimes tend to go on about the law, but I mention that case because it was the first time people in common law partnerships, especially women, were given some rights over the properties in which they lived and were looking after the children but where they were not the income winners and had no rights at all. That case allowed them to have some rights. We have a lot to be grateful to our judges for, so denigrating them is just not right. If a Government are not happy with a judge’s decision, they have a mechanism of appeal, and the final appeal is to the Supreme Court, which is full of very eminent and high-calibre people who make the decisions.
I am disappointed that the Gracious Speech did not deal with some of the health issues that are big challenges for our society, such as drinking and smoking. Everyone accepts that cigarettes cause cancer and many other illnesses. This was an opportunity for the Government, who said themselves that they want to deal with this, but it seems that because of powerful lobbyists and other groups plain packaging is now off the agenda and alcohol is not being tackled. Members have already talked about the impact of alcohol and cigarettes on people’s lives and the illnesses they cause. It is therefore sad and regrettable that this action has not taken place.
Another disappointing aspect of the Queen’s Speech relates to immigration. It is right that there should be a debate about immigration, and nobody is running away from that. People who have come to this country should be able to claim benefit if they have paid taxes to the Treasury. If they have not made those contributions, it is right that they should not be able to benefit from welfare provision. No one is arguing that that is wrong. However, the Government, who are trying to deal with UKIP in a knee-jerk reaction to what happened recently, have brought in policies requiring landlords and doctors to act as policemen. Instead, they should be making sure that the border is being patrolled properly so that people are not coming into the country illegally. They should also be making sure that the UK Border Agency becomes more effective in dealing with people who should not be in this country and should be sent back. That is the way to deal with it; it is the state’s responsibility. Making individual citizens act as spies is wrong; it is like George Orwell’s society coming to fruition. Yes, some big landlords with thousands of homes in their property portfolios might be able to carry out the searches suggested by the Government, but in my constituency a lot of people who have a small home and may be renting one room will now be criminalised if they do not carry out certain checks. That is plain wrong, as is asking doctors to spy on people. The Government and the law enforcement agencies should be patrolling these things, not creating a snooping society. That is completely the wrong approach.
The Queen’s Speech did nothing at all to try to stimulate our economy. We would have liked a jobs Bill that meant a paid job for every adult who had been out of work for more than two years; guaranteed six months’ pay for young people; a requirement—this is very important bearing in mind the wholesale privatisation that is taking place under this Government—that large firms should agree to apprenticeship schemes whenever they are given a Government contract; a Finance Bill that reversed the VAT rise and the 10p tax rate; and a consumer Bill that dealt with rising energy costs, which now average £300, and rail fares, which are going up by 9%. The rail companies should be offering people the cheapest available fare, not expecting them to search around for hours on end trying to find a good deal. We should ensure that energy companies are regulated properly and are not exploiting the consumer. Despite everything that has been said, banks are still not lending enough to small businesses, which are the backbone of our country. A specialised British investment bank should have been set up, with regional banks to support businesses. We should force banks to lend to small companies so that they can grow and create employment.
The content of the Gracious Speech is a real damp squib. It was an opportunity for this Government to be visionary, but they have been nothing of the kind.
Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)
I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. It is interesting that we should hear the Government’s plans so soon after so many of us had the opportunity to listen to the voice of the people in the county council elections in the shire counties of England.
I spent almost all of the previous four weeks home in the beautiful shire county of Derbyshire, specifically in my home town of Chesterfield. For those few short weeks we Derbyshire people seemed to be very popular among the political class. The Prime Minister came to Derbyshire twice during the campaign, as did my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband), to whom we were grateful for also visiting us after the campaign to join our celebrations. The Chancellor also came to see us, as did the Home Secretary, who took in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner). I believe she saw the beautiful Crooked Spire church, which, I am sure she was told—I do not know whether a plaque has been put up there yet—is where I got married. If that information has escaped her, I am glad to be able to remind her of it.
It is hardly surprising that Derbyshire was the focus of so much attention. No Government have lost in Derbyshire and won the country since the war. The verdict of the people of Derbyshire was pretty clear: a huge win for Labour, with 43 Labour councillors compared with 18 Conservatives, just three Lib Dems and not a UKIP councillor in sight. UKIP if you want to, but the people of Derbyshire certainly did not. It was a triumph for Labour leader Anne Western and the Labour team at county hall.
In electoral terms it was a decisive win, with Labour majorities in many seats that we hope to win in 2015. Despite the victory, however, those of us who spent considerable time on the doorsteps could not escape the sense of despair among voters—the sense that politics should be capable of offering so much more, that our Government are running out of ideas and that our great country, which fought off the massed forces of fascism from 1939 onwards, had the vision to create the national health service, has been present at the birth of so many of the world’s great inventions and is home to some of the greatest educational establishments in the world, should be capable of so much more.
The Queen’s Speech had Crosby’s fingerprints are all over it. They left quite a mark—besmirched it, we might say—but as my right hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster North said yesterday, the speech failed completely to grasp the magnitude of the moment. It is ironic that the person in charge of the Government’s xenophobia strategy is himself an immigrant. I am from a family of immigrants: my family have only been in the UK since about 1066. In fact, Her Majesty, who gave the Gracious Speech, has Germanic roots herself. We should embrace our country’s history and the fact that it is made up of so many different people.
Is this really it? Is this all the Government have to offer? The response to the drubbing that the Conservatives took is a dog whistle here, a hint at red meat there, more divide and rule, and no overarching vision for the kind of country that this Government aim to create before leaving power.
What is this Government’s vision? They have lost the triple A status and there has been no reduction in the deficit in the past year. What do they want the last two years of their cruel, divisive, incompetent and directionless reign to be about? The Home Secretary seems to think it is funny, but the people of Derbyshire were not laughing when they reflected on her and her party’s record last week. Austerity has failed, so what is the alternative vision for which this Government will be remembered? Will they now simply indulge in the most pernicious kind of blame game? If the Government have no vision or cannot agree on what they want to do, let us have a general election and give the people of this country some real alternatives.
All we have seen on immigration is incompetence and confusion. Only one in 1,000 students suspected of abusing the immigration system have been deported. Some 106,000 cases reported by universities have led to just 153 deportations. More worryingly, only 658 cases were even investigated.
At the very same time that the Government are doing so little to investigate potential abuses of the system, we have seen a big drop-off in the entirely legitimate and indeed vital numbers of foreign students, who offer revenue for our universities. At recent meetings with representatives from Sheffield, Leeds and the university of London, they have all highlighted problems resulting from the reduction in foreign student numbers.
We get the benefit of highly qualified workers when some of these students stay on. Often they return to their countries as the greatest advocates of life in Britain and are vital to our ability to trade. We all want to see an increase in exports and foreign students are an important means by which that can be achieved.
The Government’s immigration fiasco does not end there. When I speak to businesses across the country in my capacity as a shadow business Minister, I am constantly upbraided by businesses—technological and manufacturing firms in particular—about how much of an obstacle to success the confusion on immigration is.
People are concerned that UK workers are undercut in the jobs market and that the Government turn a blind eye to abuses of the minimum wage. Indeed, with their workfare policy, they seem as keen as ever to send out the message that people should be grateful for what they get and to push more workers into poverty. People are concerned that foreign workers, legal and illegal, are working for less than the minimum wage. The fuzzy line between the cost of housing and work is enabling unscrupulous firms to exploit workers’ desire to put money on the table. I am talking not about those who do not contribute, but about the very people who are fighting day and night to earn enough money so that their family can eat. Where was the Government’s acknowledgement of their failure to enforce the national minimum wage? Where was the Bill to tighten up the rules to ensure that those loopholes are closed?
People are concerned about recruitment agencies that recruit only migrant and foreign labour. That is why Labour proposes that the system be toughened up to ensure that firms that act in that way are stopped and that British workers get a fair crack of the whip when they are trying to get into the jobs market. Where was the Government’s commitment to do something about that? Is it any wonder that the voters in Derbyshire rejected the governing parties so wholeheartedly last week?
Let me touch on other reasons why Derbyshire’s voters rejected the Government. On banking, we needed to see real reform. Government net lending has fallen in 18 of the last 24 months as more and more of the Government’s money has been given to the same big four banks. That was a problem when the Government came to power, and yet it has got worse in month after month. Failed Government strategy follows failed Government strategy. In the three months to February 2013, there was an additional £4.8 billion fall in lending to small businesses.
Labour proposes something bigger. We propose a local banking network to put banks back at the heart of their communities. There must be a fundamental change in decision making to ensure that decisions about businesses are taken by people who understand those businesses, not by somebody 70 miles away. Bank lending should no longer focus more and more on London; there must be proper regional and local banking that sees money lent to small businesses within local communities.
The people cannot be fooled. They know that they are worse off under this Government than before 2010. They will be £891 worse off by 2015. They know that there is a cost-of-living crisis, but they have seen no action on train fares, payday loans or fuel costs. They have seen no action on the construction industry at a time when it is struggling. Labour has proposed a reduction in the VAT on home improvements to 5%, which is supported by the Federation of Small Businesses. Young people face a jobs crisis. Let us end the debate on whether they want work or not. Let us expose those who do not by having a jobs guarantee that ensures that all young people know that they will have an opportunity to get into work.
There is no serious growth strategy. The only growth strategy seems to be, “Let’s see if we can get kids to buy fags or get people to drink themselves stupid on cheap supermarket booze.” The Government have dropped the plans for plain cigarette packaging and minimum alcohol pricing that the Prime Minister promised. Where was the promised legislation on pub companies that we expected to hear about in the Queen’s Speech? We must support our pubs. We must ensure that more people drink in them and that less people drink at home, where much more problem drinking occurs.
As colleagues have said, the Queen’s Speech was an opportunity for the Government to show that they had listened to the message that came from people across the country last week and to show that they have a strategy to do something about the problems that face us. We now know that the Government will not take the serious action that is required, but will limp on with the Liberals and Conservatives unsure about what they can agree on. The Queen’s Speech has demonstrated that this is a mongrel Government without a proper agenda. The country is ready for something better.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
This has been, as usual, a good and positive debate that has covered a range of issues on home affairs and justice, in particular those relating to immigration, antisocial behaviour and preventing reoffending. A number of other contributions have covered a wider range of political issues, including comments on care standards in Wales by my hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith), on the role of HS2 by the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) and on energy by the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert).
Many strong concerns were raised about the economy, including by my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Gemma Doyle), who made a pertinent point about the role of the Scottish National party in Scotland. My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Helen Goodman) mentioned broadband, and my hon. Friends the Members for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) and for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi), spoke strongly about the economy. My hon. Friend for Warrington North (Helen Jones) made a passionate and heartfelt speech, again on the economy. We also heard a strong plea from my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham) about plain packaging for cigarettes.
I am sure Ministers in other Departments will read and cogitate on those issues in due course, but I want to focus on matters of home affairs and justice. Immigration, antisocial behaviour and the prevention of reoffending are extremely important. I know that not only from having heard this debate, but from experiences in my constituency. As the hon. Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) said of his constituency, not a surgery or week goes by in which I do not receive correspondence on the pressing issue of antisocial behaviour, which impacts on real people’s lives, day in, day out.
My constituency in north Wales has seen an influx of people from eastern Europe who came to work in large numbers because there were skill shortages and the economy demanded them. They now face big issues, which have been touched on by hon. Members, concerning the role of agency workers, the undercutting of the minimum wage, and the difficulties and challenges of housing. Those are key issues in my constituency, as elsewhere.
Let me set out what the Opposition welcome in the Queen’s Speech. My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) hinted at some of the issues, and I wish to reaffirm those commitments today. We broadly welcome the details on the College of Policing, and will look in detail at how to ensure it set standards in an appropriate way. We welcome measures on dog control and gun manufacture, and we look at those in detail although we may wish to strengthen them in due course. I welcome the important regulation on forced marriage, and particularly proposals on police accountability and extending the role of the Independent Police Complaints Commission to private sector contractors—an equally important issue mentioned previously by my right hon. Friend.
As a member of the shopworkers union, I welcome the action on shoplifting, and we will look at strengthening that important measure against retail crime. I will look in detail—the provisions have only been published today—at issues to do with the police negotiating board. We will reflect on that and undoubtedly be constructive, as I always try to be, when the Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Bill is in Committee.
We must also consider the important issues of immigration, antisocial behaviour and crime. We will judge the relevant Bills, and hopefully be constructive on their effective measures. On immigration, the Government are proposing a number of measures that we will consider in detail. I particularly welcomed contributions by my hon. Friends the Members for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) and for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins), who expressed their strong views about the benefits of immigration to this country. Immigrants have made this country what it is, and we must ensure that we reflect their importance in any legislation brought forward, as the hon. Member for Cambridge said.
My hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) indicated that the measures could lead to policy and implementation problems on housing, and Government Members such as the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire spoke in support of the immigration Bill. From my perspective, that Bill features limited measures that fail to deal with the big problems highlighted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford, such as exploitation of foreign workers and undercutting the local work force, and it is a missed opportunity to tackle illegal immigration, which is getting worse.
The measures in the immigration Bill are limited. Legislation on article 8 matters is already under consideration. As my right hon. Friend has said, the Government allowed the deportation of 900 fewer foreign criminals in 2012 compared with Labour’s last year in office. For part of that year, I happened to be the Justice Minister responsible for deporting foreign criminals, and signed the agreement with Nigeria that the Government trumpet as one of their great achievements.
There are current regulations in the Department for Work and Pensions guidance to deal with limiting benefits for EU nationals, and the Government have looked at the issues of private landlords. The hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith), who spoke about migrant access to the NHS, should know that hospitals already have the legal duty to recover any charges owed from overseas patients. The most important issue highlighted by my right hon. Friend was tough action, including substantial fines, on businesses that use illegal labour. Eight hundred fewer businesses have been fined for employing illegal workers—2,092 were fined in 2010, but only 1,215 were fined in 2012.
The tools are there, and we will scrutinise the immigration measures, but as my right hon. Friend has indicated, the Government could do more. I would welcome clarification from the Minister on the NHS proposals. Will they be in the immigration Bill or the national health service Bill? He will know that Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have devolved health services. I would welcome clarification from him on how the proposals will work in practice in terms of costs and access to the NHS, because Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland provide locally based health services that are accountable to Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland Ministers.
We need to look carefully at the local residency test, because councils can already set residency tests on housing matters. I would rather the Minister looked at the issues my right hon. Friend has mentioned—labour market issues. She was supported by my hon. Friends the Members for Slough, for Llanelli and for Clwyd South (Susan Elan Jones), and the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd). How can we enforce the minimum wage and strengthen rules on gangmasters? How can we ensure we extend the Gangmasters Licensing Authority? How can we prevent rogue landlords from exploiting migrant workers by giving them overcrowded, overpriced accommodation? What about barns and mobile homes being used as accommodation for migrant workers? I give notice to the Minister that we will return to those questions when that Bill and others are before the House in due course.
The hon. Member for Enfield North made a thoughtful speech on the blight of antisocial behaviour; I hope my remark does not ruin any prospects he has for future preferment. I am pleased the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire has arrived in the Chamber. She indicated strongly that antisocial behaviour is a destroyer of quality of life. She focused on early years intervention. I hope that, in due course, she will vote for the funds that will help to support such intervention, which she is currently voting to cut.
The hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray) gave strong support to dangerous dogs measures. She will have the Opposition’s support in getting them through. However, we will want to look at strengthening those measures during the passage of the Bill. We want to ensure that we tackle the scourge of dangerous dogs in a positive way.
Helen Jones
Will my right hon. Friend undertake to consider during the passage of the Bill specific measures to protect postal workers? Simple measures such as fitting cages behind letter boxes can protect postal workers from dogs. The dogs might not be inherently dangerous, but they are left running free in the home.
Mr Hanson
That is a very good point and we will reflect on it with the Minister. I put leaflets through doors on occasions. In my first by-election campaign—in Grimsby in 1977, canvassing for my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Austin Mitchell)—I had my finger bitten. I have some sympathy with the point my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North makes.
Tackling antisocial behaviour is crucial, and although I have been able to have only a brief look at the Bill, I believe it weakens the tools to do that. It will weaken antisocial behaviour orders with a power that will not lead to a criminal record if breached. Although antisocial behaviour orders are not perfect, we want to see them improved, not weakened. We will scrutinise the proposals closely during the passage of the Bill. The proposals will weaken the protection of our communities and, in the words of the Metropolitan police, the Home Secretary has previous on this: she has watered down the use of DNA, provided stricter controls on the use of CCTV, cut police numbers over and above the safeguards set by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, put pressure on the use of restorative justice, and considered stopping the European arrest warrant. Instead of standing up for the victim, the Home Office is watering down measures.
Rehabilitation is important, because nearly everybody who goes to jail comes out at some point. We have to make them better people. The hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) made a typically thoughtful speech on rehabilitation and how the prison system can ensure that offenders do not reoffend. We had many a joust when I was a Minister and he was a shadow Minister, and in his time in government, he took this issue forward. Where I disagree with him is on what appears to be the wholesale privatisation of the probation service on all matters except serious crime. I am in favour of partnership with the private sector and voluntary sectors, but that is a real issue.
The right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd placed on record his concern about cuts to legal aid. The hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) focused strongly on rehabilitation and public health, and his points were well made.
In conclusion, a lot of measures that we wished to see are missing, and may well appear in amendments or new clauses in due course. The Government should tackle economic and online crime, create a new specific offence of identity theft, strengthen the Information Commissioner’s powers, and look at breaches of data protection and cyber security. On economic crime, there should be proper measures and stronger investigative powers for agencies. On shotguns, there should be improved and more detailed licensing to stop the kind of incidents that my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford mentioned earlier. We need to look at questions relating to the seizure of assets from criminals and to build on the work of Labour in government. We should build on proposals for testing private sector contracts with a detailed framework on the use of the private sector in policing. We want to introduce proposals to strengthen police accountability in our communities.
Finally, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford and the shadow Home Office team want to see greater action taken on violence against women and girls. A national duty should be placed on all public services to respond to and record domestic and sexual violence. Measures should be in place to strengthen action to ensure that violence against women and girls is ended.
There are measures proposed in the Bill and in the Queen’s Speech that we will support and some that hit the wrong targets. Some are missing and should have been included, and we will seek to ensure that the Government include them. This is not a Government who are concerned about crime and justice; this is a Government who have watered down measures introduced by the previous Labour Government. The Government are cutting police numbers, ensuring that we cannot protect our society as we would wish. We will not just hold the legislation in the Queen’s Speech to account, but suggest alternatives. If the Government do not accept them, we will implement them in two years’ time.
The Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice (Damian Green)
I would like to thank all those who have contributed to this debate. In the time remaining, I shall restrict my response to matters relating to home affairs and justice. I know that other important issues were raised, but I think I should operate within that limit. My other self-denying ordinance is to respond only to matters that are in the Queen’s Speech, rather than to the many that others might have wanted to see in it.
The Government’s clear priority is backing people who work hard and want to get on in life. The Home Office and the Ministry of Justice help with this by keeping the country safe and secure, while protecting Britain’s hard-won civil liberties. Various contributions from Opposition Members suggest that the latter point is a genuine divide between the two parties of the coalition and the Labour party, which appears to want to restrict civil liberties at every available opportunity.
The programme for home affairs business for the new Session, as set out in the Gracious Speech, builds on the many reforms and successes that we have delivered over the past three years. We oversaw safe and secure Olympic and Paralympic games—I am sure that the House will join me in paying tribute to the police and security services that helped to deliver them—and have revolutionised the accountability of the police through the election of police and crime commissioners. Perhaps most important—I hope that the shadow police Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), notes this fact—recorded crime is down by more than 10%, and the independent crime survey for England and Wales shows crime at its lowest level since records began. Despite the turmoil in many countries around the world, our streets and our society are safer than they have been for many years. Furthermore, we have cut net migration by nearly one third, while welcoming those who want to contribute to our economy and support British businesses. Those are major successes, but further bold reforms are needed, and the ambitious measures debated today will continue the Government’s relentless focus on protecting the public.
I shall turn to the individual measures, starting with immigration. I congratulate the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who is no longer in her place, on at least coming up with a concrete immigration policy—it puts her ahead of her party’s Front-Bench team. That policy, however, was to bring back identity cards. I am happy to assure her and the House that the Government will not be taking her advice on that matter. As I said, however, net migration is already down by nearly one third under this Government. That itself is a significant success, but we of course need to do more, both in terms of the performance of the immigration system, as my hon. Friends the Members for Crawley (Henry Smith) and for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and the hon. Members for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) and for Llanelli (Nia Griffith) said, and in terms of legislation.
I shall deal with some of the detailed points made about immigration. I am happy to tell the shadow Home Secretary what the Office for National Statistics actually said about the cause of falling immigration. Its February 2013 press release stated that
“the recent decline in net migration since the year ending September 2011 has been driven by a fall in immigration”,
contrary to what she asserted earlier. The hon. Member for Slough asked for a commitment that those who were guilty only of immigration offences should not be deported. I say to her that people should comply with the law, and if the criminal offence is an immigration offence—it could be trafficking or fraud—it is still a criminal offence, and to suggest that people who commit immigration offences should gain benefits from it seems completely unacceptable.
My hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge raised the issue of the British nationality of children born before 2006 to unmarried British fathers. When I was Immigration Minister, he and I had many discussions about that, and I know that the current Immigration Minister is also looking at the matter very carefully. My hon. Friend the Member for Crawley and others raised the issue of health treatment for foreign nationals. We need to get better at reciprocal charging, and the Department of Health has issued guidance on who must produce a European health insurance card so that we can collect more money from foreign Governments. The right hon. Member for Delyn asked whether that would be an immigration or a health measure. It will be an immigration measure, and so, as with previous immigration measures, we will discuss with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland how it can best be implemented.
Damian Green
As they will be sensible proposals, I am sure that the Administrations in those areas will want to implement them.
Let me turn to the canard raised by the hon. Member for Llanelli, who said there was a threat to the Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004. It is not under threat; the Government have reviewed the remit of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority, to focus attention and resources in the right areas. She also said that we were not taking trafficking seriously, which is a profoundly unfair accusation. We are working overseas for the first time to tackle the problem at source. We have more thorough checks at our border and we are better at sharing intelligence among the law enforcement agencies. The new National Crime Agency will make us better at tackling what is a serious and growing crime.
The immigration Bill that will be introduced later this year will give the full force of legislation to the policy that this House has already unanimously endorsed, in the immigration rules, to ensure that article 8 of the European convention on human rights—the right to stay in the country because of family connections—is not abused. It will ensure that our courts balance a person’s right to remain in the country against the crime they have committed. The Bill will also ensure that the appeal system cannot be abused by those who have no right to be in this country and are simply looking to avoid removal for as long as possible. Those who do not meet our rules should leave the country. That is especially true of those foreigners who commit serious crimes. The Bill will ensure that such serious criminals will be deported from the UK in all but the most exceptional circumstances.
The Government have always been clear that we must continue to attract the brightest and best to this country—those who will study, work hard or invest: those who will contribute to our society—but we must deter those who come here simply to take. That is why the Bill will deter those who seek only to take from our public services rather than contributing to them, prevent those with no right to be here from accessing our public services and stop the British taxpayer funding the benefits tourism that has gone unchecked for too long, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) eloquently pointed out. The legislation will build on our reforms of the past three years and ensure that the interests of the UK are protected.
Several hon. Members, including the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Mr Llwyd) and the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott), said that this was in some way a toxic debate. Of course we do not want a toxic debate, but we need to have the debate and we need to take action. If the mainstream political parties do not take effective action on immigration, as we have been doing for three years, we will leave the field clear to those who want to make mischief from the issue, which would betray many people, not least immigrants to this country.
Let me turn to the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill, which was introduced today. It will radically reform the way in which antisocial behaviour is tackled, putting the needs of victims and communities first. The Bill will ensure that the front-line professionals responsible for tackling antisocial behaviour have more effective and streamlined powers. The community remedy, which my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) mentioned, will, along with the community trigger, give victims and communities a real say in how antisocial behaviour is dealt with. The community trigger will empower the most vulnerable in society, giving them the power to make agencies take persistent problems seriously. He asked about the details. We have introduced a safeguard, which will mean that councils and the police cannot set the threshold higher than three complaints, but can set it lower if they wish. I am also happy to confirm to him that the legislation makes it clear that third parties, including Members of this House, can activate the trigger on behalf of victims, which I hope he will welcome.
The professionals on the front line have told us time and again that securing an antisocial behaviour order can be a slow, bureaucratic and expensive process, and that it often fails to change a perpetrator’s behaviour, resulting in high breach rates and continued misery for victims. That is why we are proposing new powers that are quick and easy to use and will act as a real deterrent to perpetrators. The criminal behaviour order will be available to deal with the most antisocial individuals and will carry a maximum sentence of five years on breach. For lower-level offenders, a new civil injunction will be available to try to stop certain behaviour before it escalates. While breach would not result in a criminal record, it would still carry serious penalties. There are those who say that agencies should act on the first report, rather than on the second or third reports. Of course they should, but local agencies already have a duty to deal with every report of antisocial behaviour, and many of them do so quickly and effectively. This legislation will give them more powers, and I hope that they will respond to that.
There have been a number of comments on other aspects of the antisocial behaviour part of the Bill, including the measures to tackle irresponsible dog ownership. I am grateful for the work done on this by my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Angie Bray), who I know wants to scrutinise the legislation particularly carefully. We will be empowering landlords to take rapid and effective action to tackle problem behaviour by their tenants. We will also be attacking the source of gun crime, and I am grateful for the support of those on the Opposition Benches for these measures. We want to ensure that those who import or supply firearms face the full force of the law. The shadow Home Secretary and others mentioned the terrible incident of the Atherton shootings. We are considering the coroner’s recommendations and the results of the investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission.
I should also mention the Rehabilitation of Offenders Bill. My hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier) spoke with characteristically huge authority on the subject of rehabilitation. I am sad that the shadow Justice Secretary has not been here today, either for this debate or for this morning’s statement on this important Bill. These measures show that we are determined to crack down on the criminal behaviour that blights our communities by adopting a fully thought-through approach to ensure that those who commit those crimes are rehabilitated when they are caught and punished.
Reoffending levels have been too high for too long. That not only ruins lives for the victims of crime but is a dreadful deal for the taxpayer. We spend more than £3 billion a year on prisons and almost £1 billion a year on delivering sentences in the community, but reoffending rates have barely changed. That is why the system needs to change. Many Labour Members oppose the proposals on the ground that they represent some kind of privatisation, but they need to get out of their ideological straitjackets and look at the wider picture. Everyone wants reoffending rates to come down, and we all know that the vast majority of crimes are committed by a very small proportion of the population. Every one of those habitual repeat offenders whose life is turned around will represent a huge benefit not only to them and their immediate circle of friends and acquaintances but to society as a whole.
The measures that my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary is introducing will change the way we organise the prison estate and put in place an unprecedented “through the prison gate” resettlement service, meaning that someone will meet prisoners when they leave prison so that they do not simply fall back into their old ways. Most important, the measures will ensure that those serving sentences of less than 12 months will receive rehabilitation services for the first time. All those measures will make a radical difference. Our using the expertise of the private sector and of the many really good charities that work in this area will result in a rehabilitation revolution, which will be important in continuing the gains that we have made in recent years in driving down crime levels. This will be seen as a significant piece of legislation in the years to come.
Along with the shadow policing Minister, the right hon. Member for Delyn, I am looking forward to having many detailed debates on the substance of the legislative programme. I am confident that the issues that I have not had time to address today, and many others, will be discussed in much greater depth and possibly at much greater length.
The Government’s legislative programme for home affairs issues is bold, ambitious and, above all, necessary. We have already cut net migration by nearly a third and we are introducing measures to tackle abuse of the immigration system. We have cut crime by 10% and we are introducing further measures to tackle antisocial behaviour. We have established the National Crime Agency and we will now introduce further measures to tackle organised crime and cybercrime. I commend this programme to the House.
Ordered, That the debate be now adjourned.—(Nicky Morgan.)
Debate to be resumed tomorrow.
Hezbollah
(11 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)
First, in the interests of transparency, I place on record the fact that I am one of the vice-chairs of Labour Friends of Israel.
I am pleased that we are having this important debate today; it presents a timely opportunity to discuss the nefarious role of Hezbollah in the middle east and beyond. This organisation is aggravating the current situation in Syria, creating instability in Lebanon and threatening not only Israel but nations across the globe. The heartbreaking news coming to us from Syria every day reminds us how complex and fragile is the situation all over the middle east. One large cloud lurking over all these difficult situations is the presence of Hezbollah, and it is that presence that led me to seek this debate.
Before turning to the current political situation in Syria, Lebanon and the wider region, I would like to say a little about the true nature of Hezbollah, its structure and its objectives. Hezbollah is an organisation with a strong paramilitary force, independent of the Lebanese state. It was established in the early 1980s, and its fighters were organised and trained by a contingent of the Iranian revolutionary guards. Iran and Syria are its main sponsors, providing financial, political and military support to the organisation. The deputy leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Naim Qassem, stated in April 2007 that
“all our policies including firing missiles into Israeli territories could not have been done without the consent of the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has to agree to all Hezbollah’s activities in advance.”
Hezbollah is Iran’s proxy and is used by Tehran to exert its sphere of influence over Lebanon and the wider region. It has also been used by Iran to help prop up through military means the murderous regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The Hezbollah manifesto document produced in 1985, entitled “An Open Letter: The Hezbollah Programme”, declares that the organisation operates under one command structure and shares the same goals. It states:
“No one can imagine the importance of our military potential as our military apparatus is not separate from our overall social fabric. Each of us is a fighting soldier.”
Hezbollah does not have separate streams for its military and non-military work. The jihad council, the political council, the executive council and the judicial council all report to the Shura council, and there is again no operational or ideological distinction between those who pursue terror and those who do not. The deputy leader, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said of Hezbollah’s structure:
“Hezbollah has a single leadership. All political, social and jihad work is tied to the decisions of this leadership. The same leadership that directs the parliamentary and government work also leads jihad actions.”
Today, Hezbollah continues to maintain its military capacity in contravention of UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701, and in defiance of a UN military mission that was mandated to oversee the implementation of these resolutions. Hezbollah leaders continue to maintain that they are not only re-arming, but acquiring more sophisticated military technology.
Let me now focus on Syria and Lebanon. Historically, representations made in this place and beyond regarding Hezbollah have focused on the organisation’s impact on the state of Israel. I will talk about that in a moment, but I first want to say a few words about the organisation’s appalling activities in Syria and Lebanon.
As a member of the Select Committee on International Development, I have witnessed first hand the awful effects of war on innocent civilians, and few recent conflicts have been as brutal and bloody as the current Syrian civil war, set off by the violent suppression by Bashar al-Assad of his own people. Iran and Iranian-backed Hezbollah are supporting President Assad’s crackdown, and are supplying military and intelligence assistance to the regime and shipping weapons to Syria that have been deployed in violence against civilians. The elite Iranian Quds force has provided extensive logistical support and advice on how to suppress protests, following Iran’s successful crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2009. The Free Syrian army claims to have captured several Iranian and Hezbollah fighters, and many reports suggest that Hezbollah’s military assistance is invaluable to Assad in certain regions of the country.
It is to the eternal credit of the state of Israel that it alone has sought to intervene in the crisis in Syria, and its intervention was purely intended to prevent weapons transfers designed to allow Hezbollah to increase its military threat throughout the region. Syria is a febrile place and activities there are fast-moving, but one thing that is clear is the destabilising influence of Hezbollah on the situation.
Lebanon, too, has suffered at the hands of Hezbollah. Hezbollah triggered the collapse of the last Lebanese Government in January 2011, after its Ministers resigned over then Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s refusal to withdraw support from the United Nations-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon. The tribunal is investigating the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, widely assumed to have been perpetrated by Hezbollah. The head of the tribunal urged four Hezbollah members wanted in the case to appear before the court. The tribunal’s president, Judge Antonio Cassese, made the appeal in an open letter two days after he was told by Lebanese authorities that none of the four men identified by the tribunal in June as suspects had been arrested.
In March 2013, the Lebanese Cabinet, which was dominated by Hezbollah, resigned after failing to agree on a commission to oversee elections. The Hezbollah members also objected to extending the mandate of Lebanese internal security chief Ashraf Rifi. Their cynical destabilisation of the Lebanese political situation is intended purely to benefit their own interests, while prolonging uncertainty and fear for millions of innocent Lebanese citizens.
Also, of course, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah remains a clear and present danger to the people of Israel. While Israel faces the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran committed to the destruction of the Jewish state, the Iranian regime’s clients lurk just over the border. Make no mistake about it: Hezbollah is committed to continued war against Israel. The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, is on the record as saying:
“I am against any reconciliation with Israel. I do not even recognize the presence of a state that is called ‘Israel.’ I consider its presence both unjust and unlawful. That is why if Lebanon concludes a peace agreement with Israel and brings that accord to the Parliament our deputies will reject it; Hezbollah refuses any conciliation with Israel in principle.”
I have been to northern Israel and stared over our ally’s northern border, acutely conscious of the 60,000 rockets that are pointed at Israeli civilians.
Even by middle east standards, Hezbollah is a particularly destabilising military actor. Israel’s actions last weekend in Syria were intended purely to prevent Hezbollah from transporting even longer-range missiles, supplied by Iran, thus putting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem under ever greater direct threat. In this context, Israel’s reported actions are entirely understandable and, I would suggest, commendable. The House should unequivocally condemn that Hezbollah threat and support the state of Israel.
Now is the time for the EU also to take the threat from Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah seriously. Speaking in Cyprus in September, the Foreign Secretary said that he wants to see the EU
“designate and sanction the military wing of Hezbollah”.
A month later, my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary called for the EU to proscribe Hezbollah’s military wing. I am proud of the Labour party’s commitment to the proscription of Hezbollah, and the Government should use this cross-party consensus to push for firm EU action.
The reason for the new impetus was the acceptance that Hezbollah is not merely a Lebanese-based militant and political organisation, but a growing international terror network, working in tandem with Iran. Anyone in any doubt about the need for European action need only look at the number of international plots allegedly initiated by Hezbollah in recent months, one of which tragically succeeded when a bomb killed five Israeli tourists and their Bulgarian driver outside Bulgaria’s Burgas airport in July last year. Two weeks prior to that deadly attack, the Cypriot authorities arrested dual Swedish-Lebanese citizen Hossam Taleb Yaacoub, a self-confessed Hezbollah member, for plotting to murder Israeli tourists in Cyprus. In court, the suspect said that Hezbollah had spies around the world monitoring locations that Jews and Israelis frequented, in order to plan attacks.
This debate is about Hezbollah and other Iranian-supported terrorist organisations. According to Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, what we are seeing is the result of new, heightened co-operation between Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds force, itself under EU sanctions for its operatives’ role in supporting Bashar al-Assad’s violence against Syrian civilians. In addition to the bombing in Bulgaria and the foiled attack in Cyprus, there have been recent foiled attacks linked to Iran and Hezbollah in Bangkok, Baku, Tbilisi and Mombasa, as well as a bombing in New Delhi, in India, which caused severe injury. Since the bombing in Bulgaria and the emergence of clear evidence of Hezbollah’s role in Syria, there has been greater pressure on the EU to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation, something that a number of European countries are resisting.
Why is there resistance? Although the previous Government proscribed Hezbollah’s military wing, Hezbollah’s significant role in Lebanese politics is often cited as the reason why the UK has not gone further and proscribed the whole organisation, which even its leader says operates under a single command structure. The misplaced belief that Hezbollah’s politicians are legitimate and independent from its deadly terrorism is also behind the EU’s inaction. However, with Hezbollah politicians recently being responsible for causing the collapse of the Lebanese Government—a Government they have long dominated through military strength rather than votes—now is the time to expose Hezbollah’s supposed role in supporting Lebanese stability for the fallacy that it is. Hezbollah’s evil role in perpetuating the brutal military crackdown by Bashar al-Assad against his own people—again, as much a political as a military operation—further demonstrates that any attempts to draw some military/political distinction are naive at best.
Therefore, I would be grateful if the Minister updated the House on the Government’s view on proscribing the whole of Hezbollah, as recent developments in Lebanon and Syria appear to have undermined the Government’s argument that has sought to separate out Hezbollah’s military wing from its political operations. I urge the Government to extend the UK’s proscription of Hezbollah’s military wing to the whole organisation, and I would go further. With cracks beginning to show in French and German opposition to proscription, now is the time for the Government to use the cross-party consensus and make the case for tough EU action.
I accept that a full ban on Hezbollah may be difficult to achieve, but even an EU ban on the military wing of Hezbollah would send a powerful message that we do not tolerate Hezbollah’s and Iran’s terrorism, and that we will work hard to curtail terrorist fundraising and recruitment across Europe.
It is beyond doubt that Hezbollah does Iran’s bidding in upholding the bloody regime of President Bashar al-Assad, and that it perpetuates the misery of millions of Syrian civilians. Hezbollah has sought to destabilise the politics and social fabric of Lebanon for many years, most recently by undermining the Lebanese Government through a joint political and military effort. It also remains a clear and present military danger to millions of Israeli men, women and children, with tens of thousands of missiles pointed at major population centres that could be launched with one word from Hezbollah’s venal, anti-Semitic paymasters in Tehran.
It is clear that Hezbollah in its entirety should be proscribed by both the UK Government and the European Union. I urge the Minister to take decisive action to show that this country stands against terrorism in all its forms.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs (Alistair Burt)
I thank the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann) for raising this important issue; for the clear and unequivocal support that he has given to the forces of stability in the middle east; for the way that he has pointed out the risks and the dangers that Hezbollah action poses in the area; for his support for the state of Israel; and for his courtesy in sending me a copy of his speech, which has helped me to tailor my response. I will make some comments for the record on the activities of Hezbollah, and on how the United Kingdom Government see Hezbollah and other Iranian-supported terrorist organisations.
The hon. Gentleman set out at the beginning of his speech his view and his sense of the origins of Hezbollah. Let me add my own comments. The United Kingdom Government concur that Hezbollah was born during the Lebanese civil war and in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. From the outset, resistance to Israel has been an important part of Hezbollah’s raison d’être. Hezbollah seeks to represent Lebanon’s Shi’a community and over time it has gained significant electoral support. As a major political force and the largest non-state military force in the country, Hezbollah clearly plays an important role in Lebanon, but its actions have often been highly destabilising.
Four members of Hezbollah have been indicted by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon for involvement in the killing of former Prime Minister Hariri in 2004, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned. Hezbollah’s provocative actions led to the 2006 conflict with Israel, which caused extensive damage and casualties within Lebanon. It has refused to disarm, despite the requirements of UN Security Council resolution 1701. Indeed, it has continued to strengthen its arsenal, with Iranian and Syrian assistance.
The hon. Gentleman was good enough to recognise the dilemma facing not only this Government but other Governments in the EU that at other times Hezbollah has played a pragmatic political role in Lebanon—there might be all sorts of reasons for that—including as a member of the current caretaker Government. Also, in recent years it has helped to ensure that the southern border with Israel has remained relatively quiet.
As the hon. Gentleman also noted, Hezbollah has a relationship with Iran that stretches back to the establishment of the movement. Iran has provided Hezbollah with money, arms and advice from the outset, and it continues to do so. Iran’s supreme leader is also a source of religious authority for Hezbollah. In Syria and elsewhere, Hezbollah continues to work closely with Iran and in ways that the UK would argue certainly do not represent Lebanese interests.
However, it is difficult to say that Hezbollah is simply an Iranian proxy. Hezbollah’s leaders do not act solely at Iran’s behest and they tend to factor in domestic considerations, including the impact on Lebanon and on the Shi’a community, when making decisions—and sometimes when not making decisions.
My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary has asserted yet again that the EU proscription of Hezbollah, which the hon. Gentleman made a significant part of his remarks, has become a topical issue in recent months with the announcement by the previous Bulgarian Government on 5 February, implicating Hezbollah’s military wing in the atrocious bomb attack on a bus in Burgas last July, which killed five Israeli tourists and the Bulgarian bus driver. The assessment of the involvement of Hezbollah’s military wing is shared by the United Kingdom. The guilty verdict in the trial of a Hezbollah operative in Cyprus, concluded on 21 March, is still further evidence of Hezbollah’s role in terrorist attacks or planned attacks on EU soil over the past 12 months.
In response, therefore, to the murderous terrorist attack at Burgas airport, and in light of the disrupted plot in Cyprus, we are calling for Europe to deliver a robust response. We firmly believe that an appropriate EU response would be to designate Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist organisation. That would be in line with our national proscription of Hezbollah’s military wing, to which the hon. Gentleman referred. The UK proscribed Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation in 2001. In 2008, the proscription was extended to include the whole of Hezbollah’s military apparatus, namely the Jihad Council and all the units reporting to it—that is, the military wing.
It is worth highlighting from the outset the distinction that I am making between Hezbollah’s political and military wings. I am referring to Hezbollah’s military wing, and not to Hezbollah as an organisation, as a terrorist group. It is a difficult distinction to make. The hon. Gentleman set out his case very well. At present the United Kingdom is still persuaded that the military and political wings of Hezbollah are organisationally distinct. It is important to recognise that Hezbollah’s political wing is and will remain an important part of Lebanon’s political scene. The EU shares that consensus.
However, I believe very firmly that EU designation of the Hezbollah military wing would send out a clear message, as the hon. Gentleman stated, that we condemn the terrorist activities of the military wing of Hezbollah and that terrorist activities on European soil will not go unpunished. We believe the evidence gathered from the investigation into the Burgas attack and from the Cypriot trial into the foiled attack by a Hezbollah operative to be sufficient to warrant designation action under the EU common position 931—the EU’s designation process. We will continue to work closely with our European partners on this issue.
Let me say a little more. From the tone of the hon. Gentleman’s remarks and the sense behind it, he wants to be very clear about what we are doing and how determined we are to carry it through. We will take the lead in the EU in initiating CP 931 action in response to what we believe has been an attack on EU soil. A number of other EU member states and the US, Canada and Israel have also called for the EU to take action. We are sharing information with our EU partners before calling for a meeting of the common position 931 working group to discuss our proposal for a designation. We expect this meeting to take place in the coming weeks—within the next four weeks. The UK has compiled a core script to address any concerns raised by member states ahead of the working group and to explain the implications of proceeding with designation.
One of the issues which is obvious and which might be raised is the fear of some that proscription might contribute to instability in Lebanon. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman shares my view that EU designation of Hezbollah’s military wing would not run contrary to our shared support for Lebanon’s stability. We see no reason why designation would in itself affect the EU’s positive relationship with the present Lebanese Government or the EU’s assistance to the Lebanese Government. So we do not assess that our designation of Hezbollah’s military wing and the EU’s designation of Hezbollah’s military wing would affect the legitimate political role currently played by Hezbollah in Lebanon. In fact, we believe that there is a greater risk in Europe in doing nothing or not enough in response to Burgas and Cyprus.
Moving on to other elements that the hon. Gentleman raised, we are also deeply concerned by credible information that Iran and Hezbollah are providing military support to the Syrian Government. Iran’s assistance extends to providing technical advice, training, equipment and weapons to aid Assad’s brutal repression of the Syrian people. Such support is unacceptable and in direct contravention of the UN embargo on the export of weapons by Iran in UN Security Council resolution 1747.
To counter Iranian support to the Syrian regime, we designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds force, part of the Iranian military supplying support to the Syrian regime, under EU Syria sanctions in August 2011. The UK has also designated five individuals under the Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Act 2010 in relation to the terrorist activities of Iran and the Quds force.
Hezbollah, too, is providing significant support to Assad, through both direct military intervention and through assistance and advice to the Syrian forces. We condemn this involvement. As well as aiding Assad's brutal repression of the Syrian people, such involvement violates and undermines Lebanon's policy of dissociation and so threatens the country’s security. During my visit to Beirut last week, I urged all Lebanese parties to put Lebanon's interest first and to stop sending their sons over the border to Syria to die, because the only certainty that will result is that Syria’s war will come over the border to Lebanon. The policy of dissociation has worked so far, despite the fragility in Lebanon, and it is essential that that continues.
Turning to other Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups, we are seriously concerned by Iran’s support for terrorist groups that undermine regional stability. Iran provides financial resources, military equipment and training of groups not only to Hezbollah but to other groups such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and, to a lesser extent, Hamas. Such support undermines Iran's claim to support stability in the middle east.
We are also increasingly concerned by Iran's involvement in terrorism outside its borders through the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds force, including in Thailand, India, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Kenya, where two Iranian men were recently sentenced to life in prison by a Kenyan court for planning to carry out bombings in Nairobi and other cities last year. We are committed to the toughest possible international response to Iran’s support for terrorism and its refusal to operate within the bounds of international law.
I confirm for clarity that we recognise the grave concerns regarding Hezbollah and Iranian-supported terrorist groups and we are taking what action we can accordingly. We believe in particular, very much on the lines set out by the hon. Gentleman, that Europe can and must act, and I hope that I have been able to persuade him that I and my ministerial colleagues will continue to engage with our European counterparts in pursuance of that objective. What the middle east needs most desperately now is peace and stability. It is difficult to see the part being played by Hezbollah’s military wing or by Iran in relation to that. The time for ending the cycle of violence perpetuated by Assad and his regime is now, and the time to bring peace and stability to the middle east is now. We will support all attempts that aim to do that, but we will be ruthless in our condemnation of those who seek to upset it.
Question put and agreed to.